How to Play Basic Guitar Chords in 6 Easy Steps

Rock stars make guitar playing look easy, but it takes a lot of technique and practice to make a guitar sing. As with any skill, you have to master the basics first. A guitar works by amplifying sound frequencies. The strings produce these frequencies, or tones, by vibrating.

The guitar has a long neck punctuated with metal bars called frets. Fretting is the action of pressing on strings close to the frets to change the tone. Thus, finger placement directly affects the sounds coming out of your instrument. Once you've watched this video to see fretting in action, click over to the next page and try your­ hand at chords.

Now that you've got the hang of handling strings, you're ready for chords. Chords are groupings of single notes, and there are five basic combinations that you'll find in most songs: C major, G major, D major, A major and E major.

In lesson two, the instructor demonstrates the finger positions for E major, the easiest of the chords. One of the trickiest things about chords is keeping your hands in the correct position. Check out the next video to finger the common culprits behind.

You may be savvy about strings now, but you can still bump into problems that will ruin your sound. Strumming each string separately is a good way to test a chord for tone. If you find a string that doesn't ring true, it's likely that your fingers or hands have crept out of position.

In addition to troubleshooting tips, you'll tackle a second chord in this video: G major. Fortu­nately, there's more than one way to play a G chord. Once you've mastered the most common method, click to the next page to try out the C and A major chords.

The C major chord requires a bit of manual dexterity, as you have to stretch your fingers across the fingerboard. The A major chord can also be tricky, but there are multiple ways to play it. You may have noticed that you don't strum all six strings for all chords; you pick five strings at once for the C chord, for example, ­and only four for the D chord.

Some guitarists use their fingers to strum, but most use picks. As a beginner, you probably want to go with a pick and save your virgin fingers some grief. Once you've finished learning the major chords in this video, check out three minor chords on the next page.

The name makes them sound inferior, but minor chords are just as important as their major counterparts. In fact, they help round out your repertoire, giving you the ability to play more songs.

The major and minor chords differ in more than finger arrangement: While major chords ­produce a more cheerful sound, minor chords are the somber, brooding Beethovens of music. In this video, you'll try your hand at three of the minor chords: E minor, D minor and A minor (which isn't radically different from A major). Once you've mastered these final chords, proceed to the last video of the series to learn how to turn them into songs.

In this series, we've covered the basics of guitar fingering and chording. Now that you're acclimated to the instrument and know how to form single chords, you're ready to learn how to put it all together and play songs.

This video teaches you how to progress smoothly from one chord to the next, as you would when playing a song. One common progression is from G major to C major to D major, and the instructor will show you a way to handle this transition more smoothly. Once you've mastered tran­sitions, you'll be ready to rock out, starting with Blues Traveler's "Run-Around."

If you're stoked about guitar playing and want to learn more, rock on with the links on the next page.