5 Essential Guitar Chords For The Complete Beginner

This post for the complete newcomer to guitar shows five beginner open chords that can be used to play your first songs in several keys. The 5 chords you’ll learn in this tutorial are A, D, E, G, and C, and you’ll also discover how to use them to play songs in the popular guitar keys of A, D and G major. You’ll also find some suggestions for easy songs to play with the chords.

 

A Major Chord

The first of our five chords is A major. The chord diagram below shows the guitar fretboard with a black circle on the strings and frets to be pressed by your fingers. The thinnest guitar string is at the top of the diagram and the thickest at the bottom, as if you were looking down at the guitar neck while you hold it to play.

 

The number in the black circle shows which finger to use, 1 for the index, 2 for the middle and 3 for the ring finger. The ‘0’ to the left of the diagram means the string should be played open while an ‘X’ indicates the string should not be played.

 

E Major Chord

The next chord in the series is E major shown below.

 

Practice making each chord and then practice changing from one to the other. If you’re completely new to guitar it will take a while to get your fingers moving easily and accurately so don’t worry if your fingers seem to tie themselves in knots at first.

 

D Major Chord

When you add the D major chord shown below you’ll be able to play literally thousands of three-chord songs in the key of A major.

Here are a few simple example songs to get you started (there are many many more): Blowing In The Wind by Bob Dylan, La Bamba, Desire by U2, Me And Bobby McGee by Kris Kristofferson.

 

Hint: Not all of these songs use the A, D and E chords in their original versions. Some popular tab sites such as chordie.com or Ultimate Guitar offer tools to transpose the songs to the key of A so you can have a version with A, D and E chords.

 

Learn More Chords And Keys

The three chords you’ve seen so far will let you play lots of songs in the key of A. By adding a couple more chords you give yourself the option to play songs in the keys of D and G.

 

Learn the following G chord and you can play three chord songs in the key of D major : D, G, and A chords.

 

Add of the C major chord, below, an you can more songs in the key of G : G, C, and D.

 

Practice these chords and you can play many three-chord songs in the keys of A, D and G. Here are some example songs to try : Colours by Donovan (D, G, A), Mr Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan (D, A, G), Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed (G, C, D, A).

 

These five beginner guitar chords will get you off to a great start, you can play many hundreds of popular songs with them. Find and learn as many songs as you can with them to hone your chord, strumming and picking skills and develop your musical ear.

3 Guitar Dyads You Should Know

A dyad is a two-note chord often used by guitar players. They come in especially handy on electric guitar in a band, play only two notes and you leave room for other instruments to fill in the remaining notes of the chord.

In this tutorial we’ll learn three common dyads and see how to finger them on the guitar fretboard. They are the fifth (often known as a power chord), the major third and the minor third. At the end of the lesson you’ll find a video song lesson to give your dyads a workout.

Fifth Dyads

The fifth is probably the most commonly used dyad, it crops up all over the place in rock and pop music often played on guitar or a piano.

The fingerings for the fifth dyad on the guitar are shown below. The fingering shown on the right is different on the second and third strings because of the guitar’s tuning. For all the other pairs of strings use the fingering shown on the left.



The note on the lower of the two strings gives the chord name. For example if you play the fingering shown on the left at the fifth fret of the fifth string you have a D5 dyad. Practice these shapes all over the fretboard until you can easily move them around and identify the chord you’re playing.

Major 3rd Dyads

You can play a dyad using the root and major third of any major chord. Again the chord name is given by the note on the lower of the two strings in the fingerings shown. The diagram on the right shows the fingering for the second and third strings while all the other string pairs use the fingering shown on the left.

Again, practice moving these shapes up and down the fretboard and across the strings until you are comfortable with them and can identify the chord/dyad name.

Minor 3rd Dyads

The final dyad shape we’ll discover in this tutorial is the minor third. The fingerings shown in the picture below are similar to the major third dyad, notice that the minor third note is down one fret compared to the major third shapes above.



Once more practice these shapes all over the fretboard to become comfortable with them.

