Beginner guitar chords – Crash course part 3

Beginner guitar chords – Easy chords to start playing guitar with.

Like most guitarists, the first thing I learned to play on the guitar where chords. A chord is basically a group of notes played simultaneously.

The unfortunate thing about beginner guitar chords, is that, being the easiest guitar chords to play, they don’t cover all of the chords sometimes required to play a song.
There’s still quite a lot of songs you can play with them, so let’s find out what these chords are. I’ll try and show you how to play them correctly as well.

The first thing we have to do is number the fingers on your left hand – the one that’s going to be pressing the chords. If you’re left handed, that would be your right hand, but seeing as I’m right handed, let’s go with the left hand.

Now that we’ve got that down, these are some of the easiest guitar chords to learn. We’ll start with A, D and E major. these three chords are in the Key of A major.

First, the A chord

then the D chord

And the E chord

There are two extra things you need to know about the pictures.

1. The nut is that thing the strings go over, between the fretboard – or fingerboard and the head – where you tune the guitar.
2. The strings marked with an X must not be strummed or played in any way, cos they’re not part of the chord.

The way your fingers should be placed on the fret board is in such a way they’re as perpendicular to the fretboard as possible. Here’s a picture I took with my cellphone, of a D chord, just to show what your fingers should look like relative to the fretboard.

Okay well, now that we’ve got the basic idea of how to play guitar chords, here are the rest of the beginner guitar chords.

Major guitar chords for beginners.

Major guitar chords are mostly written without any suffix denoting that they are major.
They are written simply as C or G or whatever they are.

Here you go then

So between these chords we’ve got all the beginner major guitar chords. What I’ll do at a later stage is give you some other chords that are more advanced, so you’ll have something to work on when you’ve got the hang of all these beginners chords.

Minor guitar chords for beginners.

Minor chords are written with the suffix “min” behind them, like A min and B min etc.
Cool, know we also know what a suffix is.

I think the E minor must be the easiest guitar chord to play.

7th guitar chords for beginners.

Seventh chords are written simply with a 7 behind the chord letter.

That’s it for now – Next post, some more advanced chords and some tips on strumming.