HooshangBakht/fretwork-guitar-dataset

Fretwork Guitar Dataset

Guitar chord shapes, scales and traditional song metadata, released openly by Fretwork under CC BY 4.0. Free to use, including commercially, as long as you credit Fretwork.

from datasets import load_dataset

chords = load_dataset("HooshangBakht/fretwork-guitar-dataset", "chords")
scales = load_dataset("HooshangBakht/fretwork-guitar-dataset", "scales")
songs  = load_dataset("HooshangBakht/fretwork-guitar-dataset", "songs")

Contents

Config	Records	What it holds
chords	219 chords, 373 shapes	Fret positions, notes, intervals, barre and open flags
scales	156	13 scale types in all 12 keys, with fretboard positions
songs	87	Traditional and public-domain songs: key, time signature, difficulty, chords used

Every chord shape is verified

Each shape is checked by a program that works out which pitches it actually sounds in standard tuning and compares them against the chord's real tones. A shape is kept only if every note it sounds is a chord tone, the root sounds, the third or suspended note sounds, and the tone that gives the chord its name sounds. Slash chords must put the named bass note lowest.

373 of 373 shapes pass. The checker is itself tested against deliberately broken shapes — an Am with a major third, an F barre with a stray open string — and catches all of them. Both runs are reproducible from the GitHub repository:

node verify.mjs        # re-verify every shape
node verify.mjs --self # prove the checker catches known-bad shapes

barre is derived from the shape's geometry rather than its label, so a movable shape like x355xx is correctly marked as needing no barre.

Reading the fields

Chord frets run low E string first. null means the string isn't played, 0 means open, so open C is [null, 3, 2, 0, 1, 0] — written x32010 in fret_string. Tuning is standard, E A D G B E.

intervals are semitones above the root, so a major chord is [0, 4, 7].

Scale positions hold one entry per string, ordered as a tab reads — high e first, low E last. string_number is 1 for the high e and 6 for the low E. root_frets marks which of the playable frets are the root.

The songs

Traditional songs, spirituals, carols and sea shanties in the public domain. The dataset holds metadata only — title, key, time signature, difficulty and which chords the song uses. No lyrics, no melodies, no notation.

A few early 20th-century blues entries (St. Louis Blues, Trouble in Mind, Sitting on Top of the World) are public domain in the United States but may still be in copyright elsewhere under life-plus-70 rules. Only factual metadata is recorded, but filter those out if you need worldwide public-domain certainty.

Licence

CC BY 4.0. Use it in apps, products, research or model training. The one condition is credit:

Guitar data from Fretwork, CC BY 4.0.

Built something with it? hello@guitarfretwork.com

Citation

@misc{fretwork_guitar_dataset,
  title  = {Fretwork Guitar Dataset},
  author = {{True Music School}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://guitarfretwork.com/data/},
  note   = {CC BY 4.0}
}