Beginner Guitar Chords

The basic guitar chords you'll learn on this page form the foundation of today's guitar playing. I call them beginner guitar chords, but they are used everyday by beginners as well as advanced players and in all styles of music. Beginners should practice these chords until they have memorized them and are able to switch between them fluidly.

One thing that helped me a lot is learning some guitar music theory. Theory simplifies memorizing guitar chords a lot and it gives you the feeling you know what you are doing, instead of just learning some diagrams from guitar chord charts.

If you're not really sure how to read guitar chords, I suggest you read this tutorial: how to read guitar chord charts

Open chords (some call them folk chords) are usually the first thing a beginning guitar player learns.  This doesn't mean that these beginner guitar chords are very easy: learning to get those left hand fingers work together and producing a clean sound is hard work, but with regular practice you'll soon get the hang of it.

Open chords are called this way because they contain at least one open string (strings that you play without fingering them). These basic guitar chords are used a lot in music, especially on acoustic guitar. They also work on electric guitar, but opens strings sound better on an acoustic guitar in my opinion. Folk music, singer-songwriter music and country music use a lot of open chords.

Here follows a list of basic guitar chords that every guitarist needs to know.  To make it easy for you to see the guitar chord fingering, I put the guitar chord pictures next to the charts. Finger the chords with the top of your fingers and look out you don't touch adjacent strings.

A little bit about guitar chord names:

• chords are named according to letters going from A to G
• an 'm' after a letter means that the chord is a minor chord
• a '7' after the letter means that the chord is a dominant chord
• a letter without 'm' or '7' means that the chord is a major chord

To find out what the difference is between major, minor and dominant you should read the guitar music theory tutorial. Here's the list of basic guitar chords:

          

Famous guitar brands

There are a couple of guitar manufacturers that have been around for many decades, known for the general good quality of their instruments:

Yamaha is well known for the quality of its instruments making a wide variety of acoustic and electric guitars, most of which are copies of popular American models, although a few are original in design to Yamaha. They also make a line of classical-style guitars based on Spanish models.

Ibanez guitars were best-known for their reasonably priced copies of popular electric guitars, including models inspired by Les Paul and the Stratocaster in the early 1970's. Using cheaper materials and automation in manufacturing, they were able to sell their high quality guitars for a significantly lower price than the originals. They abandoned the strategy of copying classic electric guitar designs and the newer models began incorporating more unique design elements such as slimmer necks, radical body shapes and flatter fingerboards, colorful finishes and higher-output electronics.

A Brief History of the Guitar

by Paul Guy

The guitar is an ancient and noble instrument, whose history can be traced back over 4000 years. Many theories have been advanced about the instrument's ancestry. It has often been claimed that the guitar is a development of the lute, or even of the ancient Greek kithara. Research done by Dr. Michael Kasha in the 1960's showed these claims to be without merit. He showed that the lute is a result of a separate line of development, sharing common ancestors with the guitar, but having had no influence on its evolution. The influence in the opposite direction is undeniable, however - the guitar's immediate forefathers were a major influence on the development of the fretted lute from the fretless oud which the Moors brought with them to to Spain.

The sole "evidence" for the kithara theory is the similarity between the greek word "kithara" and the Spanish word "quitarra". It is hard to imagine how the guitar could have evolved from the kithara, which was a completely different type of instrument - namely a square-framed lap harp, or "lyre". (Right)

Most Expensive Bass Guitar

by jeremy

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A financially endowed bass player might look at any one of Jens Ritter’s bass guitars, which start at $6,000, and be content. After all, the German luthier’s expensive basses are made with some of the same techniques used to make Stradivarius violins. One customer, however, wasn’t satisfied with one of Ritter’s “normal” guitars and we’re lucky for it. After all, if it weren’t for this customer, we wouldn’t be able to tell you about the world’s most expensive bass guitar.

Most Expensive Guitar Picks

by jeremy 

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If you’re looking for a guitar pick, there’s no shortage of different shapes, styles and materials available for you to choose from. Customized picks have been prevalent since the days when Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick would throw hundreds of them out into the audience. In fact, most famous guitarists have their own custom guitar pick. Even among the myriad of different styles, some plectrums are more unique than others. The world’s most expensive guitar picks are some of those.
Starpics, an Australian company known for plectrums made of precious metals, created a completely unique pair of guitar picks. Like their other picks, they’re guaranteed to last pretty much forever and to significantly reduce string breakage. So what makes these picks so special?
They’re made of meteors.

These two luxury picks were fashioned from pieces of Gibeon meteorite. Said to be around 4 billion years old, Gibeon meteorites were discovered in 1836 in Namibia, Africa, where their sale and export were banned by the local government. Despite that fact, over twenty-five tons of the meteorites have been recovered and it is the most commonly found meteorite on the market today. One of the most interesting things about the meteorites is the pattern of Widmanstatten lines created by their frigid passage through space. These patterns are preserved in the picks and can be seen in the picture above.
The most expensive guitar picks in the world are priced at $5,000 AUD ($4,674 USD).

