Basic Guitar Chords

The easiest chords to play on the guitar are the Major, Minor and Seventh chords in open voicings. These chords use open strings and no more than three fingers, and they don't go into the higher positions of the guitar. The ease in playing these chords makes them the best for beginners to learn. This article will show them in two different ways: fretboard diagrams, and tablature (Tab).

A quick review of chord symbols: Uppercase letters indicate Major chords, a chord with a lowercase "m" indicates a minor chord, and a "7" indicates that the chord is a seventh chord.

Fretboard Diagrams

• Open circles indicate open strings.
• Dark, filled in circles indicate the spots on the frets where you put your fingers.
• The "X" symbol tells you to not play a string.
  

Tablature

Tablature (Tab)

Tablature (commonly abbreviated as Tab) is way of notating music that differs from standard notation. Tablature is most commonly used for fretted stringed instruments. It shows a player where to put their fingers whereas standard notation shows what pitches to play. The focus of this article will be guitar Tablature, although the concepts of Tablature apply to all fretted instruments.

The Tablature Staff represents the strings and frets of an instrument. A standard guitar has six strings and therefore guitar Tablature has six lines to a staff.

Each line represents a string, the lowest line is the lowest string (low E) and the highest line is the highest string (high E). From bottom to top the names of the strings are E, A, D, G, B, E.
Numbers on the Staff represent which fret should be pressed by a finger. Tablature is read from left to right and the following example tells you to first put a finger on the second fret of the "A string" and play that note. After that you play an open note (open = no finger down) on the "low E string."
Here is a more complex example:

To play this:

1. - Finger on second fret of "D string." No finger on "A string." - Play.

2.- Finger on second fret of "G string." - Play.

3.- Finger on second fret of "B string." No finger on "high E string." - Play

4. - Finger on second fret of "A string." No finger on "low E string." - Play

5. - Finger on second fret of 'D string." - Play

6. - Finger on first fret of "G string." No fingers on "B string" or "high E string." - Play

You might have noticed that with Tablature there is no way of telling what rhythm to play. This might not be a problem with familiar music but with unfamiliar music we need to show rhythm in one of two ways.

The first way of showing rhythm with Tablature is to show both standard notation and Tablature at the same time. This is very common in published popular music.

The second way of showing rhythm with Tablature is to draw stems and beams above the Tablature staff.
(Sometimes the stems and beams will be drawn directly on the staff, with circles added around the fret numbers for whole and half notes, creating a hybrid notation system.)

In addition to Tablature I recommend learning Standard Notation as it will greatly help with the learning of music theory.