Ukulele chord finder — chords from any uke recording.
Drop a strum-and-sing demo, a fingerstyle take, or your cover of that Hawaiian-pop arrangement you can't find a chart for. ChordSonic reads the audio and gives you the chord progression, the key and the tempo on a timeline. Soprano, concert, tenor and baritone all welcome.
What's different about chords on ukulele.
Standard ukulele tuning is GCEA — and the surprise hidden in that string order is that the top G is higher in pitch than the C and the E below it. That is the famous re-entrant high G on soprano, concert and tenor ukes. It is the reason a uke strum has that bright, shimmering, wash-of-overtones sound rather than the bass-to-treble sweep of a guitar. It also means a uke is not a small guitar: the chord shapes look similar to guitar shapes but the voicings that come out of them are inverted, with the lowest note sitting in the middle of the chord instead of at the bottom.
The other piece of the picture is the string count. Four strings instead of six means a typical uke chord is three or four notes, sometimes with a doubling. A C major on uke is often just 0-0-0-3 — one fretted note on the A string, the other three open — and that voicing is built from G, C, E, C (high G, open C, open E, fretted C on top). Guitar players reaching for a five-note open C cannot quite believe how few notes the uke version actually has. Fewer notes means the spectrum is cleaner, which is good news for chord detection from audio: there is less harmonic clutter for the pipeline to wade through.
Baritone ukulele is the exception and it deserves its own line. Baritone is tuned DGBE, identical to the top four strings of a guitar. It does not use a re-entrant string. Baritone players read chord charts the same way a guitarist reads the top four strings, and the chord shapes that work on the baritone are essentially guitar chord shapes on a smaller body. When somebody says “ukulele” without qualifying it, they usually mean a GCEA uke; but everything on this page applies to baritone too, because the chord names that come out of the audio analysis are tuning-agnostic.
Finally, a note on keys. Because the open strings on a GCEA uke spell out a C major chord, the keys that sit most comfortably on the instrument are C, F and G — and their relative minors. Most strum-and-sing arrangements gravitate there, which is part of why detecting the key of a ukulele recording tends to be more decisive than detecting the key of a busy guitar mix: the tonal centres cluster, the voicings repeat, and the modulation surface is small. None of that changes what the chord finder does, but it does mean uke recordings tend to give clean, readable charts.
How ChordSonic detects uke chords.
Three steps. No catalog lookup, no template you need to fit your song into — the chart comes from your audio.
- 01
Upload your uke audio
Drop an MP3 or WAV file — a phone recording of a couch strum-and-sing, a tidy direct-to-line take from a uke pickup, or any other source you have on hand. There is no length limit on the chord chart itself; the file size cap is on the upload, and a typical 3–4 minute song fits comfortably.
- 02
ChordSonic's pipeline analyses the recording
We pull the harmonic content out of your audio, track the beat, and match each beat against a library of chord templates to label what is being played. The whole thing runs server-side; you do not need any software installed locally. We never name the underlying components in the output — they are an implementation detail and they evolve.
- 03
Read, transpose or export the chart
The result is a timeline of chord blocks aligned to the beats of your track, the detected key, and the tempo in BPM. You can play the audio back with the chord blocks highlighting in sync, transpose the whole chart up or down for free, or export the progression as TXT, CSV or JSON for a DAW, songbook or chord-sheet generator.
One thing worth being explicit about: the chart reports the chord name, not the specific uke shape. If the pipeline hears a C major in your audio, the timeline says C — it does not tell you to play the open 0-0-0-3 shape, or the barre shape further up the neck, or a partial voicing on the top two strings for fingerstyle. Pianists, guitarists and uke players all read chord names and translate to their own shape catalogue. We keep the chart instrument-agnostic on purpose.
What uke players actually use this for.
Strum-and-sing covers
Phone propped against a coffee mug, voice memo running, the chords are right under your fingers but the part of your brain that names them has gone quiet. Record the take, upload it, and get the chart back as a clean four-chord (or six-chord) loop you can actually share with the rest of the band.
Fingerstyle arrangements
Uke fingerstyle weaves the melody on top of the chord and the chord ends up hidden inside a moving pattern. The pipeline pulls the harmony out from underneath the melody line and labels it, so you can see the chord progression underneath your own arrangement and start a written transcription from a real reference.
Songwriting on the uke
Most uke songs start as a strum on the couch. Record the demo, get the chord progression as exportable data, drop the JSON into a chord-aware notation tool or a DAW marker track, and you have a working sketch you can build from instead of trying to remember what you played yesterday.
