Essential Electric Guitar Chords - Start Here! (With PDF)

1. About This Course: Hi. My name is Jacob Lamb. I'm a musician and the owner of Lamb lessons. In this introductory course, we're going to cover the essential chords you need to be able to play your favorite songs on the electric guitar. We're going to cover things like fingering and where to place your hands to be able to play these chord shapes. We're also going to cover the individual shapes as well as how to transition between them so that by the end of this course, you'll be able to play any song you're interested in. Now, we're going to do this in the most efficient, understandable and fun way that we can so that nobody gets left behind, and you can go at your own pace. I'm looking forward to getting started, so, let's jump in together. 2. Introduction to Guitar Chords: There are two things I want to cover in this first lesson. First, what chords are and why they're important to know. Then secondly, how we're labeling the fingers. That throughout this course, you can follow along and understand the chart that we're using. First, though, why chords are important in the first place and what they are. When you hear a song, you might hear a whole bunch of instruments going on. You've got guitar, piano, drums, bass, someone singing. Maybe the guitar is doing a lead line like a solo. But at the end of the day, every single song can be boiled down to chords. They're an awesome way to get started just playing things that you love. But they're not only that doorway into the song world. They also make up the foundation of a lot of songs. The songs you and I enjoy would sound pretty hollow if there weren't some guitar chords in there. They are the start and the entire journey of your guitar career. Now, there are basic and intermediate and difficult chords, and we're going to go over the basic open chords here and a couple of bar chords if we can handle them, but that's what chords are. Now, as for the way that we're going to be figuring them out together, we're going to number our fingers, one, two, three, and four, but we're not just going to use numbers, we're going to use colors. On this chart here, we're always going to mark out the cords with dots, and I'll put some dots down for a cord right now. Now, we are going to place these fingers on these dots and we'll color code each one. The first finger will be blue. Second finger will be orange, third finger will be green, and the pinky finger here will be purple. That way when we look at the chart, we'll know exactly what finger we're supposed to put where so that we can learn these as easily as possible. 3. Major vs. Minor Chords: Now, for the chords we'll be learning, there are two types of chords we need to know, and these are major chords and minor chords. Now, maybe you've heard these terms before, maybe you haven't, but they're actually really simple. See, major chords sound a little more happy like this. Minor chords tend to sound a little more sad and somber like this. Now, to play a chord on the guitar, we need at least three unique notes. So if I pick one string at a time and maybe press something down, that's a note, right? These are all notes. So to play a chord, I need at least three notes that I'm playing at the same time. So, something like this. Our goal together is just to figure out where to put our fingers to play certain groups of three notes at a time. Now, you'll notice that we've got six strings on our guitar. Sometimes we play four strings, sometimes five, sometimes six. So just know that we need at least three notes to make a chord, but we can 4. E Major and E Minor: So far, we've learned what a chord is, why chords are important and that there are major chords and minor chords. That's a huge foundation, and now we can actually start learning the shapes together. Now, as we go through these chords, they're going to have letters. We'll learn an A chord or a C chord or a D chord. And this is how we count or talk about music. There are seven letters in the musical Alphabet, A, B C D E F, and G. Now, each of those letters has a major and a minor type of cord. But you'll notice as we're going through these, we're not going in order. We're not starting with A and ending with G. Now, the reason we're doing things that way is because we're trying to prioritize cords that are used often and chords that are easy to play. So we're starting with the E chord, e major and e minor. Now, for the actual chord shape here, I'm going to strum all six strings. So I'm going to show that I'm strumming all these strings by putting an open circle above them. That just means I'm playing the open string and not pressing anything down. We're going to start with an E minor shape, so one of the more somber chords. And the way I'll do this is I'm going to take my middle finger and place it on the second fret of the fifth string. Then I'll take my ring finger and place it on the second fret of the fourth string. And that's all there is to it. Now I can strum through my strings. I have an E minor chord. Now, we mentioned how easy it is to learn chords quickly when we just relate them to each other. So, check this out. To turn this into an e major chord, I just need to change one little note. My first finger is going to grab the first fret of the third string. And that's it. Now I've got an major chord. So that one note difference we see really clearly here on display. We have E minor and E major. Now, as we go through these lessons, we're going to be adding more and more chord shapes and practicing going between them in something called chord progressions. But for now, we know two pretty similar chords. So practice with me, let's just go back and forth between E minor and E major. We're going to s down twice for each chord. So here we go nice and slow. Turn it to major. Back to mine. Back to major. That's awesome. That's all there is to it. So in the next lesson, let's talk about A chords. 