Monday, April 26, 2010

LESSON 4 - THE GUITAR CHORD CHART


This is my fourth lesson here at Guitar tutorials for beginners and this will be an easy task for you than the last lesson I had discussed with you in these tutorials. This is a big help in order for you to be that guitar player you had dreamed in your life. The lesson that I will discuss will focus only on basic chords first. There are hundreds of chords in a guitar, and some of them, will give you hardship to make that specific chord. 

Chords with bar or flat will be disregarded first to help your finger interact well with the guitar and making you comfortable playing it when you learn how to strum the guitar right in the future.  I understand if you hadn’t learned how to tune the guitar right. Cause as I had said, previously, it takes time.  So, if you had skipped that phase for the mean time while you memorize the sound of each chord in an open hit of the string.  For the mean time, practice how to read a chord in a guitar chord chart in a breeze.

Why do I need to learn this? I want to play and strum the guitar

Take it easy, cowboy! You will, if you learned all the basics before anything else. This is the right direction for you; because if we proceed to that phase, we will be making no sense at all. Why? Cause you can’t read any chords at all. How can you play a song if you don’t know any chords to play it, right? So, you better sit back and learn the mechanics on how you can read those chords coming from a guitar chart.  This will make this lesson easier for your guitar playing. Plus, this can make you learn those songs you liked to play and sing it while you play the guitar, independently.

Numbers is the name of your fingers.

In this chart, fingers were considered as 1,2,3,4 except for your thumb. Your thumb normally, is not used to make a chord, so, in this tutorial I didn’t include it. We will concentrate only in your four fingers, and this includes you’re: pinkie, pointing, ring and lastly your middle fingers. 




This is how the numbers represent your fingers in the guitar chord charts:
  • Pinkie  -   # 1
  • Ring  -   #2
  • Middle -   #3
  • Point -      #4                
     Remember these number representations to make it easier for you to position your fingers in a specific chord to the fret board. Most of it (guitar chord chart) that uses this technique presenting the position or the specific finger how to do the chord. This helps beginners to do it much more comfortable to their fingers. This adds convenience to you. But, some of it doesn’t use this technique. Just a black point in a string indicating you must press it to do this particular chord.

This is astonishing, my first time!

Now that you had laid your eyes in it for the first time, how does it feel? Excited, don’t you? Well, this is just as simple thing that can easily be understood in these Guitar tutorials for beginners

Guitar chords example
From my previous lesson, I think that you can understand this more easily without any effort after all.  Just follow the instruction I had given and you’re finish with these lesson and go to the preceding topic. But, there’s something you need to consider here with a very little detail that can make you more precise on how to read it and eradicate confusions.

Some of it comes with a different position.  It comes horizontally or vertically. The first thing you need to consider is this:

·         If the chart has been presented vertically, you will read it starting from your left to the right (off course!).

·         If the chart has been presented horizontally, you will read it from top to bottom.

 And each, line as you can see it, corresponds to each string in the guitar.

How do I know what fret I will be using to make that chord?

You will know the fret of that specific chords looking at the Roman numeral character usually in the top of the fret image representation in the chart or in the right side if it’s in vertical position. You can also tell what fret it is if you can see the thick dark line in the top of the lines that represents the string of the guitar. This thick dark line is the representation of the start of the fret board of the guitar that I had discussed in my previous lesson about the guitar parts.  
You can see this thick dark line with the chords like  A, E, C, and also G cause these chords can be found In the first three frets in the fret board. It (the dark thick line) will be present. If not, this means the chord that you were looking starts with the fourth fret and above.

What’s that? Is that X and O?

Yup, it is and this is a very technical part to the string for a certain chord. X tells you that you need to make a string dead and by doing so, that string will not make a sound when you hit it or more precisely, If you make that chord as a whole. If you see that there’s an O in the string then, this mean that it is an open string. And open string is a method were you hit the string without pressing it. A brief example of this is this: don’t do any chord and strum your guitar. That’s an open string just like in my previous lessons about tuning a guitar. An open hit string chord is approximately called an open string chord to be more specific about our last topic. You’ deal with this dead and open string more when you are an advance player and learn its principal idea, deeper, when we advance our Guitar lessons for beginners..

Where can I find this thing?

There are lots of places you can get one of this. You can search Google using the keyword “guitar chart chords” or “guitar chart chords for beginners” to be more precise about your search. You can also buy  a song hits and they usually provides you one  there; or if you’re serious about this stuff, then, buy a guitar chord chart  for yourself, if you’re in fire to learn all those chords in an instant. 

That should wrap this thing up and I’m off to make my rest. This one’s an easy task for you to understand. Now, go and practice what you had learned this time.  Practice can help you improve your skills a lot. There’s a lot more to come so you need to be prepared in my next lesson on how to strum the guitar.  Give it some time and you’ll see the results. That’s the key to your success in this tutorial. The Guitar tutorials for beginners will help you reach those goals of yours to be a better player in this instrument called “guitar”.