The label on each voicing card — Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced — shows the rating of the easiest fingering Fretscape has for that voicing, not a label on you. A guitarist who never struggles with stretches can sit happily with Advanced voicings; someone with smaller hands or less experience usually has more luck in the Beginner band. The rating looks at the same things you'd feel in your hand: how many fingers the fingering uses, how far they spread, whether there's a barre, and how naturally the hand sits.

Beginner

Beginner voicings use few fingers, ask for small stretches, and avoid barres. Most open chords near the nut sit here — the kind of shapes you learn first on guitar. Many three- and four-string voicings also land in this band when they don't need a barre and stay within a couple of frets.

Intermediate

Intermediate voicings ask for one more thing — a barre, a wider stretch, or a slightly less natural finger placement. A standard barre F chord, the movable Am shape at the 5th fret, and most five- and six-string voicings further up the neck fall in this range. They're usually achievable once you've spent some time with the basics.

Advanced

Advanced voicings combine more than one challenging element at the same time — a full barre with a wide stretch, an unusual fingering order, or a shape that asks for the thumb on the low string while the other fingers are reaching. Jazz extensions like 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths often live here because they pack more notes into a small section of the neck.

How to use the rating

Two places to look at it:

• The label on each card — shows the difficulty of the easiest fingering Fretscape has for that voicing, so you can spot at a glance which voicings have at least one comfortable way in.
• The Difficulty setting in the filter panel — caps the list. Setting it to Beginner hides Intermediate and Advanced voicings; Intermediate hides only Advanced; Advanced shows everything. The cap also limits which fingerings each shape is allowed to use, so a chord can have noticeably more voicings on Advanced than on Beginner.

Where the difficulty really comes from

The rating sits on the card, but the work of rating it happens one layer deeper — on the fingering. Each voicing usually has more than one way to finger it, and the fingering is where the difficulty actually lives. The same F shape, for example, can have a clean Intermediate fingering with a full barre, a busier Advanced version that adds mute risk, and a stretchier Advanced version that uses the thumb on the low string.

Tap the diagram on any card to open the larger view and scroll to Fingering Options. Each fingering carries its own rating and its own tags — Full Barre, Mini Barre, Double Barre, Mute Risk, Thumb, Wide Stretch, Fewest Fingers, Most Fingers, Easy Grip, Forward Stretch, and others — that say why one fingering is rated higher than another. These are the tags that actually drive the rating.

The tags on the voicing card itself (Open, Movable, High Position, Compact) describe the shape — where it sits on the neck, whether it uses open strings, how spread out it is. They stay the same across every fingering of that shape, so they're useful for spotting the kind of voicing you want, but they don't tell you which fingering option is easiest.

Use the rating on the card as a first filter, then open the voicing and pick the fingering that fits your hand. Sometimes a slightly harder fingering is the right pick because it keeps a finger anchored across the next chord change — but that's a fingering call, not a voicing call.