7 MUST KNOW Guitar Chords for Beginners to Unlock 1000s of Songs!

There are literally thousands of chords that you could learn to play on your guitar. But fortunately for you, there are only a handful of really common chords that if you learn them, you'll be able to play 80 to 90% of the songs you dream about playing on your guitar. In this video, I'm going to show you seven essential chords that you should learn. First, I'm going to show you how to play them. I'm going to show you how to move between them, as well as handle some of the issues you might have with playing these chords. Not only that, at the end, I'm going to show you one extra bonus chord that will help you replace a very difficult bar chord. It's the dreaded F chord. Every one of my students hates it, so I show them this easier version so that they can access even more songs. Now, these chords were not chosen randomly. I actually chose from families of chords that sound good together. And we'll talk a little bit more about that towards the end of this video. And I'm going to show you how you can take and group some of these chords together to play along to some of your favorite songs, or maybe you even want to write your own.

So before we get into the list of chords you need to know, let's put a chord diagram up here because we're going to need this. This is our map. And it basically the top of your fretboard, these first three or four or five frets, okay? And what it does is these spaces, these squares, are the frets, all right? The closest to your headstock is fret 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth and so on. And then we have the strings. We have six strings on our guitar. The really thick one at the top of the guitar is an E followed by A, followed by, what is it? D followed by G followed by B and another E. And you can remember that by Eddie Ate Dynamite. Goodbye, Eddie. And the last thing you need to know about this chord diagram is there's going to be some circles on it that has numbers, okay? Mine have numbers. You're not always going to have the numbers, but I'm going to give you the numbers to make it easier for you here today. Number one is your index finger. Number two is your middle finger. Number three is your ring finger. And number four is your pinky. And this is the same whether you are a righty or a lefty. So let's use our first chord diagram we're gonna put up here, which is an E minor chord. I'm gonna show you two Ways to play this chord, and I usually play mine with the first finger and the second finger. So you're gonna see number one and number two on that chord diagram. I take the first finger, I count up two frets and I'm gonna put it on the A string. And right below it on the D string, I'm gonna put my second finger and it's a six string chord. Okay? So that's our E minor chord. And the reason I like to play the E minor like this is to pivot into C and G chords. It's much easier. And I show people in my crash course some simplified versions and how we pivot from that E minor. So it is a common way to play it. But there's also another common way that people ask me about all the time. And it's not wrong. You would use your second and third fingers instead of your first and second. So your second fingers on A, your third finger's right below it on D. Totally acceptable. It doesn't matter if you use first and second or second and third. It's not going to change the sound of the chord. Everyone's hand is different. Find which one's most comfortable for you and go with that. Now, the benefit of if you use your second and third finger to learn our next chord, which is going to be the E major chord, is you're already in place, your second and third fingers are already there. All you have to do is add the first finger on the first, first fret of the G string, okay? And it'll sound like this. So we have E minor. Just lift up that first finger. E major, put it back. Okay?

And you probably heard I muted a string down there. Okay, so let's talk about this right now, because some of you, that might have happened, alright? That's just me having bad form and bad posture on my chord. So what's happening is that high E string, this part of my palm, I was doing something bad and it was touching the high E string. See, I've been playing guitar for 20 years and sometimes I still make mistakes too. It happens. Okay, so what do we do? We learn from those mistakes. So if I'm playing the E and I'm hearing this, it means that my wrist or my hand is kind of collapsing like this round your hand. Okay. Don't have it like this round the hand. It has to go around the fretboard. You want to make sure there's like a straight space under here, under your chords. Okay, so look at that. We just addressed our first big mistake. That most people have when they play chords. So those are our first two chords. And you probably heard me say major and minor. And what's the difference of that? We're not going to get into a bunch of music theory here, but I think it's very important for you to understand that major chords, it's just the name of the chord, and it talks about the sound. We call that a voicing in music. So major chords tend to be very happy, happy sound. Whereas minor chords tend to be, like, dark and mysterious and sad. Listen to that again. So here's a major chord, and here's a minor chord.

Okay? Now in music, it's not going to tell you that it's an E major chord. You're just going to see the letter E, okay? And that will always indicate a major chord. If you need to play something different, they'll either be a letter or a number after the E. So in the case of E minor, we have a little M, and that little M just means minor, okay? So in this next example that I'm going to show you, we're going to have a minor and A. So when you see that A, you know that that's A major. And then the A with the little M is A minor. So let's talk about these two. Fortunately, we're going to start with A minor, and you already know the chord, okay? You just learned E major. So let's build that back. So we have second finger, third finger, first finger, okay? Build that back up. Now, to get to A minor, all you have to do is take each one of your fingers and move it down one string each, okay? And now instead of playing all six strings, we're gonna play the bottom five. And you know that because on the chord chart, you're gonna see an X, okay? On the chord diagram, there'll be an X. And that means don't play that string or try as best as possible not to play that string. Okay? So that is a minor, again, has a sad, dark, mysterious sound to it versus A major.

