Why You Need To Understand Chords
Understanding chords is essential to understanding why the guitar is such a popular and flexible instrument. A chord is a range of different notes played on the same instrument at the same time.
Not all instruments can do this, (think about a flute or a saxophone), and instruments that can are called harmonic instruments (other examples are guitars, violins and harps). Chords are fundamental to song-writing.
The use of a few simple chords strummed repeatedly whilst a voice or other instrument takes the main melody has formed the basis of many a successful song (think in terms of folk-era Bob Dylan).
Chord Names
Guitar musical notation follows the standard Western way of naming notes (using the alphabet letters of ‘A’ to ‘G’. Chords are also named after these notes, where the main ‘root note’ (usually the lowest note of a chord) of the chord dictates what it’s called (for example an ‘A Chord’ has ‘A’ as its root note). You also get ‘minor’ and ‘major’ chords, as well as all sorts of other ways of describing chords based on the musical scale (this will all be explained in later articles).
How Do Chords Work with the Guitar?
Most instruments require the player to be able to read musical notation if they are going to have full access to playing all the songs and musical styles out there. With the guitar this isn’t essential as chord diagrams (or boxes) provide a uniquely visual way of showing you where to put your fingers on the fingerboard to form the notes and sounds.
What is a Chord Diagram?
If you were to pick up your guitar and look down at the fingerboard from directly above and then draw exactly what you saw (as if drawing a map), you would end up with the basis for a chord diagram. You would then just need to add some symbols to represent the shape your fingers make when playing a chord to have a basic map of how to make a specific chord. This is what makes the guitar so accessible to non-professionally trained musicians.
How Do You Interpret A Basic Chord Diagram?
Imagine again that you are looking down at the fingerboard of your guitar from above. You should see what is essentially a grid of six vertical lines and a series of shorter horizontal lines with a white horizontal line at the very top (this is where the fingerboard starts). This grid is the basis of all chord diagrams.
Think now about what other information needs to go in there if it is to be useful. You use your fingers to play, so you need a way of marking which finger you are using (number them 1 to 4), and where about on the fingerboard you are putting them. This is sometimes called the Chord Shape. For example, here is an E7 chord represented by a chord diagram.
A guitar has six strings tuned to different notes (EADGBE), so you need to know which side is the high E string (the one on the far right) and which is the low E string (the one on the far left).
You also need to know if a chord requires to you to get a note out of all six strings, or just some of them. This information is shown on the diagram by two symbols, and ‘O’ which means that an open string (one which you have no fingers pressing on) should be played, and a ‘X’ which means that it shouldn’t.
And finally, some chords need you to make the chord shape further up the fingerboard. The distance up the fingerboard is measures in frets, and the frets are simply numbered upwards from ‘0’ (the one you never use represented by the white bar at the start) according to the number of frets on your guitar. So, if the number ‘5’ is marked on the left top of the chord diagram, you form the chord shape 5 frets up.
And these are the basics!
Do I Need to Know Anything Else?
This article should provide you with all you need to know about how to read simple chord diagrams. Some chord diagrams include additional information, but this will be explained in later articles. In the meantime check these out.
- The 5 Cornerstone Guitar Chords To Last You a Lifetime
- 3 Guitar Chords That Will Blow your Friends Away
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