Easy guitar chords

My name is James Davies and when I first started to learn guitar 35 years ago you would not believe how difficult it was to find information about easy guitar chords. There was the Bert Weedon book"play in a day", and a Beatles songbook which contained chords that were far above beginners level and not much else at all.

All I wanted was a book that simply contained guitar chords for beginners but it just did not exist so I was left to struggle on alone sometimes taking weeks to learn a simple song. Just like you I wanted to get playing in the shortest possible time but I just seemed to keep hitting a brick wall at every turn.

The purpose of my site is to help you become a guitar player as quickly as I can so you too can get the same pleasure from guitar playing that I have for many years.

Read on to learn about chords and how to play them,the importance of regular practice and the best products around at the moment to help speed up your progress.

Practice

The only difference between your standard of guitar playing and who you consider to be the greatest guitar player of all time is that they have practiced more than you have,there is just one simple rule to remember about playing guitar....the more you practice the better you will become.

As someone who has been teaching guitar for over twenty five years i can tell you that the question i get asked more than any other is..how much practice should i do to get good?well of course everybody wants to "get good"the problem with people is that they want to be a great player with little or in some cases no practice at all,this of course is ridiculous and a way of thinking that you must not adopt.

Right from the moment you read this you must become someone who puts in as much practice as you can every day of your life forever,every spare minute you have should be spent practicing,if you are really serious about becoming a great player this is the only way to think,if we could practice for just twenty minutes a week and become a great player dont you think that everyone on earth would do it and then everyone in the world would be good.

First of all you must make sure that you pick up your guitar and practice every single day without fail,next you must play your guitar for as long as you can play for,in the early days this will be quite difficult to do as your hands will ache and your fingers will get very sore on the tips but dont worry,as time goes by you will find that you can play for longer and longer and feel no discomfort at all,in the early days you may find that ten or fifteen minutes is all that you can manage but eventually you will be able to build up to what i can do which is easily five or six hours on a daily basis.

Dont think that you will have to play for several hours a day before you will be a good player,i play guitar for a living so i have the time every day to play for that long,i realize that the reality for most people is that they have to go to school everyday or they have to go to work so of course if you are one of those people then you wont be able to play for hours a day so what you must do is practice for as long as you can even if that is just thirty minutes a day you will still make progress so do not feel disheartened if you cannot practice for long,a small amount of practice is better than none at all.

Over thirty years ago when i started playing i worked on construction sites all around the uk,as you can imagine after doing that all day every day i was shattered and just wanted to get back to my hotel and rest but these are the times that you must stay focused and remember your dream to "get good"i would pick up my guitar every night in my hotel room and practice for as long as i could,you too must adopt this attitude if you want to be a guitar player.

After you have been playing for a while you will begin to see that you find some things easier to play than others and it is very easy to fall into the trap of playing over and over the things you find easy to play,yes of course your guitar playing should always be fun by all means have some fun playing the things that you find easy but dont forget that you must always concentrate on working on the things that you find difficult or you will never improve.

Identify your weak areas and spend extra time on them rather than shy away from them,in the long run this is what will make you a good player.

When we play a guitar it is difficult enough to place just one finger in the right place but when playing chords we are trying to place several fingers in the right place all at the same time so of course the level of difficulty is multiplied,we want to be able to set up the chord shape as fast as we can so that we can keep the song going but where a lot of people go wrong is that they set up the chord shape and just start strumming,remember that when you are strumming you are just training your strumming hand so what you must do to get good at forming chord shapes fast is to put the chord shape on,strum it just once or twice to make sure that you have placed your fingers in the right places then take the chord off,now form the chord again and strum it just once or twice again and so on,put it on take it off put it on take it off.

This may well seem a strange way to practice guitar and i can see why you would think that but just trust me when i say that this is what you must do,i will be telling you many things that you should do over time that may not make much sense at this time but believe me as time goes on you will see yourself improving.

Can you remember the movie "the karate kid"?wax on wax off,wax on wax off,none of the strange instructions made any sense to the karate kid but he had trust and stuck with it and what happened to him in the end?yes he became a champion.if you follow my instructions you too will become a champion on guitar.

Read this first

As i mentioned earlier, 35 years ago when i was just starting to learn how to play guitar all i could find was a couple of books which in all honesty were of no help to me whatsoever so can you imagine how great i felt after about a year when i found myself in the position of been able to afford a top professional private guitar teacher,it changed everything.

Immediately i felt my confidence soar,i was of course still a beginner of a very low standard but just because i had my own personal teacher i felt like i was on a much higher level,i had purpose and direction,i had guidence and regular goals to reach by the following week.This was great.

After about six months of regular lessons and what i at least considered to be good progress i was informed that my construction job contract was about to end and i was to be sent to my next job which happened to be about eighty miles away,this of course was devastating for me,how could i make it to my lesson with it been that far away,well the only thing for it was that i would get a new teacher in the next town,this then became a way of life for me,different teachers in different towns all over the place,some of course were better than others but i did learn something from all of them.

