When Highlight Root is on, the root note of the chord appears in a coloured circle on every diagram, while the other notes stay in plain dark circles. For a C chord, the C notes light up; for G, the G notes light up. At a glance, you can see which note the chord is named after.

Turning it on

Open Settings from the bottom of the app. Under DIAGRAM, turn the Highlight Root toggle on, then tap Save Changes. The highlight then appears on the chord-search result cards and inside the voicing details panel.

Highlight Root is only in Settings — the voicing details panel and Reverse Lookup don't have their own toggle, so Settings is the only place to change it.

Turn it back off the same way if you'd rather see every note in the same colour.

Why you'd use it

Highlighting the root is useful when a shape is unfamiliar.

• It shows which note the chord is named after.
• It helps you compare the root against the lowest note, so you can see whether the shape is in root position or an inversion.
• It makes movable shapes easier to read — the highlighted dot is the new root when you slide the shape up or down the neck. Open-position shapes don't slide the same way, so the highlight is mostly there to label the named note.
• In Intervals mode, it gives you a visual centre to read the rest of the chord tones from.

If you're already comfortable with the fretboard, the unhighlighted look keeps diagrams cleaner. Turn it on when you're learning a new shape; turn it off once it's under your fingers.

Highlight Root and display mode

Highlight Root works alongside the Fingers / Notes / Intervals display modes. The colour shows you where the root is; the dot label inside the circle tells you what it is — finger number, note name, or the letter R for root, depending on which mode you're in.