Olly’s Guitar World

Before we dive into playing some chords I’m going to show you how easy it is to read chords. This will allow you to pick up any songbook, or music sheet and easily play the chords to a piece of music. Having said that, although it is easy to read the chords, some chords are not that easy to position your fingers onto or easily change to and from!

For me to teach you how to play a chord you are going to need to know how to read chords as of course, I am not around to manually position your fingers on the fretboard.

There are 2 ways you can read chords. One method is to use guitar tab:

See previous lesson on reading tab

here is an example of what a chord would look like in tab:

E |—————0———————|
B |—————0———————|
G |—————0———————|
D |—————2———————|
A |—————2———————|
E |—————0———————|

This is an example of an Em (E minor) Chord. being the notes are all on top of one another they are all played at the same time. To summarize, if you put your first finger on the A string, second fret and your second finger on the D string, second fret and then play all of the 6 strings, you will have just played your first chord.

The preferred way to illustrate a chord is via a chord chart.

This is what we will get to next…………..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Guitar Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.