About FretMapper

FretMapper is a small, quiet reference site for people learning to play acoustic guitar. It exists for one type of reader: the player who has just bought a steel-string acoustic, knows three chords or none, and is trying to figure out what to practice next. Everything here is built around that person.

What's here

The catalog currently includes 520 songs, 54 chord shapes, 40 attributions, and 52 tutorials. Every song page includes a chord progression, a strumming pattern, a 10-minute practice plan, and links to the chord shapes and tutorials it depends on. Every chord page includes a labeled diagram, step-by-step fingering instructions, common mistakes to watch for, and a list of songs that use the chord. Every tutorial page is a short, focused lesson on one technique, with a daily drill at the end.

Why public-domain music

Almost everything in the FretMapper catalog is in the public domain or is a traditional song with no living rightsholder. That's a deliberate choice. Tablature and chord charts of copyrighted songs are a legal gray area — many sites that publish them operate under DMCA risk, which forces them to compromise on accuracy, completeness, or both. We'd rather have 520 songs you can study end-to-end, with full progressions and tutorials we believe in, than a thousand stubs.

It also turns out that public-domain music is exactly what beginning acoustic players have learned from for the past hundred years. The folk songs, hymns, spirituals, sea shanties, lullabies, and traditional carols that fill this site are the same songs that were the first material for nearly every acoustic player you've ever admired. They're built around three or four chords, sit naturally under open shapes, and reward the kind of slow, repeated practice that builds a lasting skill.

How the data was assembled

FretMapper's catalog was built by a one-time PHP seed script (seed.php) that combines a curated list of public-domain song titles with a library of common chord progressions and a chord-shape library covering the most useful open and barre voicings for acoustic guitar. Each song was assigned a key and a progression by hand, then expanded into multiple arrangement variations (different capo positions, fingerpicked versions, simplified four-chord versions). The seed script writes everything to a single JSON file, which the PHP templates read at request time. There's no database server, no API, no JavaScript framework — just PHP rendering HTML.

Data source: curated public-domain catalog (procedurally expanded). Generated at 2026-05-03T03:46:09+00:00.

Why no JavaScript

FretMapper is intentionally a server-rendered website. There is no React, no Vue, no Next.js, no client-side routing. Every link goes to a real URL that returns a complete HTML page. We made this choice because the site is for learners — many of them on slow connections, older devices, or borrowed library computers — and a 30 KB HTML page beats a 2 MB JavaScript bundle every time, especially when the content is mostly static.

It also means search engines, screen readers, and curl all see exactly what a human browser sees. If you want to read FretMapper offline, you can — just save the page.

Advertising

FretMapper is supported by display advertising. The ad placements are clearly marked on every page (header, in-content, sidebar, footer). We don't run autoplay video ads, intrusive popups, or anything that interferes with reading. If you'd prefer a no-ads experience, please use a content blocker — we won't try to detect or work around it.

Get in touch

FretMapper is a small project. If you spot an error in a chord chart, a misattribution, or a tutorial that needs more clarity, please let us know. The best way to help is to point at a specific page and a specific paragraph — we'll fix it.