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.

As a beginning guitar player you really don’t need many chords to get you going. Even a basic set of 10 chords will open the door to 100’s of popular songs instantly!

Guitar chords are also divided into families, the family a chord belongs to is determined by it’s type. For all beginners we have 3 main families of chords to learn. They are Major, Minor and Dominant 7 chords. With these in place you have all the necessary elements required to form keys and play through complete 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.

You can view this process as a rite of passage for playing guitar chords. Try to press down hard consistently in order to give built the harder skin as evenly and as quickly as possible.

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.

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.

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.