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I've got some sheet music that includes a guitar strumming pattern:

Guitar strumming pattern

At the top of the page, the specific inversion and octave of the chords are defined:

Cmaj7 chord A chord E chord

What does the fr5 and ringed 6 mean under the chord name?

edit: and why is this marked as a note and not a strum?

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It indicates that you play the A chord at the 5th fret and strum all six strings. With the E chord, you are fret zero (an open chord) and once again strum all six strings.

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  • Which jibes with the chord drawings. The circled numbers are usually fingerings, but we don't normally expect a musician to have 6 fingers on one hand. I am guessing the circled 6 indicates the bass note? So an open C chord might be annotated as "C fr0 (5)" since the chord is usually drawn with a mute on 6.
    – Yorik
    Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 18:03
  • Could be. Wonder why there is no notation for the Cmaj7 chord?
    – mikeford
    Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 18:46
  • @mikeford: Only the short-duration A and E chords have these annotations - everything else just seems to defer to the chord diagrams
    – Eric
    Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 19:34
  • What's the note vs slash distinction here, also?
    – Eric
    Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 22:18
  • I really don't know. It seems like a confusing way of writing out a chord progression. If you post the whole sheet it would help as taken out of context, it looks very inconsistent.
    – mikeford
    Commented Feb 21, 2017 at 23:36

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