Learning from ukulele tutorials
Pull the audio from a uke tutorial, an unboxing-and-play video, a player's home practice clip — any source you have on hand — and use the chart as a second opinion. Especially useful when the tutorial moves too fast on the explanation but you can hear the chords clearly in the playthrough.
Tunings we work with.
Standard GCEA (soprano, concert and tenor uke). This is the default for the vast majority of ukulele recordings on the internet, and it is exactly what the pipeline is most often pointed at. The re-entrant high G gives uke recordings their bright spectral signature, but it does not change the chord that comes out the other side — a strummed C is still a C regardless of voicing.
Baritone DGBE. Same pipeline, no special handling needed. Baritone audio sits lower in pitch than a soprano uke and the timbre is fuller, but the analysis is doing absolute pitch detection, not pattern-matching against a particular instrument. If you upload a baritone solo, you will get a chord chart at the actual concert pitch of the recording.
Slack-key, low-G and alternative tunings. We do not ask you what tuning you used, and we do not display one. The pipeline reports the chord names it hears. If your recording is intelligible — clean enough that a human ear would name the chords — then the chart should look right. If you are doing something deliberately unusual (open-tuned drones, prepared uke, micro-tonal experiments) the chord templates may struggle, the same way they would on any instrument played outside the equal-tempered Western system.
Other four-string instruments.
The pipeline does not know — and does not need to know — what instrument is in the recording. It looks at the harmonic content of the audio and labels the chords. That means the same flow works for any other four-string instrument that holds reasonable equal-tempered tuning: bass guitar, tenor banjo or five-string banjo (the drone string is just a doubled note in the spectrum), mandolin with its courses of paired strings, and tenor guitar in either CGDA or DGBE. None of these have a dedicated landing page on ChordSonic because the analysis is shared with the uke flow. Upload the audio, read the chord chart, ignore the fact that the page is called Ukulele Chord Finder.
One small caveat for bass: a track of solo bass guitar tends to have only the root and a few intervals rather than full chord voicings, so the chord finder will often label the root note (e.g. “A”) rather than the full quality (A minor vs A major). That is correct behaviour given the input — the harmonic information for the chord quality just is not in the recording. Stack a bass take against a chordal take and the chart fills in.
Frequently asked
Does it work for soprano, concert and tenor ukulele?
Yes. All three sizes are tuned the same way — standard GCEA with the re-entrant high G — so the chord NAME that comes out of a strummed C on a soprano is the same as on a concert or tenor. Body size changes timbre, not harmony. The pipeline reports the chord (C, Am, F, G7 and so on), and any GCEA player can read that chart straight off.
Does it work for baritone ukulele?
Yes. Baritone uke is tuned DGBE — the same as the top four strings of a guitar — so the audio sits lower than soprano or concert. The pipeline doesn't ask about tuning; it analyses the audio you uploaded and reports the chords it hears. Baritone recordings work the same way as any other 4-string instrument. If you strum a D on a baritone, the chart will say D.
Will it tell me which uke shape to play?
No, and that's a deliberate choice. We give you the chord NAME — for example, F — not a specific GCEA fingering. Every uke player has their own shape catalogue, and the same chord can be played as an open shape, a barre, an inversion further up the neck, or a partial voicing for fingerstyle. Pinning the chart to one shape would be wrong half the time. Read the chord, pick the shape that fits your hand and the song.
Can I find chords for ukulele covers from YouTube?
If you can get the audio onto your computer as an MP3 or WAV, you can upload it and ChordSonic will find the chords. We don't host or rip YouTube tracks ourselves — you bring the audio, we analyse it. Strummed uke covers tend to be cleaner inputs than full-band pop mixes, which usually means more reliable chord detection on the resulting chart.
How accurate is it on uke recordings?
Clean strummed ukulele is one of the easier cases for chord detection. The harmonic content sits in a narrow register, the chord voicings are 3–4 notes, and there is no drum kit smearing the spectrum, so the pipeline tends to nail the major-minor diatonic chords (C, Am, F, G, Dm, Em and their dominant cousins) on a typical strum-and-sing demo with around 90% per-beat agreement. Busier arrangements — fingerstyle with melody on top, uke ensembles, mixes with bass and percussion — are harder, and you should expect to glance through the chart and fix the odd label by ear before you trust it for a performance.
Drop a uke take, get a chord chart.
MP3 or WAV. Soprano, concert, tenor, baritone — the chart names the chords either way. Free, no credit card, transposition included.