Basic Guitar Chords – 8 Easy Must Know Guitar Chords For Beginners

In this lesson I show you 8 basic guitar chords that you MUST know. These easy guitar chords are the basis of countless great songs, and they are basic guitar chords that you will be playing for the rest of your guitar playing life…

The chords I will show you are: A Major, C Major, D Major, E Major, G Major, A minor, E minor and F. With the F chord, I will show you how to play this very easily.

To start off this lesson I will show you how to read a chord diagram. Chord diagrams are used in every chord book and reference material for learning chords, so knowing how to read these is vital. Chord diagrams are often used when you learn guitar chords online as well. Chord diagrams are a visual way of seeing where to put your fingers on the guitar fretboard, to play any chord. They even show you which finger to use, on which fret and on the correct string.

A very important part of learning to play chords is to work on changing between them quickly and cleanly. In this lesson I give you some great, practical tips, on changing chords quickly. I will also show you a great exercise to do for your chord changing. This will make it much easier to play the chord you are learning, without having to think where your fingers should be going. Changing between the chords that you are learning can often cause frustration. These tips and examples I give you will help make changing chords much easier, and much faster.

After learning how to play the 8 basic guitar chords, I show you two easy to play chord progressions. A chord progression is a series of chords that you change between. We start off with a simple two chord, chord progression, and then move on to a chord progression with four chords. This four chord progression is one that is used in many, many popular songs. For a lesson that focuses on the four chord progression, check out this video from the GMM YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_4dhA3yKyk

Challenge: To get the most out of this basic guitar chords lesson, complete the following challenge. Play each chord for 1 minute each. Follow the exercise shown in the video to play the chord, take your hand off the guitar, and place the chord straight down again. Do this for each of the chords in this lesson, which is only a total of 8 minutes a day!

As well as completing this challenge, play the two chord progressions for as long as you want, as often as you want