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How To Play Chords On Guitar

By Mike Hayes | July 27, 2010

Learning music is the same as learning another language; music
is, in fact a universal language, many a time I have been playing
guitar with a group of other musicians who can hardly understand
a word I say but once we start playing everybody is speaking the
same language.

When you think of music as a language it becomes easier to
understand the basic ingredients that go to make up music and
thereby accelerate your ability to learn music.

What is a chord?

Essentially a chord is like a musical word, when a musician plays
three or more notes simultaneously they are playing a chord.

Let’s take a look at how music works and then we will transfer
that information across to the guitar.

When a guitarist plays a single string the are playing a musical
‘note’; a note is like the individual letters of our alphabet and
as you know we assemble these individual letters to form words;
in exactly the same way in music each chord has it’s own unique
spelling and as we learn the spelling for chords it becomes easy
for us to develop own chord shapes on the guitar fretboard.

What type of chords are there?

Although there are many chords that you can learn on the guitar
most chords will fall into one of four categories.

1. Power chords: Technically speaking a chord is three or more
notes played together; however the power chord is played with two
notes. The popularity of power chords can be attributed to the
worldwide explosion of rock music since 1957.

In most instances a power chord consists of the first and fifth
notes of a scale, consequently the power chord is often written
as a five (5) chord; like this … C power chord = C5

Contrary to popular belief power chords are not a new sound,
classical musicians have used the two note interval combination
years before rock players discovered them; it’s just the term
‘power chords’ that’s new. Classical players refer to these
note combinations as ‘harmonic fifth’ intervals.

2. Open chords: These chords are the most common and popular
chord shapes for the beginner guitarist as all the shapes are
played at the first three frets of the guitar with the focus on
the ringing quality of the open strings.

Open chords are popular in folk, country, country rock and pop
music styles.

3. Bar chords: This type of chord shape requires a significant
amount of strength in the guitarist’s left hand (assuming you are
a right handed player) and therefore bar chords are generally the
domain of the more advanced player.

Bar chords are common in guitar styles of the late fifties and
sixties particularly in surf music.

4. Slash chords: Have become more common in pop music in recent
years as a way of creating fresh new sounds. Essentially the
concept is that you can play any bass note against any chord
thereby giving the player many new harmonic possibilities.

Here is an example of a slash chord:

C/D

In this instance we would read the chord as a ‘C’ major chord
with a ‘D’ bass note. If the guitarist was playing with a bass
player the guitarist player could play a ‘C’ major chord and have
the bass player play the ‘D’ bass note.

A common misunderstanding of slash chords is that you could play
either of the notes presented as the chord, in other words if the
guitarist did not know one of the chords they could play the
other; this is not so … it’s always indicated as the chord name
first and the bass note indicated second.

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