Chord & FretF · Cavaquinho
Remember the first chord you ever learned? Odds are it looked a lot like this one. F major is the sound of "we made it": the song lands on it and your shoulders drop on their own. Tap the player below and notice — nothing missing, nothing extra.
Listen first
What you just heard
Play the arpeggio again, no rush. There are only three: F, A and C. Keep your ear on the middle one. That's the major third, and it's what gives this chord its wide-open-day face — file that name away, because in a minute we'll move exactly that note and you'll hear the weather change.
Now it's your hands' turn
On the cavaquinho, four steel strings tuned D–G–B–D pack the chord into a small, bright space — every finger counts. So start with the first position below — the position marked with ⭐ is the easiest to play. Advice from someone who's seen this scene a thousand times: play the notes one by one before strumming. If one sounds muffled, a finger is touching the next string. Adjust, try again. It's annoying for two days and then never again.
2 more shapes of this chord on the neck
Chord & Fret Pro maps over 200,000 voicings and inversions — hear and play them all.
Precision Tuner — Before you play these shapes, get in tune — chromatic tuner and reference tones · try it in Chord & Fret
Above, the same F, higher up the neck. No rush — but the day a song wants this chord brighter and tighter, you'll already have the address.
Left-handed? Mirror's right here
What is F?
F: F Major. The notes are F, A, C (fixed-do: Fa, La, Do) — the degrees 1–3–5.
Where this chord lives
In real music, where does it earn its keep? Almost always as III in D minor, VII in G minor, VI in A minor. Don't memorize that — just notice that the same shape plays different roles in different songs, the way a word changes meaning with the sentence.
Transpose & Capo — Need it in another key? Move the whole chart and find the easiest capo · see it in Chord & Fret
Identify Chord — Found a shape on your own fretboard? The app names it back · open in Chord & Fret
Real songs pass through here: Pop · axis · Pop · axis rotação · Pagode · ciclo do pagode · Pagode · subida cromática (ref. conceito) · Mpb · IV ao iv (ref. conceito) · Samba · ciclo de quintas
Where it tends to go
Treating F as the home chord (I) of its key, it usually moves toward the pre-dominant (Gm / Bb) or the dominant (C / E°) — and the dominant pulls back home. It's a tendency, not a law.
When you want to go further
When it's time to improvise over it, F Ionian (F G A Bb C D E · 1 2 3 4 5 6 7: the plain major scale, where everything starts); F Lydian (F G A B C D E · 1 2 3 #4 5 6 7: the major scale with a raised fourth — one extra step of daydream) fit entirely. The swaps below are for when your ear gets bored of the obvious.
F Ionian
4 more scale positions on the neck
Chord & Fret Pro maps over 35,000 mapped scale shapes — hear and play them all.
The same F Ionian in its main shapes along the neck — pick whichever position sits under your hand. The rings mark the guide notes (the 3rd and 7th) that carry this chord's color.
Scale — The whole scale on the neck — in boxes or 3 notes per string; on the major modes, on guitar in standard tuning, with the CAGED forms named · open in Chord & Fret
Improvising in context
To improvise over F as home, the F Ionian scale fits entirely — it contains every note of the chord. And when the dominant (C) pulls back, the leading tone E is the note that wants to resolve home.
Swaps that work:
- Dm7 — Relative minor (vi) — same tonic function
- Am7 — Mediant (iii) — tonic function
Reharmonize — Want richer substitutions? Reharmonize the progression in a tap · use it in Chord & Fret
One last test: play F and let it ring. Comfortable, right? Exactly. Now come see what happens when we add one note and take that comfort away: F7.
Every shape of F lives in Chord & Fret Pro — 4 instruments, 16 tunings, 41 chord types and 57 scales, in every key. Start free. Unlock everything with Pro. 100% offline. No ads, no trackers.