4 EASY Guitar Chords to Play 1000s of Songs

Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I'm here to teach you four simple songs to help you start playing real music this week. These are the four chords that I teach students in my seven level guitar system to help them start having fun with their guitar much faster. Now, these are simplified versions of the chords. And despite what the music purists say, don't worry, this is not cheating. This is to help you have more fun. Because if you're able to play real music and have fun with your guitar, you're more likely to stick with it. So I'd rather simplify things for you just a little bit and increase your chances of actually sticking with learning the guitar than having you quit in frustration. So these are simplified versions of chords, but it's what I've taught thousands of students in my guitar program, and they thank me every time. So let's get started with the first chord, because once you learn all four of these, you're going to be able to play thousands of songs on your guitar.

So the first chord we're going to start with is an E minor chord. Now, I am assuming in this video that you already know how to tune your guitar and hold it. If you don't, go to the link below, grab my free guitar crash course, and then come back to this video here. But an E minor chord requires two fingers. We're going to be using our first finger and our second finger. You're going to see a little block pop up over here. This is called a chord diagram, and all it does is show us where to put our fingers on our guitar. Now, we have these blocks here. They are called frets. We're going to be working in these first three blocks right here. So the first three frets. Now, number one, number two, number three. Okay? And I refer to the top of the guitar as the thick string and the bottom of the guitar as the thin string. So what we're going to do for this first chord is we're going to take our first finger, we're going to count up two blocks, and we're going to move down one string here. So this is going to be the fifth string. Okay. Second fret. And then we're going to take our second finger, and we're going to put it right, right below on that second fret on the fourth string, okay? And it's going to sound like this. If you strum it, it's a very dark, mysterious chord. So let's go about finding that again. All right, so let's take our hand off the guitar. We're going to take our first finger, put it on the top string, go one, two, move it down one string, and then we're going to put our second finger right below. Now, you might have noticed my first finger kind of sucked, slid back a little bit to make room for this second finger. Okay. So your fingers might do that, too. Everyone's hand's different, so find what works best for you. Okay, one more time. First finger, top string, second fret down one string, second finger, right underneath it in the second fret of the fourth string.

Okay, this is an E minor chord, and we're going to strum all six strings. Okay. This is a full chord. This isn't a simplified version of the chord chord. And the reason I use the first and second fingers, because there's some of you might have learned an E minor chord, and you're like, lauren, can I do this with my second and third fingers? You can. There's nothing wrong with it. It sounds exactly the same. But what I'm going to do when I show you the next couple chords is I'm going to create a pivot point for you. And these pivot points help make it easier for you to change between the chords. Because the biggest problem students have is, is that their chord changes aren't fast enough. And I work with a lot of older adults. If you don't know who I am, I'm Lauren Bateman, and I specialize in helping absolute beginners, particularly older adults over the age of 50, learn to play and have fun with their guitar. So moving one finger on the guitar when you're just getting started is very hard. Never mind moving three or four of them at the same time. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a pivot point for you to get from an E minor chord into our next chord. Two chords. All right, so let's go to our second chord, which will help you play your first song. So the first chord we had was the E minor. Okay? So we're going to get that in place again. First finger, top string, up one fret, down a string. Second finger in place. We have E minor. Now to get to my next chord. This is going to be your easy C chord. The easy C chord. The second finger is not going to move. The second finger is going to stay in place where what's going to happen is your first finger is going to pivot down to this B string, which is the second string up from the bottom first fret. Okay, so if I go back to my E minor, I'M going to lift up my first finger. Second finger is not going to move, and I'm just going to pivot down to the B string. Now, for comfort's sake, you might adjust this second finger back in the string as a note. The further back in the fret you go, the harder you have to press to make the string sound. So if you can. It's hard in the beginning because you might not have a lot of stretch. The closer you can stay to the front of the fret, the better. Middle also works, but the closer to the front of the fret, the easier it is to press. All right, so this was our C chord. So if you go back to E minor, we're going to swing that first finger back into place. All right, so we have our E minor chord. And then I'm just going to move the first finger to that first fret of the second string and we're going to just strum the bottom four strings. Okay. So it's a very bright sounding C chord.

Okay. So if we go back to E minor now we're just going to swing that first finger back up on that fifth string.

Okay. And then we're going to go back to the C chord. Ready? Pivot.

And then we're going to go back to the, the E minor.

Swing that finger back to C.

Okay. And then back to E minor.

