Here is the entire secret, and it fits in one sentence: put a capo on your guitar’s fifth fret, play only the top four strings, and you are fingering a ukulele. The uke’s G–C–E–A strings are the guitar’s D–G–B–E set raised exactly a perfect fourth — same intervals between the strings, same geometry, same shapes. Your left hand already knows this instrument. The only thing that changes is what the shapes are called.
The capo-5 mental model
String for string, the mapping is exact: guitar D string → uke G string, G → C, B → E, high E → A. Because every string moves up the same interval, every shape you drag across keeps its structure — an open D-major grip fingered on a uke is still that grip, it just sounds a fourth higher, which makes it G major. Nothing about your muscle memory is wasted; it is all just transposed.
There is one honest asterisk. On a standard ukulele the fourth string is reentrant: that G is tuned an octave up, so it rings above the C and E strings instead of below them. Your chord shapes still work — the notes are the same pitch classes — but the lowest-note-on-the-bottom logic you use for basslines does not survive the trip. That quirk deserves its own page: see low-G vs high-G for what reentrant tuning changes and why uke players mostly keep it.
The shape converter
Every row below is computed from this site’s actual voicing data — the guitar grip from the guitar chord library, the ukulele grip from the ukulele library — and our CI re-derives the table on every change, so it can never drift from the charts it links to. Read it as: the guitar shape you know → the chord it becomes on a ukulele. Uke frets are written fourth string first (G-C-E-A).
| Guitar shape | Guitar frets | On ukulele it is | Uke frets |
|---|---|---|---|
| C major | x32010 | F major | 2010 |
| A major | x02220 | D major | 2220 |
| G major | 320003 | C major | 0003 |
| E major | 022100 | A major | 2100 |
| D major | xx0232 | G major | 0232 |
| A minor | x02210 | D minor | 2210 |
| E minor | 022000 | A minor | 2000 |
| D minor | xx0231 | G minor | 0231 |
| G7 | 320001 | C7 | 0001 |
| D7 | xx0212 | G7 | 0212 |
| E7 | 020100 | A7 | 0100 |
Study the pattern in the names and you will spot the working rule: to find a uke chord, play the guitar shape a fourth below it (equivalently, a fifth above). Want C on the uke? That is your guitar G shape. Want G? Your D shape. Want F? Your C shape. The five CAGED letters you spent years on are now a five-key head start — and each row links straight into our charts, so you can hear the uke voicing before you trust it: start from C major on soprano ukulele and browse from there.
What transfers, and what does not
- Transfers whole: shape geometry, barre technique, interval logic across adjacent strings, scale-pattern fragments on the top four strings, and everything you know about rhythm. Our scale maps will look instantly familiar — just four strings deep.
- Transfers renamed: every chord and every scale position, up a perfect fourth. C-shape fingerings make F-chords, A-shapes make D-chords, and so on down the table above.
- Does not transfer: your two bass strings — six-string voicings lose their bottom, so power chords and low riffs need rethinking; and the fourth string’s octave, which floats melody-side on a reentrant uke. Treat the ukulele as a close voiced quartet, not a truncated guitar, and both “losses” turn into the instrument’s actual character.
Expect the right hand to relearn faster than the left. Most uke players strum with the pad of the index finger or the thumb rather than a pick, the sweet spot sits over the neck-body join instead of the soundhole, and the light nylon strings reward a far softer touch than wound steel — dig in guitar-hard and the instrument chokes. Give the new touch a week of the daily drills and it settles; the shapes under your left hand will feel like home from the first minute.
The guitalele: the bridge that needs no bridge
If renaming chords sounds like homework, the uke family keeps a loophole for you. The guitalele is tuned A–D–G–C–E–A — all six strings, everything a fourth up, exactly the capo-5 guitar. As our chord reference puts it: Guitar shapes work unchanged on guitalele — finger them exactly as charted; every shape sounds a perfect fourth higher than on guitar. You keep your entire six-string vocabulary and gain the uke’s size and voice; the price is that a written C shape rings out as an F chord, so playing with others still means transposing in your head — or capo-ing the chart, not the instrument.
The baritone ukulele is the other easy door: its D–G–B–E tuning IS your top four strings, untransposed — chord names survive intact, at the cost of the classic uke shimmer.
Where to go next
- Soprano ukulele chords — every quality in every key, with the grips this table points into.
- Low-G vs high-G — the reentrant string, explained; the one genuinely new idea the uke asks you to learn.
- Ukulele progressions — your I–IV–V instincts, re-voiced for GCEA grips.