One of the awesome things about guitars is that you don’t have to learn any theory at all before you can play your first song. While a pianist would need to know what notes are in a chord a guitar player doesn’t need to. On guitar have 5 main open chord shapes C, A, G, E and D, and by placing them around the fingerboard, with a capo or a barre’, we make up all the chords - the CAGED system.
Let me give you some basic music theory notions just to give you an idea of what is happening.
In music we have two important chord families, the Major and the Minor chords. A Major chord is made up of the 1st, 3rd and 5th note of the scale, while a minor chord is the 1st,the flat 3rd and the 5th. So if you want to know which notes are in the C Major chords you’ll have to look at the C major scale - C D E F G A B C - and take C, E and G, while C minor chord would be C, Eb and G. We call them triads because they are made up of three note even if on the guitar we double some notes and use 4, 5 or even 6 strings when we play them.
Don’t worry if doesn’t make sense straight away, because right now you can just learn chords shapes and off you go.
On guitar we have a couple of very important “shapes” that we use all the time, let’s have a look at them.
“Open chords” use pressed notes and open strings. They are commonly played near the head stock of the guitar and their unique sound makes them the work horse in many styles of music.
After you learned how to play all the open chords you can upgrade your chord vocabulary by learning exceptions of the triads. The most common are the suspended, 7th & 9th chords. Theoretically you get a suspended chord when you exchange the 3rd with the 2nd or the 4th. You ad a 7th to the Major or Minor chord and you’ll have a 7th chord and ad 9th to get an add9 chord. Practically you can just learn the shapes for now.
E and the A “barre’ chords”. They are quite simple to remember because one shape could moves the fretboard and gives us many chords. Barre’ chords can be a bit more hard to play than the open chords but they allow you to play in most possible key including sharps and flats.
Eventually you should work on the “power chords”. Because they are made of the 1st & 5th note of the scale, they are not major or minor and one shape is used for both. Their shape can be moved across the fingerboard like the barre’ chords - they are identical to the low 3 strings on the E and A barre’ chords.
They can sound good on an acoustic guitar, but it’s on a distorted electric guitar that they shine. Many extremely melodic artist like U2 adopt distorted guitar & power chords for their riffs and have been the power house of many music genres.
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