If your aim is to learn guitar chords for songs in order to play folk or campfire songs, these chords will be just about all you need. If you are able to practice your chords every day for half an hour, you will be playing some easy songs very soon.

When you first begin to study chord playing, it is important not to overload. If you decide to learn the eight chords above, take just three for the first week, another three for the second week, and the final two for the third week, making revision part of your routine.

The first stage in learning a chord is placing it in your memory. Make sure you can practice a chord or group of chords without looking at your chord chart. Of course, you will remember a chord better if you try to place your fingers in position and play it, but having to tear your attention away from practicing to look at your chord diagram is not going to be productive.

The next stage in learning guitar chords is positioning your fingers so they are pressing on each string you need to play without brushing against the adjacent string. It is important to be exact in this part of learning chords because the position you practice is what will be recorded in your muscle memory.

One mistake beginner guitarists often make is pressing too hard on the strings. To find the minimum pressure needed to produce a clear sound, first just place your finger in position without pressing down. Now press down lightly while picking the string. At first, the note you play will be muffled, but when you apply a little pressure, you will hear a clean sound. This is the amount of pressure you need; if you find yourself applying too much, stop practicing and begin again without pressing down too hard.

Every time you take a chord position, the most important thing is to produce a clean sound. As you establish a practice routine, your fingers will naturally begin to go to their places without your brain needing to think about it.

To begin playing chords, place your thumb in the middle of the guitar neck, at right angles to the strings as in the photo. This is often called the “classical position” because it is taught to classical guitar students. This is the position that provides the guitarist with greatest freedom to move the left hand fingers without causing unnecessary tension or damage to the muscles and tendons in the hand and wrist.

Placing your fretting hand in the classical position when you learn your first chords will make your work easier when you start to learn chords that require your fingers to stretch to reach some of the notes. Barre chords will also be less trouble if you use this position. The term “classical” is often used in a negative way by guitarists who see it as too rigid and not giving the guitarist opportunities to loosen up and play less rule-ridden genres. In fact, the classical position offers the greatest flexibility and least likelihood of injury.

No position should be taken rigidly. When you play your guitar your body, hands, arms and fingers should be constantly adjusting to whatever demands are put on them by the music. The left hand position and the posture as a whole should be returned to at every opportunity, not held onto desperately. When the fingers need to take a new chord fingering, you will need to pay a little bit of attention to keep the thumb at right angles while the fingers find the next chord. Practicing this way will have the fingers automatically in the correct position to put the tips on the strings without muffling the other strings.

Once this way of fingering chords has become a habit, you can play chords where the thumb reaches over the top of the fretboard to fret the sixth string, or any other variation you choose.

If you do a search on the internet, you will find guitar players arguing over the advantages or otherwise of a particular left hand position. The best course of action for a beginner guitarist is to use the classical position illustrated, and once it has become natural for you to place your hand like this, then you can decide when it is appropriate to depart from it.

These photographs show how the fingers can be placed in the chord positions with the thumb at right angles to the strings.

A Major

A Minor

C Major

D Major

D Minor

E Major

E Minor

G Major

When learning or practicing chords, always place the index finger first. The same goes for changing between chords. The index finger – or first finger – is easily controlled by your brain, so put it into position first and allow the others to follow. If you find this hard to believe, just try placing random fingers first and you will see which one feels right.

Some people have a problem with guitar chords because of the length of their fingernails. It is important to keep your nails trimmed to a length which allows your fingertips to press on the strings and make contact with the fretboard.

After a day or two of practicing chord changes by carefully taking each chord position, then randomly changing to another chord, you could start to use these chords for songs. Do not try to change the chords quickly while your fingers are not used to taking their places. To practice chord changes, simply strum the first chord once, then the second chord once, and so on. Only go onto playing the accompaniment for songs after your fingers have learnt the chord shapes.

When you practice changing chords, it is a good idea to release the previous chord completely. Make sure your hand is totally relaxed before taking the next chord shape. The exception to this rule is:

When you practice your changes, be aware when you do not need to take a finger off a string to assume the next chord shape. For example, changing from C major to A minor only requires that your third finger move from the fifth string at the third fret to the third string at the second fret. The first and second fingers stay where they are.

The songs listed below will give you plenty of material for practice.

A D E
Wild Thing
Louie Louie

G D Am
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

G C D
Ring of Fire

D A G D
Bad Moon Rising

G C
My Darling Clementine

G D
She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain

D A
Happy Birthday

A D E
Johnny B. Goode

E D A
Sympathy for the Devil

You should be able to find the tabs for these songs at www.ultimate-guitar.com/ or www.chordie.com/

The Basic Guitar Chords and How to Learn Them

Here are the notes of a C major chord in musical notation:

In other types of guitar music students who do not learn to read music can still learn how to play chords to accompany songs.

