How many times have you looked at a giant guitar chord book and just about passed out when you saw the incredible amount of information that it seems like you have to learn? Notice I said 'seems like'; you know the type of book I talking about, the 1001 type chord book chock full of chord shapes and not much else.
The truth is in some cases you do have to learn an incredible amount of information to express yourself adequately on guitar, how much you need to learn depends on the type of music you want to play.
The most important thing is to be able to recall the information, there's no point learning something if you can't recall it! Remember it's not about learning heaps of random chord shapes what we need to do is learn how the language of music works once we understand the basics of the music language we will be free to play any style of music.
But what if there was a much easier and far less painful way to learn chords and chord substitution than wading through a thick boring chord book, well don't despair there are many ways to approach learning music on the guitar here's just one of the ways you could learn how to play chords on the guitar.
Let's begin with major chords...
All my examples will be presented in the key of 'C'.
Major chords: If you wanted to substitute a different chord for 'C' major you could use any of the following chords.
C = C6; Cmaj7; Cmaj9; C6/9; Cmaj7/9 Alternatively, you could use this chart to simplify the chords of a song e.
g.
, if the music chart contained a Cmaj9 you could play 'C' (or any of the other chords listed above).
See how this information frees your playing up and allows you to develop your own sound and style of playing? Minor chords: The minor chord and be substituted in the following manner like this: Cm = Cm6; Cm6/9; Cm7; Cm9; Cm11 Don't forget our chart works both ways if you need to simply or try a different sound you can use any of the chords listed.
Dominant seventh chords: C7 = C9; C13; C9(11+); C11+ The (11+) refers to a sharpened eleventh Augmented chords: C+ = C7+; C7(+5); Caug7; C9+; C9(+5); C+9 The (+) refers to a sharpened fifth (1-3-#5) A great idea is to get out those old songbooks and look through all the songs that you thought you couldn't play and use our chord simplification charts to simplify your chord changes, you will soon be playing all those songs without breaking any fingers.
So the moral of today's story is "don't worry about learning heaps of chords focus on learning how to substitute and simplify chords".