The previous four blog posts could be thought of as an orientation to playing the guitar, where you learnt some fundamentals that every beginner should be across. Now, we introduce a few simple chords. What would be of even more interest to you is how to use those chords to play a popular song that you would certainly be familiar with.

A chord is basically a collection of three or more notes played together, at the same time. There are four chords that you will learn in this post – G Major, D Major, A Minor, and C Major. Read through carefully to get a good understanding of the finger positions – which string and which fret on that particular string.

G Major Chord

The G Major Chord is played with the index finger on the 2nd fret (5th string), middle finger on the 3rd fret (6th string), ring finger on the 3rd fret (2nd string), and the little finger on the 3rd fret (1st string). The ‘0’ in the representation signifies an open string.

It is important that you’re careful while placing your fretting fingers; else you may end up muting the sound because of some overlap on the strings. The right way to hold them down is in a sort of arched manner, so that the open strings ring out loud and clear, producing a nice big sound.

The only exception to this rule is when we want to mute selected strings while playing certain chords – more advanced/complex chords. In that case, you can flatten your fingers accordingly. But for now, focus on the arched manner while learning to play these basic chords.

D Major Chord

The next chord is the D Major Chord. This is played with open string (4th string), index finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), ring finger on the 3rd fret (2nd string), and your middle finger on the 2nd fret (1st string). Note that the 5th and 6th strings are not to be played for this chord, which is represented using the ‘X’ symbol.

A Minor Chord

Generally speaking, you’ll observe that major chords sound happier and minor chords more melancholic. The A Minor Chord is played with index finger on the 1st fret (2nd string), middle finger on the 2nd fret (4th string), ring finger on the 2nd fret (3rd string), and open strings (1st and 5th). The 6th string is not played/it is blocked, as represented by the ‘X’ symbol.

C Major Chord

The next chord, C Major is played with the index finger on the 1st fret (2nd string), middle finger on the 2nd fret (4th string), ring finger on the 3rd fret (5th string), and open strings (1st and 3rd). The 6th string is not played/it is blocked, as represented by the ‘X’ symbol.

Using These 4 Chords to Play Popular Songs

These four chords are more than enough to play quite a few songs – like a few hundred to thousand. Some are played in the very same order that we’ve introduced the four here, while others involve some improvisation in the order and style of playing.

Now you will learn to use these chords to play the famous song “Knockin' on Heaven's Door” by Bob Dylan. We’ll play each chord four times, using only down strokes, to establish a steady rhythm within the span of individual chords as well as while switching to the next chord. You should get comfortable with this rhythm, before we move on to the actual structure of the song.

“Knockin' on Heaven's Door” is played with 2 counts/beats/strokes on the first two chords, followed by 4 counts/beats/strokes on the third chord. The progression consists of G Major (2 counts) – D Major (2 counts) – A Minor (4 counts) in the first round, and G Major (2 counts) – D Major (2 counts) – C Major (4 counts) in the second round.

This progression is consistent for the whole song – verse, chorus, and everything in between. So, once you learn this, you’ve basically learnt the entire song. Rhythmically, this version may sound a bit simplified compared to the original, but that’s only to allow you to develop a strong and steady rhythm hand, and to get a sense of the timing.

Wasn’t that interesting – playing a popular song by just reading till here (the fifth blog post in this series on learning to play the guitar). We’ve got more songs lined up in upcoming posts, so keep reading to learn new techniques and how to actually apply them to play along to your favourite Western music songs.