In popular music genres such as pop, rock and folk, chords are used as accompaniment for songs or melodies. Popular music makes use of only a small number of chords, so a beginner guitar student is usually given some simple songs with just two or three chords. Learning to play these simple songs will introduce the beginner to strumming, keeping time and changing chords. In addition to the tabs or sheet music for beginner level songs, most guitar teachers will give their students a chart or a list of guitar chords for reference while they are learning the basic chords.

Printable guitar chords charts are a feature of most guitar lessons websites. Designing guitar chords charts for beginners is a difficult job because the information on how to play the chord needs to be given to a novice guitarist in a way that will help them to start playing chords with a degree of confidence. There are several ways in which guitar chords can be written down:

They can be represented quite easily in tab form -

C MAJOR CHORD

e|———-0
B|——–1–
G|——0—-
D|—–2—–
A|—-3——
E|———–

Here is a link to a tutorial on how to read tab.

Apart from tabs there are many different pictorial ways of showing where to put your left hand fingers to fret a chord shape. The chord diagram I use shows the name of the chord at the top:

Under the chord name are two symbols:

indicates a string which is not strummed or is muted with one of the left hand fingers. These strings play no part in the chord.

indicates that the open string is sounded; in other words no left hand fingers are pressed onto the string.

The number on the left side of the diagram tells you where the chord is located on the fretboard.

Looking at the chord chart, you can get the following info on the chord you are studying:

the chord is a C major

the left hand fingers are placed slightly behind the frets.
The numbers inside the circles on the fretboard tell you which fingers to use to fret the chord. There is a standard way of numbering the fretting hand fingers, which is detailed in this picture:

The Basic Guitar Chords

Although there is no ultimate guitar chords chart containing all the useful chords and leaving out the obscure ones, most guitar teachers agree that the chords shown below are the basic beginners guitar chords.

These basic chords are called “open” chords because they make use of open strings. These chords are in the “first position” which means they are using only the notes found on the open strings and at the first four frets on the guitar. The first position also refers to the scales found within these four frets.

This tutorial is available in our free downloads section at Free Guitar PDFs with a larger version of the chord chart.

How to Read a Guitar Chords Chart

Any beginner guitar player will need to learn the blues guitar chords. It doesn’t matter whether you end up playing acoustic blues guitar or you find yourself taking bluegrass guitar lessons, the basic chords and scales are the same. When you start to learn to play the guitar you will be learning open chords which are mostly a matter of practice without too much pain, but blues music makes heavy use of seventh chords which are sometimes a little tricky. You can use the major or minor chords without the seventh if you want to but if you listen to a guitarist playing blues using seventh chords, you will see that the feeling is much stronger.

Without going into the theory behind seventh chords, what you need to know for purposes of this tutorial is that you may need to use all four left hand fingers to fret seventh chords. The G7 chord is quite straightforward but the C7 chord and the B7 involve applying pressure on four guitar strings. This involves the use of the pinky which will need quite a bit of practice.

The trick to changing to or from a seventh chord is learning to make as few movements as possible. Every unnecessary movement is learned by your muscle memory. Your fingers don’t know that certain movements are not needed for a chord change – your brain is going to have to decide how to carry out smooth chord changes while your body watches and learns as it carries out the movements involved.

Here’s a video that will help you learn to play seventh chords up and down the guitar fret board:

One basic trick for the beginner guitar player is getting the knack of knowing when to lift your fingers off the fretboard. Changing from the A minor chord to the C major chord involves moving only the third finger of the left hand from the second fret on the third string to the third fret of the fifth string, yet beginner guitar players will often make this chord change by lifting all the fingers off the old chord position and replacing them in the next chord shape.

A basic chord progression in the key of E can easily be learnt. It contains the chords E, E7, A7 and B7:

E E E E | E E E E | E E E E | E7 E7 E7 E7 |

A7 A7 A7 A7 | A7 A7 A7 A7 | E E E E | E E E E |

B7 B7 B7 B7 | A7 A7 A7 A7 | E E E E | E E E E |

Here is the tab for the E chord:

e———————–|

B———————–|

G——–1————–|

D——2—————-|

A—-2——————|

E–0——————–|

The E7 chord is the same but has a D note added at the third fret of the second string:

e———————–|

B———-3————|

G——–1————–|

D——2—————-|

A—-2——————|

E–0——————–|

The B7 chord is a little awkward because all four fingers are crowded together:

e———-2————|

B——–0————–|

G——2—————-|

D—-1——————|

A–2——————–|

E-x———————|

And here is the A7 chord:

e————0———-|

B———-2————|

G——–0————–|

D——2—————-|

A—-0——————|

E–x——————–|

The seventh chords will take some getting used to but a few weeks of daily practice will soon have you playing these blues guitar chords as if you had grown up with them. Once you have the basic chord shapes, practice the chord progression slowly to get used to going from one chord to another.

