Let's Play Something Using Bar Chords

Now it's time to use these bar chords with a little playing exercise. For this exercise we are going to use the following chords:

We'll be playing these chords in this order, with each chord being played for four beats like so:

     A        C        G        D
     / / / /  / / / /  / / / /  / / / /

Now here is the sound file for you to listen to: Listen

You may recognize this as Lenny Kravitz's "Fly Away". It's a little simplified on the rhythm but you can play it more like the recording if you'd like. This happens to be the entire chord pattern for the song. So there you have now learn your FIRST song. Now try playing this same chord pattern using open chords. Refer back HERE for the chord diagrams.

Now that we've learned a song I'll leave it up to you to find more songs that you want to learn. There are various avenues you can take to learning new songs. The easiest being the purchasing of sheet music. But of course a big problem with that is you have to learn to read sheet music and that could take up valuable time. Most guitarists don't do it either. Today's players are learning songs from two main sources:

Fortunately for you I have covered both of these topics in their own sections of the Free Guitar Lessons.

There is a lot more in depth discussion of chord structures in the intermediate section of the lessons. My goal for this section is to get you started playing something, anything. A great place to find some tabs or chords for songs is the internet. Go to any search engine and type in the word "chords" and then the title of the song you are interested in and watch what happens. Another great resource is TabCrawler.com. They have tabs and chord pages for just about any artist you can think of. This will help get you playing some songs that you are interested in: but don't get to hung up on them too soon as you have a LOT to learn about playing guitar. If your serious about playing you have to learn more than just one song at a time.

To get you started I've put together a detailed chord chart to show you how to play commonly used open chords as well as the barre chords. I recommend that you download it and keep it handy. Hopefully it will answer a lot of questions.

GUITAR CHORD CHART