First guitar chords, and why they are those ones

Every beginner is handed the same handful of chords: E minor, G, C, D, A minor, E. That is not tradition for its own sake. Those shapes are easy because of how a guitar is tuned, and knowing why makes the rest of the fretboard less mysterious.

The tuning is deliberately uneven

Standard tuning, lowest string first, is E A D G B E. That leaves five gaps between six strings. Four of them are fourths, and one, between G and B, is a third.

• E
• A
• D
• G
• B
• E

That one irregular gap is why chord shapes on a guitar look lopsided, and why the same shape moved across the strings does not always give the same chord. It is also why the guitar can play full six-note chords under one hand at all. A perfectly regular tuning would make scales tidier and chords much harder, and chords are what most people want.

The shapes

Six boxes, and every one of them plays. Vertical lines are strings with the low E on the left, horizontal lines are frets, a dot is a finger, an o is a string you let ring open and an x is one you leave alone.

• G
• C
• D
• Em
• Am
• E

Written out as numbers instead, lowest string first, G is 3 2 0 0 0 3 and C is x 3 2 0 1 0. Same information, less pleasant to read, which is why guitarists draw the box.

Notice how many zeros there are. Open strings are free notes: they need no finger, they ring longer than a fretted note, and they are why these chords sound big for the effort. Every one of these shapes leans on the fact that E, A, D, G and B are already in the right key for a lot of songs.

Why these six and not others

Take G, C, D, Em and Am together. Those are the I, IV, V, vi and ii chords of G major, and also most of the useful chords in C and D. In other words the beginner set is not six unrelated shapes, it is nearly a complete key, which is why you can play so many songs after learning them.

The chords page explains what those numerals are doing, and it is worth ten minutes once your fingers hurt too much to keep practising.

When the box moves up the neck

The six above all sit at the start of the neck, which is why the thick line across the top of each one is the nut.

If a number appears beside the box, like 5fr, the diagram has moved up the neck and the top line is no longer the nut. That is how barre chords get written, and it is the point where a lot of people quietly give up.

The honest bit about F

F major is the traditional wall. It needs one finger flattened across all six strings while the others form a shape behind it, and it hurts.

Two things help. First, most songs that want F will accept Fmaj7, which drops the barre entirely and sounds fine. Second, the barre is a grip problem before it is a strength problem: roll the flat finger slightly onto its side so the string sits in the crease rather than under the soft pad.

It still takes weeks. Everybody's does. The people who tell you it took them an afternoon are misremembering.

Changing between them

Look for a finger that does not move. Going from Em to Am, two fingers keep the same shape and simply shift across a string. Going from C to Am, one finger stays exactly where it is.

Practise the change, not the chords. Two chords, four beats each, slowly enough that the change happens in time. Speed arrives on its own once the fingers stop having to think, and it does not arrive at all if you keep stopping to reassemble the shape.

All six shapes are on the browser guitar, though nothing on a screen will teach your left hand what pressing a real string feels like.