Blues Guitar Chords

The Hendrix Chord is also found in Taxman by The Beatles. This is a ground breaking song in several ways. It was one of George Harrison’s first attempts at songwriting and it contains an Indian-sounding guitar solo played by Paul McCartney. As brilliant as Taxman is, nobody said, “Hey, how about that Taxman chord!” It was Jimi Hendrix’ individualistic playing that brought the dominant 7#9 chord to the fore.

You can move the chord up and down the guitar neck. Here’s the tab for the E seventh, suspended ninth chord:

e—–0—————–|

B—–8—————–|

G—–7—————–|

D—–6—————–|

A—–7—————–|

E—–0—————–|

The Jimi Hendrix Guitar Chord

No matter where it came from, twelve bar blues is like a universal language among guitar players, so it’s best to learn a little of it.

Here is a representation of twelve bars in the key of A:

A A A A
D D D D
E D A E

. . . or you could play seventh chords instead:

A7 A7 A7 A7
D7 D7 D7 D7
E7 D7 A7 E7

. . . or you could play the basic chords up to the last bar and let the E7 chord lead into the next twelve bars.

You can make up your own variations on the basic twelve bar blues – play arpeggios, use barre chords instead of open chords, but along with practicing blues on your guitar you will get plenty of ideas on making the blues your own music by listening to other blues guitar players and imitating what you like.

Here is a video that will help you with the major pentatonic scale in blues guitar music:

Learning The Blues On Guitar

Learning Where to put Your Fingers

If you want to know how to learn guitar chords, there are three ways to begin:

• the most effective but the most time consuming way is to learn to read music. If you can read standard music notation you do not necessarily need to know the names of the chords you are playing. You will have the ability to recognize and play musical notes without hesitation. To learn how to play guitar chords this way takes a long time but the ability to sight-read music will make learning how to play the guitar much easier.
• another way is to learn to read tablature. Guitar tablature, or “tabs”, is another musical language. Tabs show you where to put your fingers on the guitar fretboard. It only takes half an hour or so to learn the basic idea behind guitar tab, and although it has its limitations, it is a good way to learn chords.
• the simplest and most immediate way to learn chords is by using a guitar chord chart. Chord charts are basically pictures of the guitar strings showing you where to put your fingers.

Playing Your First Chords

The next step is the physical work of learning how to play chords on a guitar. The simplest way to begin is to strum the guitar with a pick while you make the chord shapes with the fingers of your left hand. The pick is held firmly between the thumb and first finger of your right hand. You must hold your hand so the pick strikes the strings cleanly without scraping.

When you first begin to play chords, it is a good idea to choose easy guitar chords that are not too hard on the fingers of the left hand. Such chords as the E minor or C major chord in the first position are good chords to begin with. When you have your fingers in the correct positions, try strumming the chord. The sound should be clean with each of the strings sounding without the left hand fingers brushing against them causing the notes to stop sounding.

You have now played your first chord. The next step is changing from one chord to another. Again, you should take care that your fingers only touch the strings they are supposed to touch, so careful practice is called for. When you begin to work on chord changes, you will find that certain changes are more difficult but slow, careful practice will make all chord changes easy in time.

Learning Barre Chords

In the early stages of learning guitar bar chords – or barre chords – are often big challenges. Beginners often suggest that they have individual difficulties with barre chords, such as small fingers, weak thumbs, or not knowing where to put pressure on the neck. These kinds of “difficulties” lead the beginner to look for easier alternatives to barre chords or to look for advice or tuition from experienced players to overcome their problem. In 99 percent of all cases, the solution is simply practice. Once you have learnt the basic chords in the first position, and are moving onto barre chords, make a point of practicing your chords every day. This will build the strength in your wrist and fingers that you need to play barre chords smoothly.

A simple exercise for gaining the strength and dexterity to play barre chords is this exercise:

1. Hold your left index finger across all of the strings at the seventh fret.
2. Strum the strings to make sure you are not muffling any strings.
3. Holding your finger across the strings, play the notes shown on the tab, starting on the sixth string, and playing the exercise once on the fifth, fourth, third, second and first strings.
4. Work back from the first string to the sixth.
5. Do the same exercise holding your index finger at the sixth fret, and so on until you reach the first fret.

e-8-7-9-7-10-7-
B-8-7-9-7-10-7-
G-8-7-9-7-10-7-
D-8-7-9-7-10-7-
A-8-7-9-7-10-7-
E-8-7-9-7-10-7-

Practicing this exercise will give your left hand index finger the strength it needs while training your other fingers to act independently. You will find the exercise tiring and painful the first few times, but if you can practice it daily for a couple of weeks, barre chords will become second nature.

