Find which guitar chords you need to play your favorite songs and learn how to play them.
I read once that the reason the twelve bar form is regarded as the basic blues is that record companies in the USA thought it would be a good idea to have a standard blues style. I always thought that it was just a basic building block of blues music. 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…
Every song you learn on the guitar will contain a group of chords. Some songs have only one or two, many songs have three chords, and a few songs might make use of half a dozen chords. 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…
A double-stop is when you play two notes at the same time. Some people might say that’s a chord but a lot of guitar players only consider a chord to be more than two notes, so we call two notes a double-stop. The basic effect of playing double-stops is of harmonizing with your solo playing. This technique was used by many lead guitarists in bands of the fifties and sixties. Chuck Berry was a champion of double-stop playing. One way of playing a double stop is to play two adjacent strings at the same time. Another way is to play…
Most people use a chord dictionary of some kind when they are learning guitar chords. These books are great but they contain way more chords than the beginner guitarist needs. But there is an alternative to relying on chord books that helps you to work out how to write chords for yourself and also helps you with learning the notes on the 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…