A little brighter, a little happier. Okay, now, common problems with A major, this first finger, you can see how it tends to be towards the back of the fret. This is what happens to a lot of students. They just don't have enough strength yet to push that string down. Because the further you are in the back of the fret, the more pressure you need to play your chords. So you always, whether you're playing E, E minor, whatever you want to try to be the front of the fret as best as possible. So we have A major, and I am playing this with my first, second, and third fingers. All right. For some people, that works out. I'm a smaller person. I have smaller hands. Some people have really big fingers, and they can actually play an A major chord with just their first and second fingers. I'm going to try doing it here. It's a little weird for me because my fingers are small, but I've had students who could do this by playing with their first and second fingers. Only your fingers are big enough. Another great version for people with big fingers. And I don't like teaching bar chords, but some people find this helpful is they play the first finger across all three strings. The great thing about this is I can really get that finger to the front of the fret. So for some people, that is the easiest option. This does not work for every person, especially if you have big fingers. So again, play around and see which version will work best for you and use that as your A major chord. So one more time, we have A minor, which looks much like an E major chord. And then we have A major. Okay. And as you play through, if you hear any muted strings, check which string it is. Look at your hand. It could be that your fingers are laying at an angle like this instead of perpendicular into the guitar. Make sure that the other thing to look for is the actual guitar itself. I know a lot of students, they play like this because it makes it easier to see the strings. But now you've completely changed the angle of the guitar. We want this fretboard to be straight up and down as best as possible. So if you're playing your A minor chord and you're playing with your guitar like this.

There'S a chance that these bottom strings are going to get muted because of the angle of that guitar. I know it's difficult, but as best as possible, try to look over at your fretboard instead of changing the entire angle of the guitar. Now, this next trio of chords, I'm going to show you an easy way to play them. And it's going to require four fingers, but they work really great over tons of songs. And it only requires you to move one or two fingers, which makes life a little bit easier. And we're going to start off with the G chord. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to put our pinky on the bottom E string third fret, and our third finger is going to be right above it. Now, for these next three chords, these two fingers are not going to move at all. They're just going to stay here. Now for the G chord, we're going to put our second finger on the top string and then we're going to put the first finger right below on the second fret of the A string. So we have second finger on the third fret, top string, first finger on the second fret of the A string. Now something that's common and I have to do this with my G string. Sometimes this second finger sits a little bit too low and it mutes that A string. Okay? So for me, I have to move, I have to actually play a little bit higher up on the fretboard above the string to make that sound. If I don't, I tend to mute that A string. It's a very common thing that happens. Especially if you have smaller hands like me. You sometimes just have to play because it's hard to bend that knuckle sometimes. So you just have to play a little bit higher on the fret to get that to ring. So that is our G chord. Okay? So we have pinky, third finger, first finger, second finger. Okay. And this is a real G chord. It's a very bright sounding G chord. Now to move to a C chord because a lot of people, oh, they hate this C chord. And I don't blame you. This is a much easier version. This is actually called the CAD9 chord, if you want to know the real name of it. So it's a different voicing of A chord. And all we're going to do, we're going to leave these two fingers in place and this top finger is going to come down one string and this first finger is going to come down one string. Isn't that easy? Isn't that an easy chord change? It's great. So you just can go from G to C by moving these two fingers up and down one string each. Look at that, nice and easy. Ok, so we have a G chord and then we have a C chord. It's called the C add nine. But it does replace a C chord very well. And the last one I'm going to show you is a D chord. Okay. And this is called a DSUS4 chord if you want to know the real voicing. But works really well as a D chord. All right. And all we had to do when I went from that C chord, I just took my second finger away and I moved the first finger down to the G string second fret. Okay, so we have G.

C.

D. Okay, let's do that again. Ready? We're going to move between these square chords. G.

C.

D already sounds like a song, right? One more time. G, C, D. We got G and C and D. And that's like if we did in the opposite direction, you could play Sweet Home Alabama.

Okay, so see, there you go. Here's an example of a song that uses mostly three chords and you can play the entire song. So great example right there. So G, C, D. Great songs to learn, great chords to learn together. And the final one I'm going to give you is a bonus. Okay. Because I have so many students, they're like this darn F chord just keeps showing up in all these songs. How do I play it? So what we're going to do, go back to your A minor chord. Okay, so our first finger is already in place on this A minor. And it's very common that you might change from A minor to into an F chord. What we're going to do is we're going to leave the first finger, bring the second finger down one string and then the third finger is going to reach up and over third fret of the fourth string. And if you play the bottom four strings, this is called an F major seven chord. A different voicing, but it's much easier to play and it's a great substitute to give you access to more songs. So once again, let's go back to that. A minor chord. Alright, so you have open A string, second finger, third finger, finger open, E string, leave the first finger in place, move the second finger down a string, lift up the third finger and adjust your hand. You can see I had to kind of slide my fingers forward. And then we're going to do the third fret on the D string, play the bottom four strings. And this is an easy F major seven chord. You can use it to replace an F chord in any song. So I promised you I was going to show you how you could group these chords to play thousands of songs or even write your. And you can always go over to my website, laurenbateman.com songs I actually organize songs by the chords that you need to play them. So that's also very helpful. So the first three we're going to talk about are A, D and E. Very, very commonly used in songs. I wrote a few down here. Folsom Prison Blues, Leaving On a Jet Plane, Wild Thing, Three Little Words and many, many more. The G, C and D chords as well as E minor. If you put those four together, you got tons of songs. Ring of Fire, Wonderful Tonight, Heart of Gold, Wagon Wheel, Brown Eyed Girl, you even saw I did Sweet Home Alabama. Okay, so so many songs that you can play and then if you take those chords and you add the A minor and the F major seven into the mix, you can play Knocking on Heaven's Door. Simple man have you ever seen the rain Country Roads. There are so many songs that you can play with just these seven or eight chords, so I highly encourage you to go explore that. Now if you are looking for a step by step way to learn the guitar, get your fingers moving faster, changing between these chords quicker, then I highly recommend you go check out my seven level guitar system where we work on hand dexterity, strumming and all of the cool techniques you need to to play the songs that you know and love. And this program is designed for older learners. Most of my students are in their 50s, 60s and 70s. I even had a woman 85 years old who wrote me an email the other day that she's loving the course. So it just goes to show you, you're never too old to start learning to play guitar. I'll put a link in the description below. Go check that out. I would love to help you get your guitar singing.