Guitar Chords

A short definition for guitar chords is a group of tones that generally are played together, at once. Guitar chord voicing offers the advantage of permitting optimization for many different purposes and playing styles. A guitar chord may use few strings, adjacent or not, or all of the strings. They are versatile instruments when it comes to chording purposes.

In the most common type of guitar, the 6-string one, like the one found in Learn and Master Guitar, you can only have the very largest chord voicings if you omit one or more tones. Due to the layout of notes, you can have chords composed of more than one note of the same pitch exactly. However, sometimes this same layout will demand that the notes in a chord do not follow in tonal order. Another advantage of the guitar is that you can play many chords using the exactly same notes in several places on the fretboard. In addition, it was conventionally determined that the highest pitch (or the thinnest string) is called the first string, and the lowest pitch is called the sixth string. So, when reading a musical notation, these are the basic references.

Guitar chords are represented in different ways. It can be represented in standard musical notation (which makes use of symbols), in tablature (also called tab, it indicates when and where the finger should press to generate a note or sound), or in chord diagrams (which are consisted of vertical lines representing the strings, horizontal lines representing the frets, and they also have numbers under certain strings that indicate which finger is commonly used).

In guitars tuned in the standard way, the major chords are composed by a root note (fundamental basis), a major third note (musical interval) which is above the root, and a perfect fifth note (or diapente) which is also above the root, for example, C Major, A Major, G Major, E Major, and D Major. Another type of chord is the barre chord. This type of chord is characterized by one or more fingers being used to press down multiple strings across the guitar fingerboard. The barre chord is commonly played in B Major and F Major, but G Major, C Major, and D Major can also be played as barre chords if transformed.

Minor chords are composed in the same way as the Major chords, except that we have a minor third instead of a major third. There are several other kinds of chords: augmented chords (chords with an augmented interval), diminished chords (chords with a diminished fifth), inverted chords (when the root note is not a bass note), seventh chords (composed by adding a forth note to a major triad, which is a minor seventh above the root note), extended chords (which can be ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths), and power chords, which are actually considered harmonies because they consist solely of a root note and a fifth note (sometimes an octave is included). So, these are the main aspects of guitar chords. But most of this information has a common 6-string guitar as reference, and may vary according to guitar types.