Hi- This is Jon Green's guitar lessons site. You can also check out new lessons at hubpages.com - also contact me through the hubpages site with any guitar-related questions. The lessons cover acoustic, blues and jazz styles, with info on chords and improvising - and you are welcome to suggest lesson topics too. This material is designed to help you learn guitar independently, but a few lessons with a teacher would really help. You'll see a lot of chord grids on this site - the six vertical lines are the strings, and the horizontal lines represent the frets. For music theory check out my other site, jonsmusictheory.com
Guitar beginners - Step 1
Learn first position chords, the easiest first.The most important chords are Em A D G C F E Am. (the small m means minor)
With these chords you can start playing songs right away. Literally hundreds of songs only use 3 or 4 chords from this list. Below I've listed the important beginner chords, the vertical 6 lines are the strings, the horizontal lines are the frets. Place your finger immediately behind the fret and it should prevent buzzes and you'll also need less pressure.
Step 2 - Blues chords. Using E7, A7 and B7, you can play simple blues, and also dozens of rock n' roll and rockabilly songs. There is a section on this a few pages later.
Step 3 - Learn Guitar tab, understand the concept of harmonised scales - there is an example further down the page.
Step 4 - Play some melody lines and work on major and pentatonic scales.
There are 3 main areas of guitar playing - rhythm or chord playing, lead or melody playing, and chord-melody style, where you put chords and melody together. This is associated with jazz standards, though classical guitar is a similar approach in some ways, and just as hard to play!
Now have a look at the Beginner's section later in this website.
The chart below has some chord progressions in the key of G. They are each 4 bars long - so strum each chord 4 times. They work well for country rock style acoustic guitar. With these chords you can use Em pentatonic scale or G major scale notes. If you know just basic chords, you will hopefully learn some good alternative chords here. C add9 can often be used instead of C and has a more complete and ringing sound,used in the key of G.
In the key of G you can use the following chords, each built on the notes of the major scale:
G Am Bm C D Em F sharp m7b5
This is known as the harmonised scale of G - check out jonsmusictheory.com for more info. This pattern of notes and chords will be the same for all the different keys - the I IV and V chords are major, the ii iii and vi chords are minor. Chord vii is a half-diminished chord, and it's always found one semitone below the tonic note of the key, the one the key is named after.
