3. Chord Symbols Cheat Sheet

Every chord name is a root note plus a "quality" that tells you which notes to alter from a basic major triad. Once you know what each suffix means, you can decode a chord you've never seen before just by reading its name — no need to memorize a thousand individual chord shapes.

• m — minor (flatten the 3rd)
• 7 — dominant 7th (add a flat 7th)
• maj7 — major 7th (add a natural 7th)
• sus2 / sus4 — replace the 3rd with a 2nd or 4th (no major/minor flavor)
• dim / dim7 — diminished (flatten the 3rd and 5th)
• aug — augmented (sharpen the 5th)
• add9 — a triad plus a 9th, no 7th included
• 9 / 11 / 13 — extended dominant chords that stack further up the scale
• m7b5 — half-diminished (minor 7th with a flat 5th)

Suffixes stack in a predictable order, too. Take Cm7b5 apart piece by piece: start with a C major triad (C–E–G), apply "m" to flatten the 3rd (C–Eb–G), apply "7" to add a flat 7th (C–Eb–G–Bb), then apply "b5" to flatten the 5th as well (C–Eb–Gb–Bb). Read left to right, every chord symbol is really just a short list of instructions applied one after another to a plain major triad.

You'll also run into notation variants for the same thing — maj7 is sometimes written M7 or with a triangle (Δ7), and m7 is sometimes written with a dash (-7). They all mean the same chord; different books, artists, and countries just settled on different shorthand. The Chord Dictionary's built-in search accepts several of these common variants directly, so you don't have to convert them by hand.

Look up any of these qualities in the Chord Dictionary tab to see the exact notes and fretboard shapes rather than just the theory — seeing a chord's notes highlighted on the neck makes the abstract "flatten the 3rd" instruction concrete and easy to remember.