Guitar Chords For Beginners

[Pages:103]Guitar Chords For Beginners

Guitar Chords For Beginners

A super-simple chords guide for novice guitarists.

I wrote this book after teaching one-to-one guitar lessons for tens of thousands of hours. I know the things that guitar-learners struggle with because I've seen them up-close with real people (hundreds and hundreds of times) and I know how frustrating it can be to make slow progress. Learning the guitar is the best thing I've ever done in my life. And sharing the gift of music with new guitar learners is an absolute blessing that I feel grateful for every day. My guitar-teaching philosophy can be summed up in just five words: `Make things simple and fun'. So in this book, I'm going to share the tips I've learned for making the most important part of the guitar world, chords, as simple and fun as possible. If you have a good grounding in chords, you have a fantastic foundation to succeed as a guitarist. This book will put you in the `fast lane' towards becoming the guitarist of your dreams (whatever that may be for you). Ready to get started? Let's do it! Mike Kennedy - NGA Founder

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Contents

2

Introduction

4

How to read chord boxes

11

A major

16

A minor

21

B major

27

B minor

34

C major

40

C minor

46

D major

55

D minor

63

E major

69

E minor

75

F major

84

F minor

90

G major

96

G minor

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How To Read Guitar Chordboxes

An essential skill for all guitarists.

You must be able to read chordboxes to use this book, so let's explain how to do it. (If you already know how to read chordboxes, you can safely skip ahead.)

What is a chordbox?

A chordbox is how one guitar player tells another where to press down on the fretboard to play a given chord. Let's look at an example. We'll look at the chord box for Em. (Remember, whenever you see a lowercase `m' it denotes a minor version of a chord. For example "Am" is A Minor, "Dm" is D minor and so on.)

Example chordbox

Looks a bit technical? It's actually not technical at all, so don't worry. What you're looking at here is simply a visual representation of your fingers (the black circles) pressing on the fretboard (the grid).

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This image should help make things clearer:

Take 5 minutes to digest and understand the photo above and the image below. Don't worry if it takes a few minutes for this to `click' in your mind, it takes everyone a little while to comprehend.

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A chordbox in real life

Here's what the above Em chordbox looks like in the flesh:

To play this chord we strum all six strings. ? Two strings are what we call `closed' because your fingers are pressing on them. ? The other 4 strings are what we call `open' because you aren't pressing on them, but they are still strummed.

That's it!

Spend a few minutes reviewing this and getting comfortable with it. It's very important you understand chord boxes. If this still hasn't `clicked' in your mind, then you may find it useful to re-read this article from the beginning. It can take a while for people to `get' this and repetition really helps!

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Here's some extra questions that people often ask me about chordboxes...

Sometimes I see chordboxes with numbers inside, instead of solid black dots. What does that mean?

The numbers correspond to your fingers. Like this:

So if we go back to our Em chordbox...

... you can see that instead of two black dots, we see a `1' and a `2'. This is because sometimes we want to SPECIFY exactly what fingers should be used. In this case, you should use fingers 1 & 2 to fret your Em chord.

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Again, in the flesh, it should look like this:

Can you see how fingers 1 & 2 are being used?

Ok, so is this related to string numbers too?

No. Not at all. Your fingers have numbers, like this:

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