Guitar How-To

Learning Guitar Chords

When you start learning guitar chords you will probably have some chord charts or guitar tabs to show you where to put your fingers. Having a written guide to guitar chords is not enough and you need not limit yourself to charts and tabs when there are plenty of people showing you how to play guitar chords on video sites like YouTube. Listening to someone play the chord and hearing them explain how they go about making the chord shape with their fingers makes a world of difference to how fast and how accurately you are learning guitar chords.

When you are sitting in a chair or on your bed at home learning guitar chords, it would be a good idea to see what you are doing as a process starting with how you are sitting and holding the guitar. The point of sitting down to learn guitar chords is to give your body every opportunity to learn the movements and postures needed to play guitar chords. The key to fingering and changing guitar chords is relaxation. Don’t get too bogged down in detail, but start by satisfying yourself that your posture is fairly tension free without being limp. If there are areas of tension in your body there’s no need to eliminate them now, you can work on it in future practice sessions.

When it comes to actually taking the chord fingering positions, the relaxation you started with should continue into how your fingers hover over the fretboard. The idea is to make your fingers available to learning guitar chords without putting them into artificial positions. Having your hand touching the guitar neck with your thumb with your fingers parallel to the fretboard is a position that must be learned but this position can be taken without inducing unnecessary tension.

With your fingers taking the chord shape, use your pick to slowly strum the chord. By slowly I mean so that you can hear each individual string. If you are muffling any strings because your left hand is not quite in position, make the necessary adjustments. You are probably either not pressing down enough on a string or one of your fingers is touching the string next to the one it is pressing down on.

Remember that learning guitar chords is done using two or three simple chords at one time. Part of learning chords is learning how to change chords. Your learning will be very slow if you just sit strumming one chord over and over. And go for easy open chords at first. Learning guitar chords is hard enough without biting off more than you can chew.

Here is a tutorial on the basics of guitar chords. The video features some basic chords and how to play them.