Guitar Chords and How To Learn Them
Posted on 19. Aug, 2009 by Payo W Perry in Music
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!
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.
Learning chord shapes is actually quite easy, they are not hard to remember. A greater difficulty lies in being able to sound them clearly. You need to press down hard and this is going to hurt your fingers in the beginning stages until the harder skin has built up on your fingers.
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.
The main distinction we make between chords is whether they are moveable or not. Chord shapes which cannot be moved are normally referred to as Open Chords and generally involve the using of open strings on the guitar. These normally represent the beginner guitar chords we all start of learning.
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.
Don’t try to learn 100’s of guitar chords because probably you’ll never use them. It’s far better to stick to the main chords and families and try to put them into action as soon as you can through songs you like. Guitar chords are fun, just have patience to practice and they will come.
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