5. A Major and A Minor: Here we're going to talk through a major and A minor chords. Now, for our E, we strummed all six strings. For our A, we're only going to strum five out of the six strings. So it's going to take a little bit more aiming from our right hand. Now, the cool thing about A is we can actually play this all on the same fret. We only need the second fret. Here's what I mean. I'm going to play the fifth string open. And my first finger, is going to grab the second fret of the fourth string. My second finger is going to grab the second fret of the third string. And my ring finger is going to grab the second fret of the second string. So it's all the same fret. Then we play that open first string. B. Now, typically, when we're playing a fret or pressing down, we want to stay as close to the metal bar as we can. But that's really hard when we've got everything on the same fret kind of forcing our finger out of the way. So a good rule of thumb is the further away we get from the metal fret, just the harder we want to press down. We want to really squeeze into our palm to make sure every note's ringing out nice and clear. If your chord isn't sounding quite as full or you're getting some buzz in there, a great way to go is to take your picking hand and go one string at a time. And when you come across something, It's not ringing out, and you can kind of adjust it as you need to until every string is ringing out nice and clear. One string at a time is really a great way to go. Now, let's take a look at the A minor. We know now that from major to minor, we just need to change one fret. This time through, we want to take the note on the second string and move it down. Now, it's a little difficult to do that with the third finger, so we need to shift our fingers up a little bit. We're going to play the same exact chord shape, but I'm going to change my fingers. So I'm putting my middle finger on the fourth string, my ring finger on the third string and my pinky on the second string. Same chord different fingers. That frees up my first finger. So what I'm going to do is put it on the first fret of the second string. And I've got a minor chord, a major and a minor. And now that we know e chords and A chords, we can practice shifting between these a little bit. Like, maybe I want to go from an E to an A or. Well, we can do that pretty easily. T T T T I also find it a lot easier to memorize things if we relate them to one another rather than just learning individual shapes. So there are two things I want to relate here. One of them is that if we're playing an A minor and we want to move to an E, we'd recognize pretty quickly, it's actually the exact same shape. Moved up by a set of strings. So when we're thinking about these two chords, we can remember that E and A minor are really similar to one another. Another relation we can do is see that when we're playing an A minor, and we want to move it to an A, all we need to do is put our pinky down, and we can move back back and forth. Really, really quickly. So that's the E chords and now the two A chords. Now, in the next lesson, let's take a look at D chords and remember, the more chords we know, the more songs we're able to play. 6. D Major and D Minor: We are making some great progress. So let's take a look at the D major and minor chord together. Now, with an E chord, we played all six strings. With an a chord, we played five strings. Now, with the D chord, we're playing four strings. How do we do that? Well, it takes a little bit more aiming with our right hand, but after we learn the chord shapes, I'll give you a couple of tips on how to make it a little bit easier on yourself. I'm going to start with my fourth string, and I'm not going to press anything down on that string. Now, I'm going to take my first finger, and I'm going to put it on the second fret of the third string. My third finger will go on the third fret of the second string. Now, I like to think of these two fingers kind of as a doorway for the middle finger to go through. Middle fingers going to tuck between them and get to that second fret on the first string. Then we've got a D major chord. Now, again, major to minor, there's a one note difference. This time, it's on the first string, and we need to move it down by one to play a minor chord. Again, not a big change, but we do need to shift our fingers a little bit to make that happen. So, I'm starting from the same exact note, but I'm going to put my middle finger now on the second fret of the third string, my ring finger on the third fret of the second string, and that frees up my first finger to play the first fret of the first string. First finger, first fret, first string. Now, how do we aim so specifically to only get four strings? Well, here are a couple of tips. First of all, we are playing the fourth string. We're starting on the fourth string because it's a D note. In fact, all of these chords start on the same note name as the chord name. That's an easy idea, but difficult to explain in a simple way. The note that the chord starts on is the same name as the chord. So our E chord started from an E note. Our A chord started from an A note. Our D chord starts from, you guessed it a D note. So the reason we're starting is because a chord should start from the note with the same name. Now, I go through that because when we're picking the decord, it's okay to get the fifth string in there a little bit. It sounds good. The science side of music, the theory side of music says not to, but the ear side that you actually hear, it sounds okay. Check it out. It's almost nice. It adds some depth to it. So that's one thing when we're picking and aiming for just four strings, don't beat yourself up if you get the fifth string in there. Secondly, we can bring our thumb in a little bit and have it just touch the sixth string, not press anything down, but touch it. And when it's