Guitar Chord Chart for Beginners

Learning the open-position chords will enable you to start playing accompaniment to thousands of songs for both electric and acoustic guitar.

Most of the time, these chords are played with a clean, undistorted sound, because the distortion effect will bring to much "dirt".

The distorted guitar is usually best played with the power chords instead.

Take your time mastering these easy guitar chords below and you’ll be able to pick up accompaniment by ear to a lot of tunes without much of effort ;)

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Move the cursor over the diagrams to listen to the audio examples

A minor chord C major chord G major chord E minor chord A major chord A dominant seventh chord E dominant seventh chord D dominant seventh chord F major chord D minor chord G dominant seventh chord A major second suspended chord E major chord D major chord C dominant seventh chord B dominant seventh chord Free Basic Guitar Chord Chart

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A small image showing how one fretting finger presses two strings simultaneously with its pad

Note that to play the F major chord you need to press both the 1st and 2nd string with your index finger. In order to do so lean the finger in a way that it presses the string with its pad and not with a fingertip as usual.

For fun, I've arranged the first three rows of the chart in the way that each of them creates a chord progression that you can play straightforward from left to right,
as an example Am -> C -> G -> Em (the first row) and hear some music coming out while learning the chords ;)

Whenever you need to write down your chord ideas you can print out blank chord diagrams right from this page or download the PDF sheet and print it, click here to download.

I will introduce more guitar chords for beginners on the guitar chord progressions page.

If you find playing the chords from the chart difficult, but at the same time would really like to start playing some music right now while getting the hang of them, here is a little solution for you: the short video lesson below will teach you how to play a very simple chord progression using extremely simplified versions of the Em and G chords on just the first four strings, using only single fretting finger for each chord: 

Em xx----
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G xx----
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This video is provided by GuitarTricks a resources of premium guitar lessons with plenty of high quality video materials. They provide 14 days free trial if you are interested.

You might also check out the videos below on how to play a few basic open chords. The chords she is playing at the scene 1 - "Open Chords Introduction" are the Em and G. And the C - G - Fadd9 chord progression at the 2nd scene - "More Chords".

Learning Your First Open Chords

video lessons from jamplay.com

Scene 1 - Open Chords Introduction Scene 2 - More Chords Scene 3 - Chord Variations

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This article was last updated on January 27, 2024