Learn to Play Guitar Chords by Knowing the Basics

I recently was thinking, ‘How was it that I was able to learn to play guitar chords?’  The way that I started was by learning the open, or first position chords, as they’re sometimes called.  We call them first position chords, because you play them on the first fret and they involve the use of open strings.  One reason that these guitar chords are so important as you learn to play guitar is that they provide a full sound, are easy to finger and allow you to play in several keys without having to leave the home base of the first fret thru 3rd frets.

Now I don’t encourage that you only stick with open chords.  You should learn to play guitar chords all over the neck, but once you begin to get the open ones down and understand the notes you’re playing, then you’re able to be to take these shapes and play them all over the guitar.  Below you can see the first open chord we’re going to look at, A Major:

As You Learn to Play Guitar Chords, the Open Chords Are A Great Place to Start

We can see here that for the A Maj chord, we don’t play our low E, or six string, and we let our A string (5th string) ring open, as well as our high E string (the 1st string).

Notice that the A Maj triad (chord) must contain an A note, C# note and an E note, and you can see by the diagram that all those notes are indeed being played, whether fretted or open.

One important thing to note, is that the guitar triads aren’t always played in the exact order of their written triads, and that’s fine.  Just know that every open chord you’ll learn to play holds just 3 notes, arranged in different orders, and duplicating some notes an octave higher in pitch.

Here’s the great thing about open chords…If we just move one finger we can be playing the A minor chord.  I love that by just moving one finger we can have a totally different sound.  In fact, as you learn to play guitar chords and start understanding keys in music, you’ll find that most chords are changed from Major to minor by moving just one finger.

In looking at A min, we see that everything is the same from A Maj, except we’ve taken the 2nd string note of C# and lowered it down to C.

This is what’s known as flattening the third, because C is the third tone of the A triad or chord (both for A Major and A minor).  The A Major triad is made of the notes A-C#-E and the A minor triad is A-C-E.

You can see by looking at the two A chords that the 3rd note is all that changed.  By taking any Major chord and lowering the 3rd note, we create its minor variation.  The root note and 5th note will always stay the same.

You’ll learn more about say chords have roots, thirds, and fifths in further lessons, but let’s summarize and end our look at open chords.

Here are the take-away’s as you learn to play guitar chords:

• Open chords, like all chords, contain a root, third and fifth of their parent scale.  This is called a Triad
• We can alter the quality of the chord from Maj to min by lowering the third tone of the Triad and vice versa
• With open chords, we have fretted notes and notes that we play ‘open’ or un-fretted and sometimes we mute or don’t play certain strings

I hope that little lesson was helpful for you, and remember that if you’d like more lessons to help you as you learn to play guitar chords, then we’ve got plenty.  Our 1 4 5 chord progression lesson would be a great next step.  You can sign up by entering your name and email on the upper-right side.  Please leave me a comment below and tell me your thoughts or any questions you have.  I look forward to hearing from you and wish you the best.

Andrew

Tags: major chords, minor chords, Music Theory