Of all the basic foundations required for playing guitar, guitar chords are the most fundamental. This is due largely to the fact that even music based on melodic lines are in fact being outlined by an invisible chordal background when composed.
Buy a guitar chord book and it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the 1000′s of chords and names contained with the pages. In truth however, you only 10 basic shapes to open up 100′s of songs!
We group guitar chords into respective families based upon their type and how they are built. As a beginner you need only concern yourself with 3 main families of chords. They are Major, Minor and Dominant 7 chords. Using these you’ll have the basic structure required for songs.
For beginners it can be quite a challenge to sound guitar chords clearly, even the easier ones. Most find that learning the shapes are relatively easy however. If you are not used to playing guitar it’s likely that your fingers will hurt until a layer of harder skin has built up. This normally takes a month or two.
I refer to this as a kind of ‘pain barrier’ which all guitar players must go through. After a few weeks the skin on the tops of your fingers will harden and once this happens, playing guitar chords will no longer hurt you.
We divide chords into two main forms, Barre chords and open chords. Open chords consist of all the beginner guitar chords when first learning to play. They use open strings are stay fixed in the one place.
Barre chords on the other hand are movable and by transposing the shape up or down the neck you can produce different chords. A fair amount of strength is required to perform Barre chords so that all notes sound clearly however once you achieve this it’s easy to form them anywhere on the neck.
Try to resist the urge to learn an overwhelming amount of guitar chords in the beginning stages. It’s counter productive and will ultimately frustrate you. Instead concentrate on a small group of highly used ones and put them into action through songs. By approaching guitar chords in this way you’ll develop a very useable collection over which you have a mastery.
