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The Beginners Guide to learning chords on Guitar

By Mike Hayes | May 21, 2010

When I started learning guitar the first thing I was confronted
with was the seemingly insurmountable task of memorizing all the
chords in a monster guitar chord book containing 1,001 chords.

The idea was to learn a chord a week, even at the tender age of
thirteen I knew that meant lots of guitar lessons, the first two
weeks went quite well, I remembered my chords and started to have
some sense of achievement, however tragedy struck the third week
when I learnt my third chord for some reason totally forgot one
of the chords I have previously learnt.

Latter in my guitar playing life as I spoke with other guitarists
I came to realize that apparently this situation was quite
common amongst guitarists but at the time I did not know this so
I set about learning chords by an entirely different approach.

Here’s what I did …

I soon realized my problem was that I was learning random
unrelated chord shapes without understanding why I was placing my
fingers in these particular shapes and without gaining the
essential musical skills that would allow me to connect what I
was learning to previously learnt material.

Learning random chords was similar to learning random words,
simply put the process of learning words of itself does not
automatically give you the ability to communicate your ideas, you
must first learn the skill of assembling your words into a
structured sentence that would allow you to communicate with
others.

The first major discovery was learning to create chord families;
that chords were not isolated harmonic blocks that they could be
created from scales. The idea is to stack the notes of the scale
in thirds in a layer cake fashion.

Here is an example of how to create a “C” chord derived from the
scale of C major.

C major scale: C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C

Beginning on the C note, skip over the note D then on to the note
E the musical distance from your first note C and the third note
E is a third, therefore your first two notes of your C chord will
be C and E. Indicated by [ ]

[C] – D – [E] – F – G – A – B – C

Continuing on from the E skip the next note F and move on to the
note G, the musical distance between the note E and the note G is
a third this is your next and final note that you need to spell
the C chord. Indicated by [ ]

[C] – D – [E] – F – [G] – A – B – C

Now we know how to create a C chord; C = C – E – G

If we were to play these three notes anywhere on the guitar
fretboard we would be playing a C chord. My next step was to
divide the six strings of the guitar into string grids.

String grids: are sets of three adjacent strings, on a standard
six string guitar it is possible to divide the strings into four
string grids.

grid 1: = strings 1, 2 & 3

grid 2: = 2, 3, & 4

grid 3: = 3, 4, & 5

grid 4: = 4, 5, & 6

The concept is to take your three note chord and play every
possible inversion of that chord exclusively on the string grid
before moving on to the next string grid.

Here is the three possible ways to play a C chord on grid 1

C

–0—–
–1—–
–0—–
——–
——–
——–

C

–3—–
–5—–
–5—–
——–
——–
——–

C

–8—–
–8—–
–9—–
——–
——–
——–

That’s all the C chords on the first grid (I’m restricting my
chords to the first twelve frets of the guitar, once you go
beyond the twelfth fret the guitar repeats itself, if you have a
guitar with a cutaway obviously you will want to extend your
chord playing to encompass all the possible shapes available on
your guitar.

Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson, Guitar Chords | No Comments »

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