No matter what style of music you want to play, chords are going to be a part of your playing. Of course
you can play single notes to play songs but it is not what is normally done and it’s not what you are
going to hear on your cd’s. Chords are where everybody starts when learning guitar. The exception
would be classical players that start with notes and then work their way up to chords, all by playing the
notes on the guitar.

What’s the best way to start learning chords on the guitar and what is the usual progression of learning
the various types of chords? My suggestion is to learn all the basic chords first, which is the logical
beginning. These are the basic chords to start with: A.B,C.D.E,F,G, Am,Bm.Dm,Em,A7,B7,C7,D7, E7and
G7. These chords can all be played on the first few frets of the guitar. Everyone starts with these chords
and you then can play some basic songs. Most songs that you hear on the radio do not use these
chords. Rock groups and other bands use BAR Chords. These are chords that move up and down the
neck. They are called bar chords because you put your finger across the strings “barring” many at once.
This means we can move one form up and down the neck and it becomes different chords. You cannot
move basic chords because of the open strings. When we play bar chords we are controlling the strings
and that’s big. How important are the bar chords? We can say that the Beatles wrote most of their
songs with 8 main bar chords, just moving them up and down the neck. Every fret changes the name
of the chord so with 8 main bar chords we can play ALL major, minor, 7th, and m7th chords in music. I
will show you these chord forms in your lessons. After the basic bar chords we go to intermediate and
advanced chords. These are chords like Amajor7th, Dm7-5, Gaug., G9, Bb13 and F#dim. These chords
are used mostly in jazz and blues type songs.

The final thing about chords you need to know is how to build them. You should be able to play any
chord there is by “building” it. This means you have to know some music theory. Music theory is a
big part of my lessons with you. I had to take two years of music theory in college to really know how
music works. This is standard if you go to music school. Without it you are never going to go very far. If
you want to play some Green Day or maybe Wild Thing then you do not need much theory. If you ever
expect to get into jazz or blues and especially chord melody finger style playing then it’s going to take
forever to develop your playing without a good knowledge of theory of “how” chords work. A couple of
samples of chord development would be

Knocking on Heaven’s door- 4 basic chords G, D, Am, C

Nowhere man- E, F#m, G#m,  Am,  A, B

Georgia on my Mind or Misty- Intermediate and advanced moveable bar chords