Of all the basic foundations required for playing guitar, guitar chords are the most fundamental. This is due largely to the fact that even music based on melodic lines are in fact being outlined by an invisible chordal background when composed.
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!
Guitar chords are grouped into different families and this is decided by how the chord is built, in other words, it’s structure. As a beginner you only need to worry about learning 3 families of chords. These are the most important and form a basis upon which all others are constructed. They are Major,Minor and Dominant 7 chords.
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.
All players go through this process when learning to play guitar chords. It can get painful until that layer of harder skin builds up however once done, playing chords will no longer hurt you.
We divide chords into two main forms, Barre chords and open chords. Open chords consist of all the beginner guitar chords when first learning to play. They use open strings are stay fixed in the one place.
Barre chords on the other hand are movable and by transposing the shape up or down the neck you can produce different chords. A fair amount of strength is required to perform Barre chords so that all notes sound clearly however once you achieve this it’s easy to form them anywhere on the neck.
A common beginner mistake is to try to learn lots and lots of chords. This is of no real use to you when first learning to play. It’s far better to concentrate on a smaller group of guitar chords and ones you’ll use consistently in many different songs.