Category: Chords

There is a number of guitar chords that beginner guitarists can learn easily so they can start playing songs on the guitar as soon as possible. You have probably seen guitar players moving barre chords up and down the neck of the guitar using their index finger as a bar across all the strings. Beginner guitar players usually learn “open” chords which use only two or three fingers to make notes on the fretboard and the other strings in the chord are played without any fingers pressing down on them.

So you choose simple arrangements of your songs that make use of open chords like this:

E 0———————

B –1——————-

G –3——————-

D –2——————-

A 0———————

E X———————

This is the A minor chord. The X tells us that the sixth string is not played. On the first and fifth strings where the 0 is, the open strings sound. For the other strings, the B string is played on the first fret, the G string is played at the third fret and the D string at the second fret.

Learning open chords is easy even for beginner guitar players. You will get some resistance from your body at first because you are making it do things it is not used to, but soon the routine of learning chord shapes will become quite pleasant.

The thing most people need to pay attention to is HOW you change over from one chord to the next.

When you see guitar players messing up chord changes it is because they do not practice their chord changes slowly and smoothly. This is the essence of learning guitar chords. You need to start fresh every day, practicing slow chord changes as though for the first time. After a while this will become second nature and your chord changing will become faster.

This post on guitar chords for beginners has the starting point that you want to begin playing the guitar by learning songs you have heard on the radio or on CDs. This way you will be getting your basic chords down fast and easily without learning much about their theoretical framework. Another way is to learn your guitar chords according to the “families” they are in. A chord family is a bunch of chords that are related to each other simply because they sound nice together. For example, if you are learning a song that finishes on the G chord, you will be using the G family of chords which consists of the G, A minor, C, D and E minor chords.

And today’s YouTube video is on easy guitar chords.

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If you want to thoroughly learn guitar chords the first step is to buy or download some guitar chord charts. Also try fooling around and experimenting a little. See what makes a C major chord a C major chord. Or find how many different ways you can play the C major scale, how many places on the fretboard can you make the chords of C Dm Em F G Am and Bdim. Learning chords never ends. Every practice session yields something new.

Here is a choice quote from a blog where a guy describes his efforts at learning guitar chords:
“I figured out why fretting one less string caused me to gain a note. It was because taking my finger off that string caused a different note to be played on that string - the seventh! The ‘missing’ note that I lost my not fretting that string was still being played on one of the other strings! I have to learn to stop associating the fretting of a string with the playing of a note. Even if you are playing an open, non-fretted string, you are playing a note there. You gotta count that one. This diagraming of the notes was also very helpful in starting to help me remember what notes are where on the guitar. The more I did them, the faster I got at remembering what note was the open note on each string.”
The whole blog entry is here.

If you have ever wondered how scales are related to chords, there is an entry on Dan Denley’s blog which has three videos that explain where chords come from and how they are used in chord progressions. The entry is called how chords are related to scales

Technorati Tags: guitar chords, guitar chord charts

This post is for anybody who wants to learn guitar chords but is put off by the seeming complexity of the job. If you want to learn to play electric guitar or acoustic guitar, all you need to start is a few simple principles. Once you have these basic ideas learning guitar chords will be easy.

You might have watched guitar players on television or in live performances and been intimidated by the awkward positions they put their hands into and the speed at which they change chords. If you do not aspire to being a virtuoso guitarist, you can still pursue a rewarding career or hobby as a musician without needing to put in hours a day learning complicated chords.

The first thing you need to do is find a list of songs that you want to learn to play. The first criterion for choosing songs is whether you like them. The others have to do with the use of open chords and chord families which we will now take a look at. Apart from your personal enjoyment, the use of songs as tools for learning chords has a practical value: it is much easier to learn groups of chords rather than one at a time because changing from one chord to the other helps your muscle memory to learn the fingerings.

Another thing that simplifies the process of learning guitar chords is the fact that popular music relies heavily on a form that uses only three chords for any song. This is not a hard and fast rule but you will find it holds true for most popular songs. An effective way to classify chords is to separate them into families which are simply combinations of chords that sound well together. In the key of A you have A, D and E. In the key of D the chords are D, E minor, G and A. In the key of G they are G, A minor, C, D, and E minor. And the family of chords for the key of C is C, D minor, E minor, F and G. To make your guitar practice time most effective begin with learning one chord family at a time and finding “three chord” songs that contain your chords.

The key to learning chords quickly and easily is to learn “open” chords. With these chords you only use two or three fingers to make the chord shape. Open chords are fingered within the first three frets of the guitar fretboard - the first position. Here is a tab example of an open chord:

E——–0—————
B——–0—————
G——–0—————
D——–2—————
A——–2—————
E——–0—————-

As you can see, you only need to play the notes at the second fret on the fourth and fifth strings.

If you want to become an electric guitar player and you enjoy the sound of distorted guitar using power chords, the good news is they only need two fingers to play. The bad news is you may need to practice in a concrete bunker.

So here is a YouTube video on playing the E minor chord:

Technorati Tags: guitar chords, learn to play electric guitar, Open chords, YouTube video