Chord progressions and song structures are musical building blocks — facts about a song, not protected expression. Courts have held that common progressions and harmonic rhythms cannot be owned (most recently in the 2023 verdict clearing Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud). Every chord chart on this site rests on that principle, and full songs are charted front to back on it.

The picking patterns are original practice arrangements written for this site — our own arpeggios over each song’s real chords, built to teach the left and right hands. They are deliberately not note-for-note transcriptions of any recording: a recorded performance’s exact notes remain protected expression, and teaching purpose does not exempt reproducing them.

No lyrics appear anywhere on this site. Lyrics are fully protected text and require a publisher licence to display — which is why every legitimate lyrics site pays one. Section names like “Verse 1” are structure, not lyrics.

Three of the four tones are real recordings, each under its own licence:

• Acoustic (steel-string) — FreePats FS Seagull, from samples by Gary Campion (FlameStudios), 2008. GPL-3.0-or-later. The full licence text ships beside the audio files.
• Classical (nylon) — FreePats Spanish classical guitar, recorded by roberto@zenvoid.org, 2008. CC0 1.0 (public domain).
• Electric — FreePats Electric Guitar FSBS (clean), a direct-sampled Fender. CC0 1.0 (public domain).

The fourth tone is synthesised in the browser and involves no recordings at all. All sets come from the FreePats project, reduced to the notes this site’s chords can reach.

StrumLab’s source code is MIT-licensed. The one carve-out: the GPL-3 acoustic samples are bundled data, kept in their own directory and loaded like any other static asset — the ordinary mere-aggregation case, which is why the code’s licence is unaffected. Fonts are served under the Open Font License via Google Fonts.

Everything the microphone hears is analysed in your browser and discarded. No audio is recorded, stored, or sent anywhere — there is no server that could receive it.

This page is a careful reading of where the lines sit, not legal advice. If you plan to build on this project commercially, have someone qualified read it too.