Eventually this plan began to fall apart as it was not always possible to find a teacher in all the places i had to go to,sometimes i had to travel several miles just for a one hour lesson and then obviously travel all the way back again which of course with no car and a guitar to carry around with me soon became a big inconvenience,sometimes it was possible to have the teacher travel to me but as you can imagine this always meant that i would have to pay a higher fee.

private teachers are wonderful,if you can afford them but keep in mind that you will eventually have a level of disruption to have to tolerate IE.either you will have to cancel your lesson for one reason or another or your teacher will.

These days the best way to learn guitar by far is by using online videos,think about it,you do not have to travel anywhere and nobody has to travel to you so a lesson will never be canceled so your progress will never be held up,you can practice at a time that suits you day or night,you do not have to try to squeeze everything into one hour you have as long as you like to study and if you do not fully understand something you can keep going back over it as many times as is needed before you move on and it costs you no extra at all.

Whether you want to learn easy guitar chords or advanced lead guitar styles online videos are now the way to go,all i can say is that i wish that online video courses were around when i was starting off,my progress would have been accelerated no end.Rock guitar,Blues guitar,Jazz,country,folk,heavy metal,funk,it is all available now.

Through all my years of teaching guitar when i met a new student for the first time i would always ask them what style of music they would eventually like to play,it always interested me to see how their opinions changed as they developed over the following four or five years,they may have said in the beginning that they wanted to play country but ended up playing Rock or they say that they want to play classical and ended up playing Jazz but no matter what they ended up playing every player at one time or another learns how to play the Blues.

There is something about the Blues that just seems to grip people and i was no different,as a teacher i can play all styles but i still love the Blues and why not?the Blues sounds so great that most people think that surely you must have to play for twenty years before you could learn how to play it but i lost count many years ago of how many people i have taught to play the Blues in an hour.

Just like with most things in life there is some good news and some bad news,the good news is that to play the Blues you will need to be able to play just three chords and they are all beginners chords,what makes them sound like the Blues is all about how many strums you play on each chord before you change to another chord,if you learn the basic pattern of how long you stay on each chord you will be able to strum a basic Blues in an hour.

The bad news is if you want to be a Blues lead guitarist you will have to practice for many hours a day learning all kinds of Blues scales,riffs,slides,bends,hammer-ons,pull offs,this takes time,effort,practice and great patience but if you really want it bad enough you will look on all this as a pleasure not a chore,yes its hard but believe me you have a lot of fun along the way while you are learning.

Ok lets take a look at the basic strumming pattern for the Blues,the strumming part is known as the RHYTHM,you may have heard the Blues called the twelve bar Blues,this is because in music you will play twelve bars of music,one bar means that you will count up to four once,1234,each time you say a number you will play one strum so one bar is four strums,here is the pattern for the twelve bar Blues.....

A chord 1234/1234/1234/1234................16 strums=4 bars

D chord 1234/1234...................................8 strums=2 bars

A chord 1234/1234...................................8 strums=2 bars

E chord 1234............................................4 strums=1 bar

D chord 1234............................................4 strums=1 bar

A chord 1234........................................... 4 strums=1 bar

E chord 1234............................................4 strums=1 bar

Now count up how many bars you have just played,yes twelve,congratulations you have just played a twelve bar Blues,remember everytime you say a number you play one down strum(strum down towards the floor)and dont forget that this will only sound good if you play it in perfect time(keeping it going to the same perfect tick tock just like a ticking clock)dont start playing faster when you are on a part that you find easy and then slow down when you are on a part that you find difficult,it has to be played at a regular steady beat or it will not work,remember slow and right is better than fast and wrong.

If you like people like Eric clapton,BB king,Albert king and all the other Blues giants then this is the pattern to play.

Good luck.

it gets better

If you have only just started to learn how to play your guitar then you will know how frustrating it can be in the early days when you want to keep playing for hours and hours but you can only play for a short time before your fingers begin to get really sore on the tips,i too had the same problem in fact everyone has the same problem in the early days so dont worry you are not alone.

The way to think about it is that if your fingers were not sore then that would mean that you are not practicing anywhere near enough so be proud of your sore fingers and tell all of your friends about it,the trick is to play until your fingers are so sore that you cannot even bear to touch the strings anymore then stop and rest for about an hour then go back to it and start again,do not wait until you get to the point where your fingers begin to bleed as that is just crazy as you will have to wait several days for them to heal so you will not be helping your progress you will positively be hindering it.

Many years ago when i first started to play people around me that had started to play at around the same time were trying all sorts of mad ideas to build up the calouses on the end of their fingers faster,by the way i have no intention of sharing any of them with you here as the truth is that the only thing that really works is steady daily practice and nothing else,believe me when i say there are no short cuts to becoming a good guitar player,if there was someone would have sold the secret for a fortune many times over so please do not waste your time and money on special tricks and secret methods,they do not exist.

People who look for short cuts never make any real progress so if any of those kind of people seem to be making progress faster than you do not let it bother you as further on down the line they will be exposed as people who do not know half as much as you thought,i urge you to follow my guidance and do it the old fashioned way,there is no substitute for daily practice so sit back and enjoy the ride in the knowledge that you are doing it all the right way.Trust me you will end up being a great player.How sore will your fingers be today?

I'd really love to read what you think of my lens about learning some easy beginners guitar chords. Are you a guitar newbie? Did you find some useful information here? What sort of help and information would help you even more with your guitar playing?

Drop me a comment and let me know.