Basic Guitar Chords Part 2

This is the third article in a series on how to play guitar. In the first article, we went through some important things you need to keep in mind as you start out on your new venture of learning guitar.

The second article began to look at chords, starting with the major chords you need to learn

In this article we will build on that foundation and look at the minor chords and sevenths.

Once you have grasped the majors, minors and sevenths, you will be in a great position to learn quite a range of new songs. Then we will need to learn about things like strumming, and scales - but that is for later articles.

For now, your focus is on picking up these basic chords and learning to get your fingers into position. As your practice these chord shapes, learning to get your fingers correctly positioned on the guitar neck so that each string sounds clear when you pluck it, you will find that your fingers get more familiar with the guitar neck and more comfortable moving around it

The diagram to the right reminds us of how to read the chord charts we will look at in this article. Each chord chart is written to represent the neck of the guitar as if it was being held as shown in the diagram.

The chart to the right shows the positioning of the minor chords from A to G.

As you start learning to play these, you will soon notice that there are a number of similarities between some of them. For example Am, Bm and Cm all follow a similar pattern except they are moved up the neck of the guitar slightly.

You may also notice that in the Bm and Cm chords, there are 5 black dots, representing 5 fingers... but hold on a second, you only have 4 fingers available to play each chord (since your thumb is wrapped around the back of the guitar neck!). This is because 2 of the black dots are played using the same finger:

Bm and Cm are what we call BAR CHORDS and they require your index finger to be pressed against all of the strings of the guitar in the same fret

On the BM chord, this index finger is placed on the second fret of the guitar neck (and then the rest of the fingers are placed in a shape similar to the Am chord). On the Cm chord, this exact shape is simply moved up one fret on the guitar neck.

The bar chords are much harder to play, so you may want to leave lerning thos until you have mastered the others. They will take more work and practice, so do not get discouraged if you do not get ahold of them instantly

You will notice a similar pattern to the Em, Fm and Gm chords. They all follow the same basic pattern as the Em, except the Fm is moved up on fret, with the index finger layed across all the strings of on the first fret. The Gm is then played by moving that same pattern up 2 frets.

This may all sound complicated and take a bit of thinking and practice, but you will get it!

 Out of themajor, minor and seventh chords, on the guitar, the minors are probably the hardest to play, as they involve a lot of bar chords. The sevenths are easier, as there is only one bar chord in the group - the F7

Also, once you have had a look at the majors, minors and sevenths, you will notice that various letters of chords are grouped in similar areas of your guitar neck. For example A, Am and A7 are very similar, except with one of 2 finger changes. It is hte same with most of the rest of them.

Start learning the various chords we have gone through so far. We will be adding artilces on strumming and scales soon. But for now get a hold of at least some of the chords. Learning all of the chords we have looked at so far will take time. You may want to start by getting ahold of groups of them. Once you have a few of them sorted, you can also move onto scales and strumming while continueing to learn more chords

In the next article, we look will help you understand the layout of your guitar, as well as the names of the strings etc