The Guitars of THE LION

This is the first part of a series of articles one how to teach yourself how to play guitar. I am assuming the novice guitar player knows the basics: how to tune the guitar, hold a pick, etc. In this installment I cover how to read a chord diagram, and show you some practice techniques that help you remember the chord patterns while improving your ability to quickly change between chords.

 

Some Basic Info for the Absolute Beginner

So you got a new guitar and are itching to play it, huh? Great! I am not going to go into things like how to properly tune your guitar, or explain how to hold it, use a pick here. There is plenty of info out there about that. Instead, I am going to focus on showing you some basic chords and a few techniques to get a feel of your new instrument.

The chord diagram is a simple representation of the freeboard of the guitar, as shown here:

Chords are shown as a series of dots on the chord diagram that indicate where the strings are pressed down:

Not so hard, is it? OK, let’s learn the basic chords that every guitar player needs to know.

The Five Chords Everyone Knows

These are the basic chords that are used in almost every major song ever made for guitar. At first they will feel really awkward to play until your fingers get used to how they feel. But once you learn how they feel, you will never forget them. And even better, once you can finger these chords with ease, you will find all the other chords out there are just variations on these.

To start, pick any two chords. Make the first chord and strum the guitar while counting you yourself:

1, 2, 3, 4…. with each strum. Then immediately switch to the second chord and strum it 4 times, counting to yourself again.

For instance, if you picked the DMajor (DM) chord and the EMajor (EM) chord, it would go like this:

Chord being fingered: D D D D E E E E Strumming ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Count 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

Keep repeating this until you can switch between the D and E chords with ease.

This exercise does a couple neat things:

Teaches you new chords. You learn how to change chords quickly while staying on time. You learn how it ~feels~ to change finger positions between two chords. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Learning how it feels to “hold” a certain chord is important. After a while, you will notice that when you hear that chord in a song, your hand will already know where to go to make that sound. Equally important is knowing how it feels to change between two chords.

If you could watch your hand in slow motion as it changes from the D to E chord, it is an amazing dance as each finger jumps to a new position. Learning the steps to that dance is an important part in being able to play. Not only do you need to know the chords themselves, but you need to know the dance steps of changing between the chords. You need to be able to do that without thinking about it. That’s what this exercise does for you.

After you get your first two chords down, change it up. Use one chord you know well, and a brand new one.  Once you can easily switch between any two of the above chords, change it up by picking THREE chords and running though the changes….

OK, the Sixth Chord Everyone Knows!

I lied. There is another chord everyone knows. It is FMajor (FM), and it looks like this:

It feels similar to the CMajor (CM) chord you already learned, so if you are already comfortable making that chord, the FMajor will seem pretty easy.

But this chord has something really cool it can do that none of the first five chords can. You can MOVE this chord! Check it out, by moving it up two frets, it becomes a GMajor (GM) chord…