touched, then it kind of cuts off the sound. So now we don't have to worry so much about strumming that string because even if we do, no sound comes out. So this way, we can play all the right notes of a dechord without worrying so much about strumming really specifically for strings only. But all that being said, now we know E A and D chords, and we can start thinking about some songs to play with these. Like, maybe I want to play E to A to D minor. Well, let's give that a shot together, and I'll strum each 12 times. Well, already, this is starting to sound like a song. 7. C Major and G Major: Now, these are the last two chords we're going to learn before we take a little bit of a break and practice some of the shapes and learn some right hand strumming patterns. We'll go through more together after that, but we should start practicing what we've learned. We're going to learn two major chords in this lesson, and that's a C cord and a G cord. Now, a fair warning, you have to stretch your hand a little bit for these, but I want to give you some practical advice and some theoretical life advice. For the practical advice, as we're trying to stretch to these cord shapes, we want to make sure our thumb is on top of the string and our wrist is pushed forward so our fingers have all the space in the world to be able to reach where we need. If your wrist is pulled back too far, there's just no way our fingers can reach where they need to. The theoretical advice is that while these shapes are difficult now, someday, as long as you keep going, you'll be able to look back and just laugh at what used to be difficult. I've taught student after student who's struggled with the two chords we're about to go through. And then down the road in the future, it's just, oh, man, it's second nature. It's like another language. So we're going to start with a C chord. Now, this is a chord that uses five of the strings, so I'll start picking from string five. What I'm going to do is take my ring finger and put it on the third fret of the fifth string, which we know now, since it's the start of a C chord, this is a C note. My middle finger is going to go on the second fret of the fourth string. Now, my third string will be open, and my first finger will go on the first fret of the second string. So a little bit of a stretch, and then our first string is open. So that's our C cord. Again, making sure we're nice and close to those frets, the metal bars, and picking one string at a time, making sure each note is ringing out nice and clear. So a little bit of a stretch, but we got it. And speaking of a stretch, let's take a look at the G major chord. Now, for the G major, we're playing all six strings, and I'm going to take my middle finger and put it on the third fret of the thickest string, which is the sixth string. Now, my first finger is going to grab the second fret of the fifth string. And here's the cool part. The next three strings, next three notes are all open. We don't need to press a single thing down until we get to the first or thinnest string. Now we need to grab the third fret of the first string. I have always liked using my pinky for this one. Some people like using their third finger. You can use whichever one you'd like, but I will write it down as the pinky, and we've got our G chord. Now, we've got a ton of popular chords, so we can start making some really cool progressions. And we're going to do that in the next lesson as we talk through some strumming patterns. 8. Transitioning and Strumming Patterns: Now, we know a lot of really good and popular chords. So let's start putting these into common progressions and focusing a bit on the right hand. Now, the right hand really brings songs to life. It's one thing to be able to strum down chords. Down over and over. It's another thing entirely to have a strumming pattern, which is just a series of down and up strokes, which sounds something like this. Totally different. Now, to understand strumming patterns, we first need to understand that most songs in the world are broken up into four count songs or three count songs. All that this means is that with a four count song, we count one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. And we'll change chords typically on even numbers. Every two counts or four counts or eight counts, we would change a chord. Three count songs are exactly the same, but three counts, who would have guessed. So we count these, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. This wildly changes the feel of a song without changing much else. It's just the count. So that's really cool. We can also subdivide counts by using the word and, one and two, and three, and one, and two. This just gives us more options to place strums and make more creative strumming patterns. When we combine strumming patterns with chord progressions, we get songs. I guarantee by the end of this lesson, if you follow along, you're going to be ready to play songs, which is pretty crazy. In fact, let's do an exercise right now, that's going to sound like a song because it is. For the first stroming pattern we're going to learn, it applies to both of them. And it's this really easy thing where every time we count a number, we pick down and up. So I'm going one, two, three, four. Let's try doing something like that with a cord progression that goes from C to A minor to d to G. Check this out. We'll go really slow. One, two, three, four, A minor, one, two, three, four to D, one, two, three, four, and to g, one, two, three, four Now, the more we practice that, the more fluid it gets, and check this out. It sounds like a song. That's pretty awesome. And we can do the same thing for three beats, just over three counts. One, two, three, one, two, three, right? Now, let's learn a strumming pattern more specific to each of these. So a four beat strumming pattern and three beat. For the four beat, we're doing something that's