Today's Grip, String by String

Four strings, and one of them is not where you think it is. Here is the shape for the chord the network drew this morning, with its reentrant surprise named.

One chord a day, drawn by the whole Warrior Network from a single shared seed: a hash of the calendar date over a curated pool, so every sister site is looking at exactly the chord you are. What changes from site to site is the answer, and on a ukulele the answer starts with a peculiarity of the tuning.

On almost every other stringed instrument the string nearest your face is the lowest note you hear, so "the fourth string" and "the bass note" mean the same thing. In standard GCEA they do not: the fourth string is tuned ABOVE the third, which is what reentrant means, and it is the reason a uke sounds like a uke rather than a very small guitar. It also means that in any given grip the lowest pitch can be sitting in the middle of the neck.

So today's reading names both things separately: which string or strings carry the root of the chord, and which string is actually producing the lowest note. They agree far less often than players expect, and once you can see the difference you can voice-lead between chords by ear instead of by hope.

The grip itself is computed in your browser, from your own calendar date, and never on the server: rendered pages here are cached at the edge for hours at a time, so a date baked into the HTML would cheerfully hand you yesterday's chord a minute after midnight. Once the page knows what day it is where you are, today's shape appears below with every string named.

While you wait — or if scripting is off — the whole library is browsable by hand at the chord reference, and the fretboard explorer will show you the reentrant octave for yourself.

One chord a day, drawn by the whole Warrior Network from a single shared seed: a hash of the calendar date over a curated pool, so every sister site is looking at exactly the chord you are. What changes from site to site is the answer, and on a ukulele the answer starts with a peculiarity of the tuning.

On almost every other stringed instrument the string nearest your face is the lowest note you hear, so "the fourth string" and "the bass note" mean the same thing. In standard GCEA they do not: the fourth string is tuned ABOVE the third, which is what reentrant means, and it is the reason a uke sounds like a uke rather than a very small guitar. It also means that in any given grip the lowest pitch can be sitting in the middle of the neck.

So today's reading names both things separately: which string or strings carry the root of the chord, and which string is actually producing the lowest note. They agree far less often than players expect, and once you can see the difference you can voice-lead between chords by ear instead of by hope.

The grip itself is computed in your browser, from your own calendar date, and never on the server: rendered pages here are cached at the edge for hours at a time, so a date baked into the HTML would cheerfully hand you yesterday's chord a minute after midnight. Once the page knows what day it is where you are, today's shape appears below with every string named.