If, after a month or so of working on playing and changing barre chords, you feel that you have a particular problem you will probably find your answer on one of the guitar forums.

The Elements of Guitar Chord Playing Technique

One way of playing a double stop is to play two adjacent strings at the same time. Another way is to play two strings that are not next to each other by strumming with your plectrum and muting the string in the middle. Or you can put your pick between your teeth and pluck the two strings you want to play.

Here is a C major scale played up the fretboard on the first and second strings using double-stops:

e–0–1–3–5–7—8–10–12—————–|

B–1–3–5–6–8–10–12–13—————–|

G——————————————–|

D——————————————–|

A——————————————–|

E——————————————–|

And here is the same scale played in the open position across the fretboard:

e———————–0———————|

B————–0–1–3–1———————|

G——–0–2–0–2–4————————|

D–2–3–2–3———————————|

A–3–5—————————————|

E———————————————|

Here is a video showing you how to play double-stops:

This lesson on Guitar Diads or Double Stops has some tabs for double-stop exercises.

How To Play Double-Stops On Guitar

The white notes on the piano are the notes of the C major scale which are C D E F G A B C but on the guitar we have no visual aids to remembering the note patterns.

The lowest C note on the guitar is the third fret on the fifth string. The next note, D, is the open fourth string, and the E is the second fret on the fourth string. The F is the third fret on the fourth string and then we go to the open third string which sounds the note G. Then the second fret of the third string is A, the open second string is the B note and the first fret of the second string gives us C which is the beginning of the next octave.

To play the C major scale using these frets, which is known as playing in the first position, use the first finger for notes that appear on the first fret, the second finger fro notes at the second fret and use the third finger for third fret notes.

Knowing where the notes are is one thing, the next step is to do daily practice to get the notes under your fingers. According to its basic definition a chord is a mix of any number of any notes but a major chord is the first, third and fifth note of a major scale. In the case of the C major scale the notes are C, E and G.

To play a C minor chord all you need to do is play the note E flat (written Eb) instead of the E natural note you played in the major chord. This applies to all keys. Always and everywhere, the major chord is the first, third and fifth notes of the scale and the minor chord, which has a sadder sound, contains the flattened third.

You can play scales and notes in all keys in the first position. If you haven’t already, download a guitar fretboard diagram to show you where the notes are and some tabs or chord charts for some songs you want to learn. You will be learning open chords like the C major and C minor chords you just learnt and you have already found out how to work out where the notes are for your major and minor chords.

To save you some work you can download a collection of guitar chords but once you know how to find them for yourself, why not use your musical knowledge?

Learning Guitar Chords The Easy Way

There is no yesterday in practicing guitar chords. Today’s practice time is a new experience, so you must let your muscle memory show you the right way to start. Yesterday when you completed your guitar practice, you were warmed up. You recall that now as you start today and you want to keep playing at that speed. It is better to forget how great you sounded yesterday and start your practice with what your muscles are capable of today.

What can make learning guitar chords a little easier? Start by buying or downloading some chord charts for songs you really like. Songs you are hot to learn to play. If you know which chords are in your favorite songs, you will know which chords you want to learn, and applying your knowledge of your chords to the songs you want to play will help you know where you are in your guitar playing progress. You can even try imitating the solos in your songs by using the notes in the chords you are learning. There are many different ways to play any chord. It is quite interesting to experiment with how the different chord fingerings at different positions on the guitar fretboard sound. And do not forget about bar chords. They are a necessary part of your guitar learning, so the earlier you start, the better. And the identical rule applies to learning bar chords – practice slowly – your muscles will do the learning for you if you treat them right.

You might also be interested in learning to play, or at least get to know, the many variances there are in all chord shapes. Any major chord can be played around a dozen different ways. You do not have to learn them all off by heart but you can look them up in your chord charts and play them through to see how different they all sound.
If you can find a chord that you can call your favorite, that is a help while you are still learning. For some guitarists their favorite chord can only be found in exotic tunings like D A D G B D. Other guitar players love to hear the D minor chord in the first position. Or maybe you like the E minor chord – two finger chord used to great effect in many songs.

Here is a video guitar lesson on chord variations:

How To Learn Guitar Chords

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.

The Meaning of Beginner Guitar Chords