Guitar Lovers

When you learn to play the guitar your first stock in trade is the number of chords you can play. To get any decent sort of repertoire you need to learn as many guitar chords as possible. For the beginner it can be very confusing and overwhelming because there are literally thousands of chords. Using a printable guitar chords chart for reference is very useful for the first year or so.

Learn the main forms of the chords

There are obscure versions of chords that you can ignore at first. So for the chord of A you only need to learn 3 versions. A major, A minor (Am) and A seven (A7). So when you come across a piece of music that asks for A two or A nine just ignore this and play one of the 3 main chords. This will usually be the major version of the chord.

Second Stage Of Learning Guitar Chords

Once you have mastered and remembered the 3 main chords in each key you can then start treating yourself to some of the more unusual guitar chords. If you forget your standard chords you can just refer to your guitar chords chart to jog your memory. The second stage of learning chords will have you sounding much more interesting. There is a music phase or fashion at the moment of replacing the Major version of a chord with the 2 chord. What this means is that you replace A Major with A two (A2). The other very popular chords are the bossa nova guitar chords such as the major sevenths. For example C major seven (CMaj7). As soon as you add these bossa nova chords and other variations your playing will change and become much more interesting.

Changing The Bass Notes

All the chords discussed here will be on any guitar chords chart. What you will not have is the alterantive bass notes. The Group U2 are the greatest exponents of this technique. What you do is keep the same bass note playing all the way through while you change all the other parts of the chord. So in the key of A you can play the chords of A, D & E but leave the 5th string open with the Bass note of A playing for all the chords. This would be written A. D/A, E/A. A good learning technique is to play around with these alternative bass notes when playing guitar chords.