Introduction to Chords

Chords! You can hardly have music without chords. 

Put simply, chords are 3 or more distinct notes played together. Playing chords makes up a huge part of what we do on the guitar, and it's a great idea to start establishing a wide repertoire of chords early on. 

The first goal we will work towards is learning the simplest open chords for the Major and Minor variants of our natural notes:

A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

Then, we'll fill in the gaps of the chords that don't have a convenient open shape configuration by learning our barre shapes.

Lastly, we'll learn the Dominant 7th variations, and once that's all done, we should have 21 chord shapes under our belt. 

Specifically: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G in Major, Minor, and Dominant 7th form.

You're rarely going to encounter a song written for guitar that doesn't use one of these chords. The exception is if the song is in a sharp or flat key, but most guitarists will use a capo in that case. 

However - I like to be all rounded. So we also cover how to play our sharps (A#, C#, D#, F#, G#) in Major, Minor, and Dom7 forms.

(Don't worry, it's just going to be the same barre shapes we already covered.)

I highly recommend testing yourself occasionally on these shapes. Walk through each note of the note wheel, and ask yourself if you know that note's chord shape in each form we've covered so far.

As we advance into more complex chords, we will start to pivot away from rote memorization of hundreds of different shapes, and instead cover the most common chords used.

Don't worry, though. This is why we want to know theory. I will give you the tools needed to build any chord from scratch yourself, in case you encounter a chord we haven't covered together in our lessons.

At this stage we will learn to incorporate Suspended 2nd and Suspended 4th chords, along with Major and Minor 7ths.

If you're following along, that's 7 variants (Major, Minor, Sus2, Sus4, Dom7, Min7, and Maj7) on each of the 12 notes of the wheel. Being able to access all of those chords on command is a huge step, and one that I promise is highly achievable.

From here, we branch out into extended chords, like the 9th, 11th, and 13th. We will also start looking at more complex chord names, like the "m7b5" and the "7#9". These look intimidating to a lot of people - we will break them down in detail, and then you'll see they aren't so scary.

At this point chords will become increasingly open to interpretation (unless we are learning a song note for note).

As we look into chord inversions and the whole gamut of options open to us on guitar, we will start to see each chord name less as one specific shape, and more a host of beautiful choices.

That's what we call chord voicing, and it's incredibly fun to play around with. But it'll take some work to get there.

If you ever feel lost, come back to this page and figure out where you are along this proposed timeline. Find the first thing that gives you trouble and make that your next step. 

A strong command and understanding of chords is the backbone of solid guitar work, and will serve you well no matter what you choose to do with the instrument!

Lastly, it's not enough to simply know how a chord is played. We want to be comfortable actually playing them, and transitioning to them. Check out Practicing Chord Transitions for more on that.