Sunday, July 31, 2011

How To Play Guitar: Major Chords (NG05)

What's up future rock stars!!!
Hope your guitar learning journey is going well.
This will be the first article about chords, we will quickly discuss what chords are and then we'll have a look at the major chords.

Alright, so what are chords? To put it simply, chords are two or more notes played simultaneously. There are many chord types, like major, minor, major7th, dominant7th, minor7th, suspended 2nd, suspended 4th,etc. All these chords are divided into categories depending on the number of notes each chord uses, you have dyads (2 note chords), triads (3 note chords), tetrads (4 note chords), etc...Lots and lots of chord shapes and chord types for every key, there are thousands. Do you need to know all of them? No, but the more you know, the more diversity you can have in your music.

In this article we are going to look at the major chords, major and minor chords are very basic triads. The formula for a major chord is: 1 3 5. What this exactly means is not important for now, you'll get it when we take a look at the major scale. It just means that a major chord is made of the first note or root note, the third note and the fifth note of it's major scale.

Root note: This is a pretty important term and it's used by many teachers and musicians. The root note is, in most cases, the lowest note of the chord and of it's major scale, it's also the note that gives its name to the chord. (ex. The root note of the A major chord is the note A).

Now let's take a look at these chords:

First we have the C major chord: C E G













D major chord: D F# A














E major chord: E G# B












F major chord: F A C













G major chord: G B D (There are a few ways to play this chord, I play it by using all four fingers because it sounds a bit more badass, a bit more rock n roll, put you can also play it with the ring finger on the 3rd fret high e-string and leave the B-string open.)













A major chord: A C# E













B major chord: B D# F#













Practice every shape and when you got two or three down, practice playing one after another. Try to get your chord changes as fast and as accurate as possible. Next time we'll take a look at the minor chords and then we'll learn some famous songs.

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