Content Licence

The licence, in one line

Three of our published surfaces are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International — the SPDX identifier is CC-BY-4.0. You may copy them, change them, print them, and republish them anywhere, commercially included. The one condition is credit.

This is not a promise we can quietly take back later. A CC BY licence is irrevocable: every copy already released stays licensed even if this page changes tomorrow. That is exactly why the scope below is written as a short list of what is covered rather than a vague gesture at “the site” — we would rather be narrow and certain than broad and sorry.

What you may reuse

• The chord-diagram SVGs — every diagram served at /images/diagrams/{instrument}/{note}/{type}.svg, 2,327 of them today across guitar, ukulele, mandolin and bass. Hotlink them straight from us: they are sent with an open CORS header and a week-long cache, and hotlinking is the use they were built for.
• The output of our embeddable widgets — the chord, chord-set, fretboard, progression, tuner and metronome frames documented on the embed page — as long as the small “String Warrior” link each widget renders stays visible. That link is the credit; it is not decoration.
• The Open Graph chord cards at /images/og/…, drawn from the same voicing data as the diagrams.

Adding a fourth surface to that list is a deliberate act, not a resemblance — new artwork is not covered because it looks like the artwork that is.

What this licence does not cover

Everything else stays all rights reserved. Specifically:

• The code that runs the site and builds the diagrams. (An open-source release of the underlying music-theory package is a separate decision, on a separate licence file, for a later day.)
• The writing — page copy, articles, buying guides, learning paths, FAQ answers, practice routines.
• The chord, scale, progression, lick and exercise libraries as compiled collections. A fact about music is nobody's property; the curated, checked, cross-referenced library of them took years.
• The name and the logo. A Creative Commons licence never grants trademark rights, and this one does not: reuse the diagram, don't imply we endorsed you.
• The fonts we ship (Oswald and Bebas Neue), which travel under their own SIL Open Font License terms.

How to credit us

Put this line near the diagram:

Chord diagram by String Warrior (stringwarrior.com), CC BY 4.0

If you can use HTML, this version does the credit and the link in one:

<figure>
  <img src="https://stringwarrior.com/images/diagrams/guitar/c/major.svg"
       alt="C major chord diagram for guitar" width="150" height="180">
  <figcaption>
    Chord diagram by <a href="https://stringwarrior.com/">String Warrior</a>,
    <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY 4.0</a>
  </figcaption>
</figure>

For the widgets there is nothing to do: the attribution already renders inside the frame. Leave it visible and you have met the condition.

The terms travel with the file

A licence nobody can find is a licence nobody follows, so every served diagram carries its own terms. Open one in a text editor and the <metadata> element right under the title names this site and this licence. The HTTP response repeats it in a Link: <…>; rel="license" header, and our oEmbed endpoint returns license and license_url fields alongside the embed markup — so a scraper, an image indexer or a publishing platform can read the permission without ever loading this page.

The strings in those three places are checked against the source text on every build, so they cannot quietly drift apart from what you are reading here.

Not sure whether your use is covered?

Ask. Contact details are on our About page, and we would much rather answer a question than find out later that somebody assumed the worst and didn't use the diagram at all. When in doubt, over-credit — nobody has ever been asked to remove an attribution.