Putting The Dyads To Work

To put your newly learned dyads into action have a go at the intro of Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand. This guitar part offers you a good workout with the three dyad shapes you’ve learned in this lesson. The fifth, major and minor third dyads are all used in the video below (click here to view it if you’re reading in email or a feed reader).

What Stops A Lot Of People From Learning New Guitar Skills (And What To Do About It)

A lot of guitar players experience the feeling that they’re not making progress and are stuck playing the same old things over and over. This is often described as being “stuck in a rut”.

 

I think this feeling results from not learning enough new guitar skills that give you new things to play and new ways to play old things. New skills don’t mean we have to learn a whole new style of playing every month. A few new licks, a new scale position, or a few new chords or progressions suffice. Whatever the skills, we simply need to be on the look out for new things to try, and get to work trying them and applying them.

 

But of course, not all the new things we try prove to be easy. Many are beyond our current reach and turn out to be much harder to learn and master than we thought. We quickly discover that our goal of learning them in a month, or three months, is not going to happen…

 

Fear Of Failure?

The fear of failure starts to take hold, and we look for ways to avoid it. Suddenly, there’s no time to practice, one of our favourite excuses for not doing what we set out to achieve. After a while some start telling everybody they’re in a rut, or even give up altogether, submitting to that “no talent” voice in their head with barely a struggle.

 

But what could you do instead to combat this fear of failure?

 

It took me a long time to realize it, but I think the problem is not so much the fear of failure. Fear of failure is just a symptom of the real problem, the idea that you have only one chance to succeed.

 

Whenever I set out to learn a new guitar skill I had this implicit idea in mind that if I didn’t learn it, and learn it now, then I would never learn it. It’s from this idea that you have only one chance to succeed that the fear of failure takes root.

 

What To Do About It?

You can take a whole lot of pressure off yourself when you realize that the skill you’re trying to learn right now is not your only chance to succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Who cares if you don’t learn to play bar chords this week, this month, or even this year? If you don’t succeed then you can just give yourself more time or go and work on something else instead. You might come back to bar chords later if you still feel you need them, or maybe you’ll discover some other style of playing where you don’t ever need them anyway. The same applies for any skill, there are many possibilities to try...

 

So if you’ve trapped yourself into a corner with the idea that you have only one chance to succeed, realize that in fact you have as many chances as you are willing to give yourself.

 

What About You?

Do you find yourself stuck with the feeling you’re not improving and learning new guitar skills? Use the comments link below to share how you deal with it…

Do You Make These 3 Guitar Chord Practice Errors?

 

How do you practice guitar chords? There are plenty of different approaches you can use to work on them and make the most of your practice time. But whatever your preferred approach is here are three errors to look out for, as well as suggestions to avoid them or replace them with better habits.

 

1. You don’t have a system to practice all changes

The most difficult part of chord playing is making the changes from one chord to any other quickly and cleanly. Although there are not that many basic chords there are a lot of possible chord changes to practice. This number grows even bigger thanks to the many possible extensions and alternative fingerings. If you don’t have a system to make sure you work them all you will miss a lot of them.

 

A system I find effective for this is guitar chord practice tables.

 

2. You always practice the same fingering

Most of us learn new chords and the way to finger them simultaneously. This finger goes here, that finger there… Once we’ve learned this fingering we always use the same one to play the chord. But there are good reasons to break this habit and learn to finger the chord differently. For example, an alternative fingering could make it easier to change to this chord from some chords, or it could free up a finger to play a melody or bass note.

 

Look for different ways to finger the chords you learn and include these fingerings in your guitar chord practice.

 

3. Not paying attention to the degrees and notes of the chord

Learning the names of chords and how to finger them is a minimum to be able to play. But if you stop there you’re missing an opportunity to boost your musical knowledge and playing skill.

 

Learn the names and scale degrees of each note of the chord and you’ll develop your musical knowledge much further. You’ll notice more relations between notes and chords and discover new ways to play things. To help you do this name the notes of chords out loud as you practice. You can choose to use either note names or scale degrees.

 

Photo by Vincent Lock.