Guitar chords - find, learn and play
Guitar-chord.org is the site for you who want to learn your first guitar chords or wish to discover new ones. Here you will also find the theory of the chords and they will be put in context with help of chord progressions and songs so you in an instant can begin to practise what you learn. All the theoretical substance have been minimised and you are given straightforward facts that will help you to get into the guitar playing right away.
New article: The relationship between chords and scales
New video lesson: Useful music theory
Beginner: Learn basic major and minor chords
Intermediate:
Enrich the sound with inverted chords
What is a chord?
A chord is a harmony of several notes played together. Let’s look at the C major chord, which includes the notes C, E and G.
Major C chord
In this specific C chord (a chord can be played in many ways as the fret board of the guitar let us find the constellations of the same notes in several positions), there’s five notes played together: C, E, G (open string), C and E (open string). On a guitar we sometimes play the same note but in different octaves in a chord to get a richer sound.
A common way to separate guitar chords is in major and minor. There’s a difference in sound between these: the major tends to sound kind of cheerful or neutral as the minor have more of a sad character. Therefore you will hear more major chords in fast rock songs and lot's of minor chord in ballads.
To accomplish additional mood in sound so-called flavours are used. To the C chord a B note can be added to create such a flavour and that chord will then be called Cmaj7 (‘maj’ stands for major).
Cmaj7 chord
By releasing the fifth string (B-string) we have got - as the picture above shows - the following notes: C, E, G, B and C. These kinds of chords are used in many music styles, but you may associate the sound to some specific style – melancholy ballads or jazz?
Let’s now try this guitar chord:
C7 chord
The name on this chord is C7 and if you find some blues in it you’re completely on the spot – this kinds of chords are regularly used in the style of blues.
The C7 chord is consisting of these notes: C, E, Bb, C and E. As you may have notice we no longer have a G note. Due to the construction of the guitar we sometimes have to skip some less important note in a chord. The fifth note, which is G in this case, are the note that are commonly skipped in these cases. (Even at the piano, there things like this aren’t forced, the fifth note are sometimes left out because it otherwise would be too much harmonic notes together with additional melody notes.)
There are lots of chords, all you really need to do are simply placing your fingers in a random position on the guitars fret board and you going to accomplish a guitar chord. But it’s not until you doing it with control and in organized form that music are being created. The guitar chords are categorized in names (e.g. C, C7) and in bigger groups. Some of the more common groups are:
On this site you will also find other groups that are not among the most common but still very often used like sus chords, slash chords and others.
Advice for the beginner
In case you have just begun playing guitar, learning some chords is a very good way to start. Try to memorize a few ones and then practise on switching between the chords.
For the intermediate guitar player
Learning new chords is always a good way to improve as a guitar player. Look around on this site and you will find several categories. Besides that, on Guitar-chord.org you will also find articles and video lessons.