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Chord symbols for beginners: what C, G7 and Am mean above the bar

By Taekyung Lee · 2026-10-10

Every score on this site has green letters above the bars: C, G7, Am, Dm7. They are chord symbols, the shorthand guitarists and jazz pianists have used for a century, and they let you play a left hand without reading a single bass note. Here is how to read them, how to play from them, and how the converter decides which one to write.

What a chord symbol says

A chord symbol names a chord by its root and its type. C means a C major chord: C, E and G. G means G, B and D. The capital letter alone always means major. A lower-case m means minor: Am is A, C and E, with the middle note a semitone lower than in A major. A 7 adds the seventh note above the root, flattened: G7 is G, B, D and F. maj7 adds it unflattened: Cmaj7 is C, E, G and B. That covers almost every symbol on this site. The rest are rare: dim (diminished), sus4 (the third replaced by the fourth), a slash like C/E meaning a C chord with E as the lowest note.

Building any major or minor chord

You do not need to memorize them. Start on the root and count up the white and black keys together. A major chord is root, then four keys up, then three more. C: C, up four to E, up three to G. A minor chord is root, three up, four up. A: A, up three to C, up four to E. Every chord symbol with a plain letter or an m can be built this way in a few seconds, and after a week of doing it you will stop counting.

Playing a left hand from the symbols

The simplest left hand is the one our scores use: play the chord as a block, all notes at once, on the first beat of the bar, and hold it until the next symbol. That is what the blue letters under the bass staff are. Once that is comfortable, there are two upgrades that make any song sound more finished:

• Root then chord. On beat one play just the root with the fifth finger; on beat two (or three, in 3/4 time) play the other two notes above it with the thumb and index finger. This is the "oom-pah" pattern and it fits every song in 3/4 and 4/4 on this site. Try it on The Blue Danube, which is written for it.
• Broken chord. Play the three notes one after another, low to high, as even eighths. Bach's Prelude in C is nothing but this pattern, with the chord symbols changing every bar; it is the best possible exercise for it.

Guitarists read the same symbols and strum them, which is why a page from this site works as a lead sheet for a singalong with a guitar.

How Notalo decides which symbol to write

The converter does not know what chord you meant. It looks at every notehead that falls inside a bar, in both hands, collects their letter names, and finds the chord that explains the most of them. If a bar contains C, E and G in the left hand and the melody wanders through C, D, E and G, the best match is C. If the melody also lands on a B, the best match becomes Cmaj7, because B is the major seventh of C, and that is what you will see written. If a bar has G, B, D and the melody adds an F, you get G7.

This is why the symbols are occasionally more complicated than a human arranger would write. In the London Bridge score, bar one is labeled Am7: the left hand holds a C chord and the melody passes through A, and C, E, G, A is literally an A minor seventh. An arranger would write C and call the A a passing note. The converter has no concept of a passing note, so it reports what is there. Read the symbol as "the notes in this bar add up to this", and simplify it yourself if the fancier chord sounds wrong: Am7 can always be played as C, Cmaj7 as C, G7 as G.

Two things to know about the guessing. First, it is per bar, so a bar that changes chord halfway (common in hymns and carols) gets one symbol for the whole bar, usually the first chord; on our own scores we split such bars into two chords, and the converter then writes two symbols. Second, a bar with only a melody and no left hand gets a guess from the melody alone, which is unreliable; the symbols are best on music with a written left hand.

The five chords that cover most songs

In any major key, three chords cover the majority of folk songs and carols: the ones built on the first, fourth and fifth notes of the scale. In C major that is C, F and G (or G7). In G major it is G, C and D. In F major, F, B♭ and C. Add the two minor chords built on the sixth and second notes (Am and Dm in C) and you can accompany nearly everything on this site. Look at the symbols on Jingle Bells, The Twelve Days of Christmas and Amazing Grace in turn, and you will see the same three-chord pattern in three different keys. Once you see it, you can play the left hand of a song you have never heard from its symbols alone, which is the point of the whole system.

Written by Taekyung Lee, a self-taught pianist (four years, no lessons) who built Notalo for personal practice. About · Instagram

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