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How To Find The Best Chord Shapes on the Guitar

By Mike Hayes | May 24, 2010

Are you tired of trying to stretch your fingers to play the
impossible chord on the guitar? Well you are not on your own, at
least 65% of the chord shapes presented in chord books would be
difficult for almost any guitarist!

It’s time to find a better way to play chords on the guitar, what
if I told you they are many ways to play chords on the guitar,
here is just one approach I use to make chord shapes easy to
play.

Step 1: throw your chord book(s) out the window or better still
send them to a guitar player you don’t like, that should set them
back twenty years.

Step 2: learn how to spell each chord, each chord has it’s own
individual spelling just as we have a correct way of spelling
each word in our English language.

I’ll give you an example of how each chord is spelt in the key of
“C”.

Chord spelling in the key of C major.

CMaj7 = C – E – G – B

Dm7 = D – F – A – C

Em7 = E – G – B – D

FMaj7 = F – A- C – E

G7 = G -B – D – F

Am7 = A – C – E – G

Bm7b5 = B – D – F – A

Notice how each chord has it’s own individual set of notes and
that all the notes in this set of chords are contained in the key
of C major. It could therefore be said that these chords are the
children of the parent scale of C major.

Step 3: covert root position chord spelling to open voiced
harmony to make the chords easily playable on the guitar
fretboard.

Root position chords mean that the notes of the chord are played
exactly as I have indicated above in step two e.g., the notes in
each chord are presented in alphabetical order.

The main problem with many musical theoretical concepts is
converting over to the guitar fretboard the root position chord
is a typical physical problem that stops many guitar players in
their tracks.

The problem is that it’s too big of a stretch to correctly play
most root position chords on the guitar.

Here is a few samples of how root position chords would be played
on the guitar.

CMaj7

—x—–
—x—–
—4—–
—5—–
—7—–
—8—–

Dm7

—x—–
—1—–
—2—–
—3—–
—5—–
—x—–

Em7

—x—–
—3—–
—4—–
—5—–
—7—–
—x—–

From these samples you can see that all three chords involve a
five fret stretch something that the majority of guitarists would
find difficult.

To convert these tricky chord shapes over to open voiced chords
all we have to do is move the second note in each chord up one
octave higher.

Here is how we do that:

Move the second note in this chord “E” up one octave

CMaj7 = C – E – G – B

becomes …

CMaj7 = C – G – B – [E]

This root position CMaj7 chord

CMaj7

—x—–
—x—–
—4—–
—5—–
—7—–
—8—–

Can now be played like this:

CMaj7

—x—–
—5—–
—4—–
—5—–
—3—–
—x—–

Try creating open voiced versions of the other chords in the key
of “C” and discover how simple this process really is, I’m sure
your fingers will prefer the open voiced chords on the guitar.

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

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