down, up, up, down, up. And that sounds a little confusing. I like breaking it into two sections. So the first section is down down up. The second section is up, down up. And counting out the ns between the numbers can really help with this. One and two, and three and four and down and down, up, and up, down, up. So we can apply that to our chord progression. Let's change it up a little bit. Let's do a minor to D minor to E minor. Sad song, lots of minors. So, counting slow, one, two, three, and four, and down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down up, one, two, and three and four, and one and two, and three, and four and That's awesome. Now, let's look at a three beat strumming pattern. Something here would be down, up, down, up. Really simple. Down, do, up, down, up, down, up. For this one, let's go from a D to a C to a G. So starting from a D, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down, two, up, down, up, down. Two, three, one, two, and three and one, two, and three and four. Now, we've gone through a lot of chords and those strumming patterns can be applied to any chords. So a great way to practice is to write some yourself and practice them with that strumming pattern. Now, if you don't feel like writing any, you could also go look up chords at this point to some of your favorite songs. Going between chords can be really difficult, especially when we're first starting. So if your transitions between them are slow, don't beat yourself up. A great way to practice this here is to go back and forth over and over, especially with a metronome, which is just something that helps you keep time. It clicks for you. So take two chords and start going between them really slowly. Like really slow. Slower than you think you need to. Then you can slowly speed the metronome up just bit by bit. Kind of a painstaking process. But pretty soon, your muscle memory will kick in, and this is going to help your transitions between chords like 1004. Don't quote me on that, but a lot. 9. Power Chords: Now, more specific to the electric guitar and rock music, especially, let's talk about a type of chord called a power chord. Now, you may have heard of power chords, but if not, they're really simple and really cool. See, each of the chords we've been going over, we're learning a specific shape for that chord. The neat thing about power chords is that it's one shape, and it's movable all over the neck of the guitar. Something really important that we're not going over in this course is knowing the names of the notes around the neck. Cause whatever note you start the power chord shape from, that's what chord you're playing. So as an example, let's start a power chord from the third fret of the sixth string, and then we'll see how it's movable. So I'm going to put my first finger on the third fret of the sixth string. Now, behind it, I'm going to put my ring finger on the fifth fret of the fifth string. So I've moved up a string and down by two frets. Behind that, I'm going to put my pinky on the same fifth fret this time of the fourth string and stop. That's a power cord right there. I'm only going to pick the three notes I'm pressing down. Now, this is a G power chord. And I know that because I'm starting from a G note. Right? We can think of that G chord that we played. And we know that the root, the first note of a chord is the same name as the chord. So that's a G note. So I've got a G power chord, starting from the same note. So this would be a C power cord. And again, they're slid and do Now, what happens if we need something like an A power cord, right? Because we know an A is the open string. So how do we do that shape with an open string? Well, we still can. If we think about a power cord shape, we're moving it down, Oh, well, by the time we get there, we've got the same shape. We just have to kind of visualize it differently, okay? So these are power chords, and the use of them is kind of filling in with rock music, especially if you get some effects. They work really well with distortion, rock music, punk music. You won't hear them as often on an acoustic guitar, but they're really handy to know. They're also a great substitute if we forget a chord shape. If I'm playing A minor, C and D. Let's say I forgot my C chord, but I know the power cord shape, well, I can play a minor C and D. That C power chord saved me there. Because I forgot the shape of the open cord. 10. F Major and B Major - Barre Chords: Now we've got F minor and B minor. We've got again, bar chords and regular chords, especially that B minor, is a really cool version of it that I think will remind you of our chords we started with. Let's take a look at each of these. For the F major chord, we slid our E up by one. Now we're doing the same exact thing, but with minor. I'm going to take my E minor. Slide it up. By one, and then lay the first finger down. But the cool thing about the minor chord is my middle finger is free to help push that first finger in. Now I've got two fingers squeezing into my thumb together. That should make it a little bit easier. For the B minor, we're doing the same thing. We're taking an A minor chord, leaving the first finger free and sliding it up by two, Laying that first finger down. There's our B minor chord. Now, for the F minor, there's a variation that we don't need to bar, but it sounds pretty holllow. This is where the bar really does come in handy. We can play, slide up that E minor, take our first finger and put it on the first fret of the third string and just play those three notes. There's our F minor, much more Hallow than the full chord. For the B minor, there's a great variation that works ten times out of ten. I'm going to take my first finger and I'm going to put it on the second fret of the fifth string. Now, I'm going to play an open f string, and then my second finger will grab the second fret of third string. My ring finger is going to get the third fret of the second string, and I'll play the open first string. So this is another way to play B minor. 