The Importance of Guitar Chords

Most beginners are introduced to guitar chords at the earliest stage of learning guitar. They are a foundation upon which not only harmony but also melody are build and derived and so their importance cannot be ignored.

A great common myth is that you must learn 100′s of different chords but in reality all it takes is a simple set of 10 to launch you into 100′s of popular songs!

We group guitar chords into respective families based upon their type and how they are built. As a beginner you need only concern yourself with 3 main families of chords. They are Major, Minor and Dominant 7 chords. Using these you’ll have the basic structure required for songs.

For beginners it can be quite a challenge to sound guitar chords clearly, even the easier ones. Most find that learning the shapes are relatively easy however. If you are not used to playing guitar it’s likely that your fingers will hurt until a layer of harder skin has built up. This normally takes a month or two.

I refer to this as a kind of ‘pain barrier’ which all guitar players must go through. After a few weeks the skin on the tops of your fingers will harden and once this happens, playing guitar chords will no longer hurt you.

We have two main categories of guitar chords. Open chords are the easier of the two and typically represent the types of beginner chords we all first learn. They use open strings and are stationary.

The second kind are called Barre Chords (pronounced Bar). Barre chords are much harder than Open Chords and as a result beginners will normally wait anything up to a year before learning them. Barre chords can be moved up and down the neck to form new chords without any problem. The main advantage of learning them is the new array of keys they will open for you to play songs in.

Try to resist the urge to learn an overwhelming amount of guitar chords in the beginning stages. It’s counter productive and will ultimately frustrate you. Instead concentrate on a small group of highly used ones and put them into action through songs. By approaching guitar chords in this way you’ll develop a very useable collection over which you have a mastery.