Okay. So you can see it's much easier to do this than it is to do this. Okay. And you can see I still have a pivot point. Most people learn this three fingered C chord and it usually ends up sounding like that. The reason is to spread your fingers over three frets is very difficult in the beginning stages. You don't have a lot of dexterity in your hands. But also moving three fingers is a lot harder than just moving one. Okay. A lot of my students, when they come to me, they're like, I'm trying to learn this really hard C chord and I want to give up. And I show them the two finger C chord and they're like, I can do that. And I say, yes, you can. We're gonna start here. We will graduate to the full C chord. But if you learn this E minor in the easy C chord, you can learn a song called Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles. I do have a tutorial on that here on YouTube. And it's basically a two chord song. There's not very many of them, but that's a first song. That's a great one to start with. And all you have to do is Practice moving this first finger. E minor C. E minor C. E minor C. So those are your first two chords. The third chord we're going to learn is an easy G chord. All right? Now, if you're a music purist, we call this a G6 chord, if you want to know that. But I just tell people it's the easy G chord, and we're going to go back to our E minor, and hopefully you're starting to get familiar with it. But if not, just in case, let's start on that top string again with our first finger. Slide it up to the second fret, move it down to the fifth string, put that second finger right underneath it on the fourth string, okay? And we're going to strum that E minor to get to the easy G chord, we're going to leave our first finger in place. Now, the first finger is going to be our pivot point, and we're going to pivot up our second finger to this low E string, third fret, okay? And you're going to strum the whole guitar, okay? So it's going to go back to E minor.

And then pivot that second finger up, and you got G. Now, you'll notice my first finger here, just like on that C chord was, it's sliding forwards and back. Okay? So I'm making room for my fingers, and everyone's fingers are different, so we're making room for that finger to get by. Now, a note on the G chord, especially for me, because my fingers. Fingers are weird. I can't press directly on this string, or I tend to mute the string below. So sometimes I have to place my string just a little bit higher up on that string to make enough room to clear the string. So if you're hearing muted strings, it's okay. That's totally normal. Totally normal. You just have to find what works best for your hand. And a lot of times, as you get better with doing these chords, chords, you're going to get more experience, you're going to get more flexible, and that by itself fixes a lot of these problems. So what I would recommend students do now at this stage, before I teach you the fourth chord, is I would recommend that they work on transitioning between these three chords because they share a pivot point. And I would tell them, we're going to start on the G chord. So we're going to put our first finger up, two frets down one, and then the second finger on that top string, okay? And we're going to go G. We're going to pivot into E minor. So slide that first finger back. Second finger comes down, E minor. Now we're going to pivot into our C chord. Okay. Second finger is going to slide back a little bit. First finger pivots down to the B string and we have C. And then we're going to go back to E minor to G, to E minor, to C, to E minor, to G. Okay.

That's what I would have you do. I would just have you go between these chords just to get your fingers moving. Because that's half the battle when you're learning guitar is just to get those fingers moving back and forth. Okay?

Alright. So hopefully by now, and you can pause the video if you need to, you're starting to feel better about these three chords and moving between them, because you really only have to move one finger. So the fourth chord we're going to learn is called a D chord. And this is going to be an easy D chord because again, it only requires two fingers. Unfortunately, there is no pivot point between the E minor chord and the D. So what we're going to do is we're going to start from where we know and then we're going to go someplace new. So we're going to start on our E minor chord again. First fret, second fret down, one string, second finger underneath. Okay? We have our E minor chord. What we are going to do is we're going to lift up our second finger and we're going to count down one, two strings. Okay? So that's the motion there. And then we're going to use the third finger on the third fret of our B string. And we're only going to strum the bottom four strings. Okay. This is technically called the Desus two chord. It is a D chord. Sounds very pretty, very nice. But it only requires two fingers. Now, to get back to E minor, we would lift up the third finger, move the first finger up, move it up again, and then put the second finger right underneath. Okay? So what you might want to practice doing is just going from the first finger here to here, alright? From the fifth string to the third string. Just work on that transition because that's the biggest jump. Fortunately, they're in the same fret. And then getting that third finger into place. So you'd have E minor and D, E minor and D. Okay. And once you learn these four chords, you'll be able to play songs like Heart of Gold.

Okay. You can play songs like Heart of Gold. You can play Zombie by the Cranberries. I Think Perfect by Ed Sheeran might be one of them. You can play Brown Eyed Girl. You can play a large part of Country Roads. There are a lot of songs that you can play with just these four chords and I have a lot of them and tutorials on my website, laurenbateman.com so at this point, my recommendation to you would be working on practicing transitions between these chords. Because that's what songs are. Songs are just four chords. Sometimes three chords. Three or four chords that have different transitions. So what I would do is I would recommend going from E minor to C, E minor to G. E minor to D. Okay. That's all your E minor transitions. Then I would work on going from G to C. That's going to be a big jump. G to C, G to D. And then I would work on going from C to D. Okay. So those are all your chord combinations. And if you learn all of those, you'll be able to play any song that uses these four chords. And I promise you there are thousands of them out there and I do have a number of them on my website now. If you found this video helpful and you are a beginner and particularly if you're an older learner, I would love to work with you in my seven level guitar system. It is a step by step program designed for beginner guitar students to have more fun on their guitar this year. Okay. Because learning to play the guitar is not easy. Learning on YouTube. There's great, there's lots of information here over on YouTube. I teach a lot on YouTube, but there is nothing like having a step by step lesson plan to help you make progress week to week and month to month. So if you are serious about learning to play the guitar, I highly recommend that you go check out my seven level guitar system. I'll put a link in the description below and I hope to see you in another lesson video real soon.