The Most Expensive Guitar

by tom on January 18, 2006 · 

by Heather Strobel

“Blackie”, Eric Clapton’s favorite mid-career modified Strat has been surpassed in value and is no longer the most expensive guitar ever, despite that it was bought for $950,000 USD in 2004 by a guitar archaeologist.

The latest most expensive electric guitar in the world dethroned its predecessor at an auction in Doha, Qatar on November 16th, 2005. The Strat was signed by several rock musicians to benefit a tsunami charity, ‘Reach out to Asia’. It was bought one year ago by Qatar’s royal family for a million dollars and donated back to the Asia Program, bringing in $2.7 million USD at the more recent auction, whose attendees included Former President Bill Clinton. Technically, the guitar has generated a total of $3.7 million USD, making it the most expensive guitar yet.

GUITAR PRO 6

Bob Thomas

Guitar Pro 6’s armoury of tab symbols incorporates a staggering array of special notation devices, and string bends are highly configurable.

Guitar Pro 6’s armoury of tab symbols incorporates a staggering array of special notation devices, and string bends are highly configurable.

If you’ve ever picked up a book of highly accurate transcriptions of the playing of one of the great exponents of the acoustic or electric guitar, you’ll no doubt have realised just how complex a guitar piece can be, and just how detailed the notation of the interaction between fingers, strings and frets has to be in order to fully capture the music being made. Apart from the basic notes, the transcriber has to notate string/fret positions, note bends, arpeggios, sweeps, taps and the myriad other physical subtleties that go into reproducing the performance on paper. If you write for guitar, you’ll not only be putting notes to paper, but you’ll also need a comprehensive vocabulary of additional notation symbols to be able to fully communicate your ideas to another player.

Over the last 50 or so years, the level of detail available in transcriptions of popular guitar music has grown from the simple (and often wildly inaccurate) chord diagrams of the ’60s, to the point today where any guitarist’s performance can be meticulously written out in such extreme detail that every note and nuance of the original can be captured, transcribed, read and — ability permitting — replayed. Add to this a growing demand for notation of complete band performances (lead, rhythm and bass guitars, drums plus whatever other instruments are in the mix) and the level of complexity in the task of transcription becomes extremely high, placing great demands not only on transcribers, but also on the software that they have to rely on to get the task done.

GUITAR PRO 5

It is rare to find a web-savvy guitarist who has not yet encountered Guitar Pro, the consummate tablature editor.
The latest version is Guitar Pro 5, which brings an array of new possibilities to what is already the industry standard of tablature software. The most interesting feature of Guitar Pro 5 is the Realistic Sound Engine or RSE. It replaces the basic MIDI tones of yore with high fidelity samples from a Stratocaster and Les Paul guitars (as well as bass and drum samples) and provides an array of effect options to simulate an enormous variety of familiar tones. The tones are generally named in thinly veiled reference to the names of specific amps, pedals, and songs. Some are more obvious than others, but for the most part I suspect most of us would be able recognise the intended tone from the title, but perhaps find the tone to be a little off upon listening to it. The tones range from some specific songs such as Sunday Bloody Sunday (Single – Sunday) and Voodoo Child (Hey Jimi – Voodoo), to more general ones like a Fender Twin with a Big Muff pedal (American Clean – Pi Distortion).  To me, the general ones are more convincing, simply because the more specific titles make too obvious the discrepancies between the simulation and the original. They are perhaps too ambitious given the limitations of the engine, however it is hard to complain given the impressive jump up from the simple MIDI tones that they replace which are not even in the same league. It is really quite an excellent system.
I tried out full tabs for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday for applying the corresponding RSE tones to the guitar tracks. Undoubtedly all three sounded great when combined with the actual music of the songs they intend to imitate, but I still felt that none were especially close. The Hendrix and U2 tones are fairly generic ones that add a wah and delay sound respectively, while the Teen Spirit tone is far too clean sounding to be believable.

Guitar Practice Recipe for Success
Guest article by Will Landrum

Guitar practice...ever wonder how someone could be so good at what they do? Do you wonder if you could ever be as good as your favorite guitar player?

Well, I'm here to tell you that you can! I'm also here to give you some insight as to how. There are several principles of guitar practice you must adhere to if you are to ever get to a level of great playing. Some of these principles are not just for guitar players. They apply to anything in life that you're trying to accomplish that's worth accomplishing.

1) DEDICATION You MUST devote yourself to the task at hand. This can be difficult if you "don't seem to have the time" for guitar practice or playing. You will have to sacrifice some things in order to make time for your music. For example, Friday nights may be reserved as your weekly night to go to the movies with your friends. It may be a good idea to forget that for a while and use the time more constructively to develop your chops.

2) PRACTICE Now that you've set aside time for your guitar playing, make sure you use it for what it was intended! You've brushed off your movie friends (who want you to be a famous guitarist anyway, right?) and now you're at home free and clear for guitar practice. BUT, you see that the season finale of Star Trek is on tonight! DON'T GIVE IN! TAPE IT! GO PLAY YOUR GUITAR! Write out a practice schedule for yourself. Work on specific techniques or moves.