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Guitar: Absolute Beginners’/Bluffers’ Lesson #1
By Rick | September 11, 2007
Ok, you want to play guitar. You want to play well - eventually - but for now you just want to be able to play a few songs and maybe jam a bit with other people. No problem!
One word of warning. Your early progress will be limited by how much you practice. Sorry, but even to bluff and fake it by learning this bare minimum, basic, essential stuff you will have to be able to play some chords, and it takes a while for your fingers to learn to make the right shapes and to change between the different shapes at a workable speed.
By the way, we’re not just going to teach you a handful of chords and then cut you adrift: we will be building on each step in the teaching process. However, we will be teaching these early lessons in a modular fashion, and each lesson will leave you with the raw material to play more songs or to add extra features, flourishes and flashy bits to the songs you already know.
Here’s a little secret that may encourage you. By learning just three or four chords you will be able to play along with literally hundreds of the most well known songs!
Let’s get started.
This time we will learn three easy chords. Just three, but that’s enough to allow you to strum along to a song. In this article we will just cover the practical aspects of actually playing the chords and your first song. However, we will soon be adding a link to another page that explains a bit more of how music works with relation to what you learn here. I recommend that you check out that page too, but if you don’t you’ll still learn the song!
So, a guitar has six strings. When you hold the guitar and look down, the thickest strings are nearest to you and the thinest are nearest the floor. Despite this, we generally call the thick bass strings the low or bottom strings and the thin ones are called the high or top strings. That’s because we are talking about the pitch of the notes that the strings play.
Starting with the thickest string and working our way towards the floor, the strings are tuned to E A D G B E. If we were to pluck these in that order we would say that we were working our way up from bottom E to high or top E, because the pitch of the notes gets higher.
In the chord diagrams below, the vertical lines represent the strings (with the thick bass strings at the left). The horizontal lines represent the wire frets that go across the fingerboard, and the top horizontal line of each diagram represent the plastic or bone “nut” that the strings go over as they leave the fretboard and go up to the tuners. The note for each string is written at the top end of the string, just above the nut.
The numbered dots show where to put your fingers. The numbers correspond to specific fingers: index=1, middle=2, ring=3 and pinkie=4. Where a string has an X at the nut it means don’t play that string as that note doesn’t fit into the chord properly, and it’ll sound better without it.
Our first three chords are the three chords you would need to play a basic 12-bar blues in the key of A. If you hear a chord or a musical key referred to just by its letter, without the words Major or minor, then Major is probably what is meant. So here we have three chords in the key of A Major, namely E, A and D.
To play the chord, start on the first string that is to be played (so if there is an X you would start on the next string) and strum down with your pick or thumb. The notes should sound pretty much simultaneously.
To make your chords sound good, check the following:
- position your fingers just behind the frets, not on them nor in the middle of the space. You will notice that the sound is cleaner and free of buzzing
- use your finger tips where the rigors of hand contortion will allow. Using the tips of fingers will help you to avoid accidentally damping adjacent strings
- with your fingers fretting the chord shapes, pluck the strings one at a time. If a string sound buzzy or muted then check the points above and adjust your finger/hand position
It will take a bit of time to get your chords sounding clean, but it’ll come.
Once you have the chords sounding fairly good and clear, then you should practice changing between them. This is the other thing that takes practice.
With these three chords you will be able to play hundreds of songs. You might not realise it immediately, but you’ll learn to spot them in songs by the sound. Some songs will use the equivalent chords in other keys (more on this concept soon) so it may not work if you try to play along with your A, D and E chords. The reason I chose the chords in the key of A is that they are amongst the easiest on a beginner’s hands.
Once you can have a fair crack at these chords, try playing the following song. Hopefully everyone knows this one!
La Bamba
See if you can work out the following songs with your three chords.
- “The Great Pretender” - Various
- “You Are My Sunshine” - Various
- “Folsom Prison Blues” - Johnny Cash
- “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” - Proclaimers
- “I Wanna Be Sedated” - Ramones
- “Hotel Yorba” - White Stripes
- “Wild Thing” - Trogs
- “Three Steps to Heaven” - Eddie Cochran
- Any 12-bar blues song…
You’ll soon get to recognise songs that feature three chords, and we’ll be adding to the list above regularly.
Next lesson: more three-chord songs, a bit of explanation, plus… Four Chord Songs! Learning just one more chord adds hundreds more songs you’ll be able to play!
Topics: Lessons, Getting Started, Uncategorized |
September 24th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Don’t you need an X on the A string for D Major, otherwise it’s A/Dmaj? Mind you I don’t know much about theory.
September 25th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Well, sort of. Actually, I’d say it was D/A. Convention is that the chord name goes before the slash and the alternative bass note goes after the slash.
For newbies, a bit of an explanation:
What Chris says is, strictly speaking, true. Usually the lowest note in a chord is the note known variously as the root, bass or name note (so for a D chord the lowest note would usually be D). Sometimes, people prefer the sound of a chord with one of the other notes in that chord as the bass note.
D Maj has an A in it, so by playing the open 5th (or A) string we’re not adding a note, just duplicating one that occurs in the chord already. There’s not really a great difference, so for beginners we thought we’d keep it simple and get them to avoid just one string.
Either way you play it - missing the low E string, or missing both the low E and the A - are absolutely fine.
I’m currently working on a couple of articles which explain a bit more about how chords are put together. Hopefully those pieces will make this stuff a little clearer.
Thanks for raising the point, Chris.