How To Play Guitar Chords – The Newbie Guide

Learning how to play guitar chords is among the first items on the agenda of a newbie guitar player. But playing guitar is a new skill with a whole new system of muscle movements to learn, not to mention learning the theory behind guitar chords and how to use them in your guitar playing. If you have a teacher he will show you how you should be holding your guitar and correct any mistakes you are making about fingering chords or strumming the strings with your right hand. If you do not have a teacher who can help you with the physical part of learning to play guitar chords, you will need to be very careful how you treat your back, shoulders, arms and hands.

The chords we mostly use to play popular music are derived from the keys A G C and D. As you progress in your guitar playing you will learn how to play these basic chords all over the guitar fretboard. Guitar students usually begin to learn how to play chords by first learning to finger simple “open” chords. They are called open chords because at least one of the notes in any of these chords is sounded by playing an open string. After the muscles in your hands get used to fingering chords and pressing down on the guitar strings, you will move onto “barre” or “bar” chords that are played with the first finger held down across some or all of the strings.

A good place to start in understanding chords is to get to know chord “families”. Family is a good name to describe how we group the keys we use in guitar playing. Let us take a look at what the chord families consist of. In the A family, the chords we use are A, D and E. The D family contains the chords D, E minor, G and A. In the G chord family we find the chords G, A minor, C, D and E minor. The C family has the chords C, D minor, E minor, F and G. There are variations on basic chords that add variety to your guitar playing. The main variation we use is the “seventh” chord. You will be learning common seventh chords like G7, D, and C7 early in your chord playing career as these chords appear frequently in popular music.

Learning to finger the chords with your left hand (if you are right-handed) is only half the job. The other half is learning to strum chords with your right hand. Fortunately when we get into actually doing the strumming, it makes the task of learning chords easier, not harder.

Once you have learnt your basic chords and you are ready to play some more challenging music, you will learn a few chord playing tricks that make learning to play guitar a little simpler. Power chords are a good example. These are two- or three-note chords that are used to great effect in rock music. They can be moved up and down the guitar neck according to which key you are playing in and you will mostly find electric guitar players use them with distortion. In fact there are basic chord shapes that are played as open chords but, with addition of a barre using the first finger, they can be moved up the fretboard to make chords in all other keys. The basic shapes you will learn for movable chords will probably be the open C, A and E shapes. Another trick is when you are using the E major chord shape as a barre chord, say at the fifth fret, which is A major, to play the minor chord all you have to do is lift you pinky off the fretboard. There will be many other tricks and wrinkles that you will discover as the guitar begins to be less of a mystery.