simple hand tracking chords — play any song with chord gestures_
Play chords with your hands in the air
Allow the camera and your hands become 20 real chords — enough to strum along with most simple songs. Works best about an arm's length from the camera with a light source in front of you.
Chord chart 20 chords
Instrument 15 voices
Sound
Record
Tracking & display
Guide — how to play a song with hand gesture chords
Press Start camera and accept the browser prompt. The hand model downloads once and is then cached, so the second visit starts almost instantly. Nothing is uploaded.
Look up a beginner chart for your song. Most simple songs lean on a handful of open chords: G, C, D, Em and Am cover a large share of them.
Check the Chord chart panel. Right hand for majors, left hand for minors, tilt the hand for the second row, pinch for 7ths.
Show the gesture for the first chord, hold it, then switch shape for the next chord in rhythm, the way you would change shapes on a guitar neck.
Flick your hand down to strum a held chord again. Press ● Record to save the take as video and a clean WAV.
What is in here
Relaxed hand, not tilted and not pinching: show 1 to 5 fingers for C, G, D, A and E. Tilt the hand outward, fingers pointing sideways, and show 1 or 2 fingers for F and Bb.
- 1 · 2 · 3 fingers
- C · G · D
- 4 fingers
- A
- Open palm
- E
- Tilted · 1
- F
- Tilted · 2
- Bb
The same idea on the other hand: relaxed, 1 to 5 fingers for Am, Em, Dm, Bm and F#m. Tilted with 1 finger gives Cm, and the last tilted slot holds B7.
- 1 · 2 · 3 fingers
- Am · Em · Dm
- 4 fingers
- Bm
- Open palm
- F#m
- Tilted · 1
- Cm
- Tilted · 2
- B7 (the odd one out)
Touch thumb to index finger. On the right hand, where you pinch across the frame picks the chord; on the left, a pinch anywhere is Am7.
- Right pinch
- Far left → far right: C7 · G7 · D7 · A7 · E7
- Left pinch
- Am7, anywhere in frame
- Voicing
- Root, third, fifth and seventh, plus the root an octave up
These work at all times, for either hand.
- Fist ✊
- Silences that hand at once
- Flick down
- Strums the held chord again
- Hand height
- Volume, raise the hand to swell
- F · R
- Fullscreen · start or stop recording
- Space
- Panic, silence everything
Each hand is tracked and voiced on its own. For a normal song, follow the chart one hand at a time; hold a chord in each hand when you want a fuller blend.
- G – Em – C – D
- Right 2 · left 2 · right 1 · right 3
- Blues run
- Right pinch, slide C7 → G7 → D7 → A7 → E7
- Two-hand pad
- Am on the left, C7 on the right
Watch the live chord name on screen. If it flickers between two chords, hold the shape steadier; most misfires happen on the way between finger counts, like passing 2 while going from 1 to 3.
- Light
- In front of you, plain wall behind
- Frame
- Keep the whole hand, fingertips too, in view
- Smoothing
- Raise it for a steadier chord name
Hand tracking chords: play real songs with 20 chord gestures
Simple Hand Tracking Chords is a free browser instrument that turns your webcam into a chord machine. It maps 20 common chords (C, G, D, A, E, F, Bb, Am, Em, Dm, Bm, F#m, Cm, G7, C7, D7, E7, A7, B7 and Am7) to one fixed hand gesture each, the chords a beginner guitarist learns first. You can take a song's chord chart from anywhere and play it in the air, with no music theory needed: you only need the chord names, and the Chord chart panel shows the hand shape for each one. There is no account and nothing to install.
The Hand Tracking Instrument has a Chord Conductor mode that thinks in scale degrees, so the same hand shape plays a different chord depending on the key you picked. This app is the opposite: each gesture always means the same named chord, so you never translate Roman numerals in your head.
How the gestures work
A hand landmark model returns 21 points per hand, and the app reads them for four things: which hand it is, how many fingers are extended, whether the hand is tilted outward, and whether the thumb is pinched to the index finger. That is enough to reach all 20 chords without overlap.
- Right hand, the seven major chords: relaxed with 1, 2, 3 or 4 fingers for C, G, D and A, an open palm for E. Tilt the hand outward (fingers pointing sideways) and show 1 or 2 fingers for F and Bb.
