Guitar Lesson: Why You Should Learn These Chords

A guitar is a fantastic instrument. It can be extremely difficult to master but it also invites you to explore the beautiful but easy chords that are available. I will give you some easy but nice sounding progressions to explore!

In this guitar lesson I will use a special form of tablature with only numbers. I have found that the ordinary tablature staff can be displayed completely wrong on some article sites.

Therefore I invented this tablature notation instead. It works as follows:

The first number indicates the fret to press down. The number after the slash tells you what string to play. Here is an example:

3/2

This means: Press down the third fret on the second string and play the note!

Why should you learn the following guitar chords?

1. They are easy to learn.

2. They sound good.

3. They give you examples on what you can do with a guitar.

Learn a flamenco guitar sounding progression

In this guitar lesson we will begin by learning what you can do with an ordinary easy E-major chord. It is played like this:

0/6 2/5 2/4 1/3 0/2 0/1

If you slide this guitar chord up one fret the three open strings will sound the same but as the other frets change you will hear a completely different chord with a morish touch to it. We can notate it like this:

0/6 3/5 3/4 2/3 0/2 0/1

Our next guitar chord is created if you slide the chord up two frets further. This will result in the following chord:

0/6 5/6 5/5 4/3 0/2 0/1

Now it is time to use these guitar chords to create a flavour of Spain. We can call the first chord A, the second B and the third C. You can play the chords in this order:

A B C B A

or a little more sophisticated:

A [A B] A [A B] A B C B A [A B] A (The chords between brackets played faster)

Learn some pop sounding guitar progressions

We will start out this guitar chord progression with the same basic E major chord:

0/6 2/5 2/4 1/3 0/2 0/1

Now we will change the sound of the chord by sliding it up three frets to the following position:

0/6 5/5 5/4 4/3 0/2 0/1

It will now be a nice sounding E minor 7 chord.

Try to slide the chord up two more frets and you will get the following guitar chord:

0/6 7/5 7/4 6/3 0/2 0/1

This guitar chord is called A add 9.

We can use the same method we used in the previous example. We call the first chord A, the second B and the third C.

You can play these chords in the following order:

A B C B with four downstrokes on each or a little bit faster with two downstrokes on each chord:

A A B A C C B B

Finally we will add just one more position to slide to with the chord. Move it up two more frets and you will get the following guitar chord:

0/6 9/5 9/4 8/3 0/2 0/1

It’s a sort of B chord and we can call it D when we construct patterns. Let’s experiment a bit with the chords we now have at our disposal. Play four fast downstrokes on each chord:

A B C D

This was just a few examples on what you can do with common basic chords. You can try this method with the common A-major chord or other chords and listen to the results.

Peter Edvinsson
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