Most beginners are introduced to guitar chords at the earliest stage of learning guitar. They are a foundation upon which not only harmony but also melody are build and derived and so their importance cannot be ignored.
As a beginning guitar player you really don’t need many chords to get you going. Even a basic set of 10 chords will open the door to 100’s of popular songs instantly!
Guitar chords are grouped into different families and this is decided by how the chord is built, in other words, it’s structure. As a beginner you only need to worry about learning 3 families of chords. These are the most important and form a basis upon which all others are constructed. They are Major,Minor and Dominant 7 chords.
For beginners it can be quite a challenge to sound guitar chords clearly, even the easier ones. Most find that learning the shapes are relatively easy however. If you are not used to playing guitar it’s likely that your fingers will hurt until a layer of harder skin has built up. This normally takes a month or two.
I refer to this as a kind of ‘pain barrier’ which all guitar players must go through. After a few weeks the skin on the tops of your fingers will harden and once this happens, playing guitar chords will no longer hurt you.
We divide chords into two main forms, Barre chords and open chords. Open chords consist of all the beginner guitar chords when first learning to play. They use open strings are stay fixed in the one place.
Barre chords on the other hand are movable and by transposing the shape up or down the neck you can produce different chords. A fair amount of strength is required to perform Barre chords so that all notes sound clearly however once you achieve this it’s easy to form them anywhere on the neck.
A common beginner mistake is to try to learn lots and lots of chords. This is of no real use to you when first learning to play. It’s far better to concentrate on a smaller group of guitar chords and ones you’ll use consistently in many different songs.