Free Basic Guitar Chords

One of the first endeavors you are going to face while learning the guitar, is learning basic guitar chords. Learning guitar chords, will be one of the most fundamental lessons you learn in your guitar playing career. Use this guide, to master your guitar chords early on, and you’ll be playing songs in no time.

Guitar chords take advantage of the intervals between the strings, which in each case are perfect fourths excepting the interval between the B (second) and G (third) strings, which is a major third. To go above standard tuning it is common in many forms of hard rock as well as metal to use drop D tuning. This requires the player to change the low E string tuning to that of a D note.

Major chords contain a root note, a note a major third above the root and a note a perfect fifth above the root.

From left to right (A, C, D, E, G)

These five chords are fundamental to guitar for a variety of reasons including:

• they are all major triads, and as such they are all primary reference chords
• they all occur and are available in open position: the first three frets plus open strings
• each has its root on a different string
• their overall gross large shapes become the basis of the CAGED system
• they can be connected and linked together to create one large long contiguous 12-fret or one-octave greater resource pattern of major triad tones encompassing the entire fretboard.

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