Guitar chords offer you a quick way to become a musician. You can accompany yourself singing or you can use your knowledge of guitar chords as a basis for finger picking patterns and arpeggios. This article gives you some tips on the ways to learn guitar chords and how to practice them.
Yes, you can teach yourself guitar chords. In fact, there's a couple of ways that you can go about it. Guitar chords give you an easy way to accompany yourself singing, and you don't necessarily have to know any guitar theory to do that because you can just read the names of the chords to a song straight off the sheet music.
One way you can teach yourself guitar chords is to buy a chord dictionary or download one from the internet. This approach will allow you to pick up the sheet music or tab to a song and play the chords written on it. You can use the chord dictionary to give you the fingering for any chords you do not already know.
One way you can use to teach yourself guitar chords is to print out the chord charts you are using and play a chord - say C major - for four beats, then another chord for four more beats, then another, and so on for all the chords you have on your chart. Change the order in which you play the chords to get your chord changing technique up to scratch.
The first chords you will be learning will be open chords in the first position on the fretboard. If you do not have some songs to learn but you want to learn some chords, start with simple ones like E major and A major. Practicing the changes between these two will get your fingers into guitar chord mode.
Learning chords as you need them for songs, and using a chord dictionary as your resource makes you reliant on the chord charts for the fingerings you need and on the sheet music or tab for the chords you use for any song. There is nothing wrong with this way of learning chords. It's just that you can learn some basic ideas behind the use of chords in music and, if you like, you can learn the locations of the notes on the guitar fretboard which will give you the freedom to choose which notes in which position you use to make up your chords.
For the purpose of practicing chord changes, don't practice for extended periods of time. Five or ten minutes a day is okay, but you can do more if the interest factor is there. The important thing is not to wear yourself down by overpracticing your chord changes. Your fingers will learn the knack of playing guitar chords in their own time, and there is nothing you can do to speed this process up.
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