Of all the basic foundations required for playing guitar, guitar chords are the most fundamental. This is due largely to the fact that even music based on melodic lines are in fact being outlined by an invisible chordal background when composed.

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.

We have two main categories of guitar chords. Open chords are the easier of the two and typically represent the types of beginner chords we all first learn. They use open strings and are stationary.

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.

A common beginner mistake is to try to learn lots and lots of chords. This is of no real use to you when first learning to play. It’s far better to concentrate on a smaller group of guitar chords and ones you’ll use consistently in many different songs.