Guitar Chord Complete

What Are the First Guitar Chords to Learn?

I am often amazed and dismayed at the way guitar lessons teach complete beginners. They seem to be hell bent on making the new guitarist fail at every turn. They teach chords and sequences that are completely out of reach for a new guitar player. Because of this they can give up far too early. What you need to do is learn the easy guitar chords first and find songs that will use these chords. When you have learnt all the easy guitar chords you can start learning the harder ones.

First Guitar Chords

Rather than just give out a list of the easy chords let me first tell you what they all have in common. They all have only two or three fingers for the left hand and they are all closely placed together on the fret board. I do not agree with teaching the chords of G and C in the first few lessons as they require quite a bit of stretching and accuracy to get right. The first guitar chords you should learn include E, A, Em, Am, D, Dm, D7, A7, E7 and D Maj 7. That is 10 chords which are easy to play and can be learnt in a week at the most.

Learning the guitar chords

Learn these chords first to the point that your fingers can find them automatically. Practice playing guitar with you eyes closed so that your fingers get used to the positions of the strings and frets. Once you have done this you can then play harder chords. You fingers will find them and play them much more easily because you have become familiar with the guitar.

The second wave of guitar chords

the second set of guitar chords still only use two or three fingers but this time they can cover the first 3 fret positions in one chord. The next best 10 chords to learn are C, G, C major 7, G7, F major 7, A major 7, Em7, Dm7, A2 and Esus4. Mixingb this second set of chords with the first 10 will enable you to play most songs ever written. I kid you not. Most songs include only 3, 4 or 5 chords. It is how they are put together and played that make the songs all sound so different.

The third set of guitar chords

There are a huge set of chords called "Bar" chords (Sometimes spelt Barre). These should not be used until you have really got hold of the first 20 chords. It is worth learning them after this however as you will be able to play anything once you have mastered these bar chords. To let you in gently the first one to learn is Fm7. Look it up and try it out. Once you have learnt it you can place this chord shape anywhere on the guitar fingerboard to get different versions of the chord. They will all be m7 chords but the chord name will change. The first 4 are Fm7, F#m7, Gm7, G#m7... you get the idea.