This article will show you how to make the best use of free guitar chord charts which you can get on the internet. As the internet changes, sites go down and new ones arise, so I will not risk this resource going out of date by talking about where to find your free guitar chord charts, just how to use them to jump start your guitar playing.

You can easily gather a good collection of chord charts and lyrics to your favorite songs to help you learn to play the guitar. If you feel that you should be learning a whole bunch of musical theory and how to read musical notation, but somehow feel it is simply not you, then that's okay - begin with what you feel most enthusiastic about. As soon as you've started to learn using guitar chord charts you have bought or downloaded for free, you may see as you go along that you will need to know a bit about musical theory to see how chords and scales fit together. If, however, you are comfortable learning chords to your favorite songs, then keep at it.

Why don't we begin with the basic baby steps and work up to a few truly useful knowledge regarding guitar chords and how the dots on the charts relate to musical sounds. You know the frets on your guitar's neck in some way show you where the notes are, so let's get a little more technical. You'll see when you make use of scale charts to learn to play guitar tunes that in a given position on the fret board, you will sometimes need to move up or down one fret or two frets. If you play the note at the first fret, and then move up to the second fret, you've moved up a semitone. If you've moved up two frets, it's called a tone. The distance between the notes E and F or B and C is a tone. The distance between the notes C and D is a tone. So as you learn songs in various keys, you will begin to see that what you're playing when you play scales is different patterns of tones or semi tones on the guitar neck.

If you have watched guitarists play, you will have noticed that often they place their index finger across all six strings. This is called a barre. When you start to learn songs, you'll be making use of chords played in the First position on the fret board. These are mostly open chords, that's chords which do not make use of the barre. You are able to try to play barre chords any time, but it is a bit ambitious to expect to be able to use them until after your hands have done some practice with open chords.

When you are learning chords to accompany songs, you will probably make use of your chord charts showing you chords that use all the guitar's strings. However if you want to get into playing solos, begin with the three note chords called triads. The three notes in a triad are the basic notes of your chord, thus by learning triads, you will begin to see how the guitar chords are structured. Also you can move your triads up and down the fret board to make new chords.

Here is an example: The chord of A Major is comprised of the notes A C# and E shown in tab form as:

E----------------------------------------- B--------------2-------------------------- G--------------2-------------------------- D--------------2-------------------------- A----------------------------------------- E-----------------------------------------

Move that shape one semitone (one fret) up the neck and you get A# or Bb.

E----------------------------------------- B--------------3-------------------------- G--------------3-------------------------- D--------------3-------------------------- A----------------------------------------- E-----------------------------------------

One fret higher is B Major.

E----------------------------------------- B--------------4-------------------------- G--------------4-------------------------- D--------------4-------------------------- A----------------------------------------- E-----------------------------------------

This shape played anywhere on the neck will present you with a major chord. The fret it's played at tells you the key it's in.

Listed here are the notes for the triads of the basic chords: C Major - C E G D Major - D F# A E Major - B E G# F Major - C F A G Major - G B D A Major - A C# E B Major - B D# F#

Now the minor chords: C Minor - C Eb G D Minor - D F A E Minor - B E G F Minor - C F Ab G Minor - G Bb D A Minor - A C E B Minor - B D F# Naturally, there will be some points you should make a bit clearer, so you'll find more descriptions and illustrations obtainable for free on the web.