Holdsworth Chord Explorer
Allan Holdsworth didn’t think about chords the way the rest of us were taught. He didn’t see them as tidy stacks of thirds with names attached — he saw them as groups of notes pulled from a scale, shapes he could grab and move around the neck, every one of them diatonic to whatever he was playing over.
This tool lets you work the same way. Pick a key and one of the five scales from my Holdsworth book, tap any four notes to build a voicing, then move that shape up and down the scale — each note climbing its own string to the next scale tone. No chord names, no theory to wade through. Just notes lighting up the neck, the way Allan saw them.
How to use it
- Choose a key and a scale. The neck lights up with only that scale’s notes.
- Tap four notes — one per string — to build a starting voicing.
- Hit Up or Down the scale to move the whole shape through the scale, one step at a time.
- Watch how the shape changes as it travels — same four fingers, endlessly different sounds. Let your ears be the judge.
Why Holdsworth saw chords this way
Most guitarists learn chords as fixed shapes with names — a C, an Am7, a G13 — each one memorised on its own. Holdsworth threw that out. To him, a chord was simply a handful of notes borrowed from a scale, and any group of notes from that scale was fair game over any of its chords. That single shift is what gave his comping its unmistakable colour: lush, ambiguous voicings that don’t sit neatly in a chord chart but always belong.
The tool above lets you hear that for yourself. Because every note you select is drawn from the scale, every shape you build — and every shape it becomes as you move it through the scale — is automatically usable over the music in that key. You’re not memorising chords. You’re exploring a scale’s worth of sounds with four fingers.
What to listen for
As you step a shape up or down the scale, notice that it doesn’t just slide — it changes. The gaps between your fingers stretch and shrink because the scale’s steps are uneven, so the same starting shape throws out a different voicing at every position. Some sound consonant and warm; some sound tense and modern; a few sound genuinely strange. That’s the point. Holdsworth kept the ones his ear loved and discarded the rest — and so should you. There are no wrong answers here, only sounds you like and sounds you don’t.
A few ways to use it
- Find voicings for a key. Pick the scale that matches the song you’re playing, build a shape you like, and you’ve got a chord that works over the whole progression.
- Discover substitutions. Move a familiar voicing one step through the scale and you’ll often land on a richer, more unexpected version of the same idea.
- Train your ear. Step slowly through the scale and really listen to how each voicing feels. Over time you’ll start to hear where on the neck the sounds you want are hiding.
- Try the harder scales. The Major scale is a friendly place to start, but the real Holdsworth flavour lives in the Melodic Minor, Harmonic Minor, Lydian Diminished and Diminished scales. Switch to those once the idea clicks.
This tool covers one idea — moving a single shape through a scale. Holdsworth took the same core concept and built an entire system on it: how he chose his scales, how he linked chords to those scales, the four-note-per-string approach behind his fretboard logic, and the legato technique that let him play it all. If the way of thinking here resonates with you, that’s exactly what Allan Holdsworth: A Guitarist’s Guide lays out in full.
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