How To Learn Guitar Chords Easily

This article is for anybody who wants to learn guitar chords but is put off by the seeming complexity of the job. If you want to learn to play electric guitar or acoustic guitar, all you need to start is a few simple principles. Once you have these basic ideas learning guitar chords will be easy.

You might have watched guitar players on television or in live performances and been intimidated by the awkward positions they put their hands into and the speed at which they change chords. If you do not aspire to being a virtuoso guitarist, you can still pursue a rewarding career or hobby as a musician without needing to put in hours a day learning complicated chords.

The first thing you need to do is find a list of songs that you want to learn to play. The first criterion for choosing songs is whether you like them. The others have to do with the use of open chords and chord families which we will now take a look at. Apart from your personal enjoyment, the use of songs as tools for learning chords has a practical value: it is much easier to learn groups of chords rather than one at a time because changing from one chord to the other helps your muscle memory to learn the fingerings.

Another thing that simplifies the process of learning guitar chords is the fact that popular music relies heavily on a form that uses only three chords for any song. This is not a hard and fast rule but you will find it holds true for most popular songs. An effective way to classify chords is to separate them into families which are simply combinations of chords that sound well together. In the key of A you have A, D and E. In the key of D the chords are D, E minor, G and A. In the key of G they are G, A minor, C, D, and E minor. And the family of chords for the key of C is C, D minor, E minor, F and G. To make your guitar practice time most effective begin with learning one chord family at a time and finding "three chord" songs that contain your chords.

The key to learning chords quickly and easily is to learn "open" chords. With these chords you only use two or three fingers to make the chord shape. Open chords are fingered within the first three frets of the guitar fretboard - the first position. Here is a tab example of an open chord:

E--------0---------------
B--------0---------------
G--------0---------------
D--------2---------------
A--------2---------------
E--------0----------------

As you can see, you only need to play the notes at the second fret on the fourth and fifth strings.

If you want to become an electric guitar player and you enjoy the sound of distorted guitar using power chords, the good news is they only need two fingers to play. The bad news is you may need to practice in a concrete bunker.