Desi Serna

Learning to play the guitar is a lot fun. Use this cheat sheet to help you get started with your guitar finger placement and guitar chords. If you need help with finger placement on your guitar, use tablature (tab) and fingerboard diagrams.Practice playing the most common open-position chords on your guitar to get that “jangly” sound, and make sure you know the notes on the neck of your guitar to change starting notes in scales, chords, and arpeggios.

Guitar theory is an area of study that explains how you can play, improvise, and compose popular music on the guitar fretboard — and why certain elements of music go together the way they do.Dive into guitar theory by exploring a fretboard diagram showing notes along the 6th and 5th strings; some major scale patterns; Roman numerals and the major/minor chord sequence; and mode names.

This Cheat Sheet has some handy tips that you can keep in your practice area for quick reference.Use these techniques to review your basic rhythms and warm up your hands at the beginning of a playing session. Before you begin, trim and file the nails on your fretting hand so that nothing comes between your fingertips and the strings.

The open C chord is one of the most basic types of chords that guitarists play. You probably learned it early on when you first started with guitar. But did you know the C chord shape doesn’t have to be confined to the open position? You can move the shape up and play other major chords with it. You accomplish this move either by placing a capo (a device clamped on the fingerboard to raise the open strings) on your guitar or by rearranging your fingers and barring across the neck.

On the guitar, the D form is unique in that it’s the only CAGED form that isn’t rooted to either the 6th or 5th string. Instead, its root is on the 4th string. This form is awkward to finger and technically isn’t a barre chord. As with some of the other CAGED forms, you don’t usually use it in the same way that it appears in the open position.

On the guitar, before you break down the C form into smaller and more useable chord voicings, you should add to it in the form of an arpeggio pattern. An arpeggio is a technique in which you play the notes of a chord one at a time like a scale rather than simultaneously as a chord. The term is also used as the verb arpeggiate to describe how players pick through the notes of chords individually rather than strumming them all simultaneously (think of the opening to “The House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals or “Everybody Hurts” by R.

Mixolydian is the fifth mode of the major scale — when the 5th scale degree functions as the tonic on the guitar. It centers on a major chord, so it’s considered a major key. It’s also called the dominant scale because the 5th degree of the major scale is named the dominant pitch and forms a dominant 7th chord.