How To Learn Guitar Chords Easily
If all you want is diagrams, either buy a chordbook or go to this website:
http://www.all-guitar-chords.com
This website will show you more than you will ever need to know or use.
There are many different chord types. Some common types are:
- Major
- Minor
- Major 7th
- Minor 7th
- Dominant 7th
Some less common ones are:
- Major 9th
- Minor 9th
- Dominant 9th
And even less common are 11th and 13th chords. There are a whole lot more weird and wonderful sounding chords.
On top of all those different types, they all need to be learned in A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.
The good news is that you don’t have to learn a ridiculous number of different chord patterns. And you don’t even need to learn about chord theory and guitar scales if you don’t want to.
Just to give you a little theory, the Major guitar chord is made up from the first, third, and fifth notes of the Major scale. The C Major chord would then use the C, E, and G notes.
While this is useful to know, it doesn’t help you to quickly learn how to play chords on your guitar.
I’m going to go into this in a lot more detail later with pictures and fingerings, but what you basically do is learn one or two different chord shapes and then learn how to play them on different positions on the fretboard.
Take a look at the website I mentioned earlier and look at the E Major chord. The root note of this is on the sixth string. The open E string is the root note of the chord you are playing. Move this chord up the neck of the guitar and place the first finger across the strings at the third fret to form a bar and you are now playing a G Major chord. You can go this any where on the neck.
One final example is the A Major chord. Look at it on the website. The root note is on fifth string this time. Place the first finger bar across the strings at the third fret and play the same chord. You now have a C Major chord and again you can do this any where on the neck of the guitar.
You now should realise that you can play any Major chord on your guitar from two basic Major chord patterns by knowing the notes on the fifth and sixth strings. As I said earlier, I will go into more detail later with diagrams and how to play these chords easily.
The Minor chord is only one note different to the major one. It’s very easy to convert the Major patterns to Minor ones. Again, it can be moved to any position on the fretboard to play any Minor chord.
By mastering these techniques while you are learning how to play guitar, you will become a much better guitarist.