- Left hand, the six minor chords: relaxed with 1 to 4 fingers for Am, Em, Dm and Bm, an open palm for F#m, tilted with 1 finger for Cm.
- The seven 7th chords: pinch the right hand and move it from the far left to the far right of the frame for C7, G7, D7, A7 and E7. Pinch the left hand anywhere for Am7. B7 has no plain B major in this set to pinch from, so it takes the last open slot: left hand tilted with 2 fingers.
A fist means no chord, so you can drop a hand between chords without anything ringing on. Triads sound as four notes (root, third, fifth and the root an octave up) and 7th chords add the seventh as a fifth note, voiced around the middle of the range so they suit anything from Sub Bass to Concert Harp.
Gesture synth chords and hand tracking music
A gesture synth turns hand movements into sound. Most of them map the position of a hand to pitch, which makes melodies easy and songs hard. This one maps the shape of a hand to a whole chord, so holding up a gesture is like pressing a chord button on an autoharp or an accordion's bass side: the chord sounds in tune and in time with the strum, whatever your fingers were doing a moment before. That is why it suits playing along with songs. For melodies, loops and a backing band that follows you, the full Hand Tracking Instrument has six play modes and also works with a mouse or touchscreen.
How to play a whole song
Find a beginner chord chart for a song that uses open chords; most do. Show each chord's gesture in turn, in rhythm, and hold it as long as the chart says. A chord sustains while you hold the shape, and a quick downward flick of the hand strums it again with a fresh, slightly louder attack, so you can strum on the beat without changing your fingers. Hand height sets the volume, so raise your hand for the chorus. A G–Em–C–D song, one of the most common progressions in pop, is right-2, left-2, right-1, right-3. When learning, practise switching between just two chords first.
- Beginner strum-along: Nylon Guitar, relaxed right hand, 1–5 fingers for C G D A E.
- Ballad: Warm Pad or Bowed Strings, slow chord changes, hand raised on the chorus.
- Two chords at once: hold Am in the left hand and add C7 in the right for a richer static chord.
Fifteen instruments, none of them samples
The synthesis engine is shared with Hand Tracking Instrument, and every note is built live with the Web Audio API. Nylon Guitar and Concert Harp use Karplus-Strong synthesis, a physical model of a plucked string. Electric Piano and Vibraphone are two-operator FM. Struck Piano and Music Box are additive with inharmonic partials. Warm Pad, Bowed Strings, Choir Aah, Brass Section, Bright Lead, Retro Square and Sub Bass are subtractive, detuned oscillators through a filter envelope. Church Organ is a drawbar stack and Flute is filtered noise. Step through them with [ and ]; volume, reverb and delay are in the Sound panel.
Recording
Press Record (or R) and the page captures the canvas exactly as you see it, with camera, hand skeleton and live chord names, as a WebM video with the synth audio mixed in. At the same time it writes an uncompressed 16-bit WAV of the audio alone, ready for an audio editor or DAW. Switch the record button to audio only if you do not need the video.
Where the video goes: nowhere
The camera stream goes into a canvas and a hand-tracking model running inside your browser tab. It is not sent to a server, and the only recording that exists is one you start yourself, kept in memory until you download it or close the tab. Instrument, volume, reverb, delay and the tracking and display settings are saved in your browser's local storage. It is free, with no ads, no paywall and no watermark.
Browsers, phones and tracking tips
Chrome and Edge are fastest because they can run the model on the GPU; Firefox and Safari work too. The page needs a secure https connection and camera permission. On a phone or tablet use the front camera in landscape, propped up so both hands are free. For steady tracking, face a window or lamp, keep a plain wall behind you and keep your fingertips inside the frame. If small jitter changes the chord, raise Smoothing. Sensitivity sets how small a downward flick still counts as a strum. Fullscreen (F, leave with Esc) hides the page around the camera view, and Space silences everything.
More chord and hand-tracking tools
If 20 chords is more than you need, the 4 Chord Song Player strips it down to C, G, Am and F with 100 songs and a drum beat. The Hand Tracking Instrument adds air harp, air keys, theremin and drum pads. Want a beat behind your chords? Make one with the online drum machine in Drum Loop Studio and export it as a seamless loop. See how these chords are fingered on a real guitar or piano in the chord chart generator, tune up with the guitar tuner, or browse all the free music tools.