11. F Minor and B Minor: Now we've got F minor and B minor. We've got again, bar chords and regular chords, especially that B minor, is a really cool version of it that I think will remind you of our chords we started with. Let's take a look at each of these. For the F major chord, we slid our E up by one. Now we're doing the same exact thing, but with minor. I'm going to take my E minor. Slide it up. By one, and then lay the first finger down. But the cool thing about the minor chord is my middle finger is free to help push that first finger in. Now I've got two fingers squeezing into my thumb together. That should make it a little bit easier. For the B minor, we're doing the same thing. We're taking an A minor chord, leaving the first finger free and sliding it up by two, Laying that first finger down. There's our B minor chord. Now, for the F minor, there's a variation that we don't need to bar, but it sounds pretty holllow. This is where the bar really does come in handy. We can play, slide up that E minor, take our first finger and put it on the first fret of the third string and just play those three notes. There's our F minor, much more Hallow than the full chord. For the B minor, there's a great variation that works ten times out of ten. I'm going to take my first finger and I'm going to put it on the second fret of the fifth string. Now, I'm going to play an open f string, and then my second finger will grab the second fret of third string. My ring finger is going to get the third fret of the second string, and I'll play the open first string. So this is another way to play B minor. 12. Reviewing All Chords: You've learned a ton of chords. That's genuinely really impressive. I know, we're not face to face at the moment, but I've taught this over and over to a lot of students. And the fact that you're at this point, it's incredible. Let's go ahead and quickly review all of our chords. And this time, we will go in order from A through G majors and minors. We've got a major. A minor. A B major or the kind without the bar, and a B minor. We've got a C major. Wait a second, we haven't talked about a C minor. This is where bar chords are really cool because we can take the B minor shape, and we're just focused on the root note, where it's starting from. This is starting from a B note, so it's a B minor. If we slit it up by one, we're starting from a C note, now it's a C minor, same shape, different chord. Then we've got D. D minor. E E minor. F variation without the big bar. F minor and its variation. G, wait, we need a G minor as well. Well, we were able to slide B minor up to c, so can we do the same thing with G? Absolutely, we can. We can take our F minor and start it from a G note. For a G minor. And then we're right back to A. That's 14 chords that you've learned so far. Amazing. 13. Turning Chords Into Songs: Knowing how to play these chords is amazing, but we also want to know how to find chords to our favorite songs, and this is really easy. So let's pull up a web page here. The way we do this is we type in the name of a song, the band, and then just the word chords. A lot of websites that give you chords, and they're all great, but I love ultimate guitar. When we click on it, we get this page, and right away, there's a few really cool things. At the top of the page, we'll get a strumming pattern. When we look at the chords, we'll notice they're placed over specific words. If we know the song and we know how the words go, the word that the chord is over is where we change to that chord. That helps us time it out a little bit. If we've forgotten one or two of these chord shapes, we can scroll over the chord and it will tell us what the shape is, which is really handy. Now, down at the bottom, we've got two buttons I want to focus on, and that's simplify and transpose. We may notice in some songs that there are sevens or slashes or numbers. And we don't know those yet. But if we click the simplify button, all of that goes away, and it brings us back just to the basic chords. All of that stuff is character on top of the substance of the chord. We right now are concerned about the substance. So we can hit simplify to help us as we get to know more chords. The transpose button changes the key of the song. Now, what that means is that the chords will shift around, but they will shift together. So the distance between the chords doesn't change. Why this is good is that we can play the same exact song, but maybe find chords that we're more comfortable with. Where this is difficult, is that, first of all, we may not be able to play along with the song anymore because we're playing in a different key. Or we may change the key too high or too low to be able to sing it comfortably. But it can absolutely help us find chords that we're comfortable with as well. 14. Final Project and Congratulations!: You've made it to the end of this course. Congratulations. By now, we should have a pretty good understanding of our basic open chords, and maybe even a couple of bar chords. Now, for a final project, we're going to practice these chords by looking up a song that you enjoy. We're going to play along and film or record the audio of us doing this. If you're feeling adventurous, you can throw in a strumming pattern, or you could even write your own chords to play for us. If you're a little recording shy or you don't have the ability to record. You could also just do this as text, write out the song you chose or the chords you wrote, and how it went for you. If it was easy, if it was difficult, what you struggled with. Now, if you've got any questions at all, I would love to hear from you. You can always reach out to me at Jacob at lamlessons.com, and I'll see you there, or you can visit me at my website at WWW do amblessons.com, and I'll see you in the next course.