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- How to read and play from chord diagrams
- Classic chords from famous songs by The Beatles, The Who, and more
- The secrets behind the sounds that make up great guitar chords
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Guitar Chord Basics
This guide covers the most common chords (known as chord shapes) that rock and blues guitarists use. It doesn’t cover every rock and blues chord out there, but it does contain the shapes that the majority of guitarists use when they’re playing live, recording, or just jamming alone or with friends.
Fretboxes, Tab, and Standard Notation
Guitar chords can be written in three ways:
- Fretboxes
- Tablature (Tab)
- Standard Notation
The first step toward playing rock and blues chords is knowing how to read fretboxes (also known as chord diagrams) and, ideally, tab and standard music notation as well. You don’t need to know how to read music to learn or play chords, but it’s certainly helpful.
Fretboxes (Chord Diagrams)
Fretboxes show the guitar upright with the headstock, nut, and tuning pegs at the top of the diagram. The six vertical lines represent the strings, as shown in the image below.
Standard Notation and Tablature
Tab is drawn with the guitar on its side, with the thickest string at the bottom. The six horizontal lines in the tab staff represent the strings of the guitar. The bottom line represents the 6th (lowest) string, and the top line represents the 1st (highest) string. Tab is almost always written with its equivalent standard notation, as in the image below.
Chord-Naming Conventions
Below are several examples of the naming conventions musicians use to indicate chord types, such as major chords and minor chords. The most common naming conventions for some of the most popular types of chords appear in bold below. This chart uses those naming conventions for all of the chords in this guide. For instance, in this chart, a C-major chord will appear simply as “C” rather than as “Cmaj.”
- C: C major, Cmaj
- Cm: Cmin, C-
- C7: Cdom7
- Cmaj7: CM7, C∆, C∆7
- Cm7: Cmin7, C-7
- C5: C(no 3rd)
- C+: Caug, C5+
- C7#9: C7(-10), C7(sharp9)
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