Hey folks, CMC here. Check it out: today’s notes are all about HOW TO LEARN GUITAR CHORDS. Chords rock, right!
Where would we be without those divine six or twelve string harmonies, that gutteral Les Paul growl or Supertramp twelve string heavenly chorus? Where would we be without Smoke on the Water or Sound Garden? Well, if THEY didn’t do it, we know YOU would. So, let’s get those fingers crackin.
GET OUT YOUR CHARTS OR HIT UP YOUR FRIENDS.
7 Basic Chords for learning easy guitar songs
That’s right- there are only two ways I know of that will teach you how to learn to play guitar chords on guitar:
- Find some charts: hard copies (”books” for all of you folks under like 30) or online somewhere. Just Google “guitar chords” and a virtual avalanche of groovy diagrams will soon flood your screen. Them, it’s pretty basic: grab that neck, wrap…stretch…your hand (the left one, for most of us) all the way AROUND TO THE FRONT. Pretend your hand is a spider or a claw. Whatever you think the opposite of “flat” is, DO IT. Then, find those frets, those spots, those magic places. PRESS your fingertips down onto the strings, so that they hit the frets where they need to be, according to your diagrams.
GOT IT? Everyone (every fingertip) IN PLACE??? AWESOME!
Now, HOLD STILL! DON’T MOVE THOSE FINGERTIPS! No matter how hard it might seem, no matter how hard those tips want to quit, just hang on! What’s about to happen is nothing short of revelatory, divine and blissful. What you are about to do is STRUM. Now, you know the drill. Is there even a four year old alive anywhere on planet earth that doesn’t almost instinctively know how to STRUM? It’s almost as though we just KNOW what this is all about. We see those strings and we know we’ve got to strum. So, there you go- your poor left (or right in rare cases like Hendrix) hand has been waiting for what seems like EVER. It’s saying to your other hand: “dude, WTF? STRUM! Get on with it!” So, just do it! If you want to be a showman like Pete Townsend, take your whole arm and do roundabouts with it for each strum. Or be subtle, or make up your own style..whatever works for you but strum you must. After all, your fret hand was just the SET UP your strumming/picking hand is the PAYOFF. So, back to the “other” method which is really the same, all of the above but…
- If you want to do as I did, as millions of us lazy mofos did, just hit up a guitar playing friend, which would go something like this:
YOU-Dude! Show me some chords.
FRIEND-Hey. No problem. How about the basics: E, A, D, G ?
YOU-That would be rad, dude.
