Guitar Chord Lessons for Beginners and Intermediates

We’ve partnered with Nate Savage of the Beginners Guitar System to bring you a series of guitar chord video lessons for beginner and intermediate guitar players. We hope you enjoy!

Guitar chords covers a wide range of lessons and topics when you’re learning the guitar. We’ve divided these lessons into beginner types of chords and intermediate types of chords. I’ll give a brief explanation of each type as we go along.

Beginner Guitar Chords

When you’re first learning how to play guitar chords you always start with open chords. Open chords are those that are on the first fret (right next to the nut) and have at least one open string strummed while playing them.

There are also variations of these beginner guitar chords, which could be looked at as simple guitar chords which use only 3 or 4 strings rather then all 6.

A few things to keep in mind when starting to learn guitar chords:

Take your time, your fingers don’t always want to go into the shapes you want them to right away. Practice slowly and you’ll be able to do things faster.

Be sure to use the tips of your fingers on the frets. This will avoid your fingers “blunting” or muffling other strings that should be played open.

First practice only making the chord shapes you learn then add strumming.

When you add strumming to your guitar chords practice slowly introduce switching from one chord to another.

Let’s get started.

This lesson will introduce you to the 7 essential guitar chords for beginners you must know.

We also have some lessons that are more specific to acoustic guitar chords or electric guitar chords

Intermediate Guitar Chords

If you’ve already gone through our beginner guitar chords lessons, or if you already know the majority of your open chords, then you might want to consider our intermediate chord lessons.

The next step up from open chords is learning your Bar Chords. These can take some time to master and they are difficult for beginners as you must build strength in your hand.

Close to bar chords are power chords which are used more in electric then acoustic guitar, but they’re fun to learn.

This lesson will introduce you to Power Chords
This lesson will introduce you to Bar Chords