Here you will learn guitar chords for beginners.

On the guitar we have major and minor chords. Their names are alphabetical, starting with A and ending with G. If you have ever played piano before, you’ll notice this is the same. On the image I am playing an E-minor chord. This is the easiest chord in my opinion as it requires only 2 fingers. I play this chord with my middle finger on the A-string and my ring finger on the D-string both in the second fret. You can choose to use different fingers for this chord, I use these because it makes it easier to transition to an E-Major and A-Minor chord.

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Let’s move on to your first Major chord.

This chord is called an E-Major or E chord. It is played the same as the E-minor chord we saw earlier, but you add your index finger on the G-string in the first fret. The quick difference between Major and minor is that a Major is really just a minor with a flat third. So for the E chord, the third note is a G note. (…E F G). To flatten the note (Gb) means to lower the note half a step. Thus you add your index finger on the first fret of the G-string to flatten the note that was an open G-string before. Don’t worry, this is just music theory, you don’t need to know or understand this to be a guitar player. Just know that Major and minor chords usually differ only one finger to play, one can be added or moved 1 fret.

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To represent chords on paper for beginners we typically use simple tabs. On these tabs you can see the first 5 frets of the guitar. The four fingers used to play chords are numbered 1-4. The index finger is number 1, the pinky 4. In tabs this is not used as the numbers will represent the frets you play with, not the fingers. More about this notation can be found on the Guitar-tabs page.

Knowing this, this is how we are going to show the E-Major chord, take a way finger 1 and you will have the E-minor chord. Remember E-A-D-G-B-e are the strings, the small numbers on the left represent the frets.

On the image below, you will find an overview of the standard chords. With these chords you will be able to play almost every pop song. When you get more advanced you can start practicing bar-chords.