On Learning Chords

On Learning Chords

As you go off on your adventure to learn the guitar, chords are an essential part of the musician’s vocabulary. It is important to learn a lot of them. At first you will learn them as shapes and places to put your fingers, eventually you will learn codes to create the shapes for yourself.

Here are some basic chords that are easy to learn.

How to read chord charts

A chord chart is a visual representation of a section of your guitar’s fretboard. It commonly consists of a matrix of strings and frets as pictured below.

A black circle will show you where to place your fingers. 

A white circle will show you which strings to play, even if you aren’t pressing any strings down. 

If a string has nothing on it, don’t play anything. Easy.

To get started, let us take a look at the chart for a C Major chord…

Not only do chord chart tell you where to put your fingers, they also show you which fingers to place at each position through the chord. 

Your first to little finger are labelled numbers 1 to 4.

It should look something like this however it is unlikely that when you first start to play, it will sound anything like how you wish. It’s difficult to compress the tense wire with the fleshy pads of your fingers but as you persevere and you gain a greater degree of control, you will be able to manipulate the sound as you please.

Your fingers will hurt

It’s not just that they’ll hurt, your fingers are going to harden. If you’re serious about learning to play the guitar, you must be willing to be in pain a decent amount of your first 3 - 6 months of playing depending on the hardness of your skin.

In order to fret the string properly, use the tip of your finger. The most sensitive and vulnerable part a few millimetres beneath the nail. It’s the only way to ensure that you are only fretting the strings needed while allowing the other strings the mobility they need in order to ring out.

After you get to grips with the shape of C Major, why not branch out to your first minor chord.

A minor

These two chords are related to each other. I won’t go into how until later but if you’d care to practice them until you can switch between them smoothly you can hear their similarities even though they are very much unique.

Hint: Use the note on the first fret of the B string as an anchor for the changing chords.

The rest of the beginner chords in the series can be found here.