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.

On the guitar, different C form chord voicings are played by breaking down the arpeggio pattern into smaller, fragmented pieces. Here are several ways to play partial chord shapes based on the full C form. In these examples, you fret and pick only the black dots. The numbers in the black dots are suggested fingerings.

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, there are many types of chords that include 2nds and 9ths, but the three that you’re most likely to encounter are sus2, add9, and 9 chords. You start with the sus2 chord, a chord that has its 3rd replaced or suspended by a 2nd. Basics of sus2 chords Sus2 chords are stacked 1-2-5 or some combination thereof.

There’s more than one way to put together and play a 7th chord shape on the guitar. Here are a few m7 examples, namely variations on the open Em7 and Am7 forms. Expect to see these shapes used elsewhere on the fretboard as full or partial barre chords. To understand why these variations work, look at the intervals to see how they appear in multiple locations.