Eight chords, and most of the songs you want to play open up. They are E, A, D, G, C, E minor, A minor and D minor, and they are called open chords because some of their strings ring without a finger on them. That is what makes them sound big while your hand is still clumsy. Each one below is written out string by string and finger by finger, with the fault it usually produces and the change it leads into. Before any of it, make sure the guitar is in tune: a correct chord on an out of tune guitar sounds wrong, and you will go looking for the mistake in your fingers. The online guitar tuner takes a minute, and how to tune a guitar explains the rest.
What makes a chord an open chord
An open chord uses at least one string played open, with nothing pressing it. Every shape on this page lives in the first three frets and leaves one or more strings free to ring. Two things follow from that, and both are in your favor at the start.
The first is sound. An open string vibrates along its whole length against a metal nut rather than a soft fingertip, so it rings longer and louder than a fretted one. A beginner playing an open chord gets more sound out of the guitar than the effort really deserves, which is exactly the right way round when you are starting.
The second is effort. With two or three fingers doing the work instead of six strings to hold down, the hand can learn one thing at a time: where to put a finger, how close to the fret, how hard to press. The chords that ask one finger to press every string at once are barre chords, and they come later for a reason covered further down.
How to read the shapes on this page
Each chord is written as six characters, read from the thickest string to the thinnest, which is the order you see them when you look down at the guitar on your lap. A number is the fret to press. A 0 is an open string, played with nothing on it. An x is a string you do not play at all. So x 3 2 0 1 0 means: skip the thickest string, third fret, second fret, open, first fret, open.
Fingers are numbered the usual way: first finger is the index, second the middle, third the ring, fourth the little finger. The thumb never counts.
Six characters in a row is the compact way of writing a chord. The other notation you will meet is the tab, six lines of dashes with numbers on them, which writes out a whole part rather than a single shape: how to read guitar tabs covers it from the beginning.
Beginner guitar chords: the eight shapes
Here they are at a glance, then one by one. The order is the order to learn them in, and the reason for it is in the next section.
| Chord | Shape | Strings played | Fingers |
|---|---|---|---|
| E major | 0 2 2 1 0 0 | 6 of 6 | 3 |
| A major | x 0 2 2 2 0 | 5 of 6 | 3 |
| D major | x x 0 2 3 2 | 4 of 6 | 3 |
| G major | 3 2 0 0 3 3 | 6 of 6 | 4 |
| C major | x 3 2 0 1 0 | 5 of 6 | 3 |
| E minor | 0 2 2 0 0 0 | 6 of 6 | 2 |
| A minor | x 0 2 2 1 0 | 5 of 6 | 3 |
| D minor | x x 0 2 3 1 | 4 of 6 | 3 |
E major (E)
0 2 2 1 0 0, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, first fret of the third string (G).
- Second finger, second fret of the fifth string (A).
- Third finger, second fret of the fourth string (D).
Strum: All six strings.
Put the second and third fingers down first, as a pair. They sit on the same fret, side by side, and they are what the shape is really built on. The first finger then drops into the only space left.
E to A is the friendliest first move: your hand stays in the same two frets and only the shape rotates.
A major (A)
x 0 2 2 2 0, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, second fret of the fourth string (D).
- Second finger, second fret of the third string (G).
- Third finger, second fret of the second string (B).
Strum: Five strings, from the fifth string down. Leave the thick E alone.
Three fingers crowd into one fret, so they have to stand on their tips. If the thin E string buzzes, your third finger is lying flat across it. Lift the wrist slightly and the string rings.
A to E and A to D both work from here, which makes A the hinge of your first three chords.
D major (D)
x x 0 2 3 2, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, second fret of the third string (G).
- Second finger, second fret of the first string (high E).
- Third finger, third fret of the second string (B).
Strum: Four strings only, from the fourth string down.
The three fingers make a small triangle, and the shape only sounds clean when the triangle keeps its shape in the air, before it lands. Practice lifting all three off together and putting them back together.
D to A is the first change that asks your whole hand to move rather than rearrange. Go slowly and watch the first finger: it leads.
G major (G)
3 2 0 0 3 3, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, second fret of the fifth string (A).
- Second finger, third fret of the sixth string (low E).
- Third finger, third fret of the second string (B).
- Fourth finger, third fret of the first string (high E).
Strum: All six strings.
Two versions are in circulation, and this is the four finger one. It presses the second string instead of letting it ring open, which makes the chord fuller and more even. It costs a little more at first and is worth it.
G to D is the cheap one: the third finger is already on the second string at the third fret, which is exactly where D wants it, so it stays put while the rest of the hand moves.
C major (C)
x 3 2 0 1 0, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, first fret of the second string (B).
- Second finger, second fret of the fourth string (D).
- Third finger, third fret of the fifth string (A).
Strum: Five strings, from the fifth string down.
The fingers climb away from you in a neat diagonal. The usual fault is the first finger leaning back and deadening the thin E string, which is meant to ring open.
C to Am barely moves at all. The first and second fingers stay exactly where they are, and only the third travels, from the fifth string at the third fret to the third string at the second.
E minor (Em)
0 2 2 0 0 0, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- Second finger, second fret of the fifth string (A).
- Third finger, second fret of the fourth string (D).
Strum: All six strings.
Two fingers, no string to avoid, and four open strings ringing underneath. This is the easiest chord on the guitar, and it is E major with the first finger taken away, so the two of them teach each other.
Em to C keeps the second finger exactly where it is, on the fourth string at the second fret. Treat that finger as an anchor and the rest of the change organizes itself around it.
A minor (Am)
x 0 2 2 1 0, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, first fret of the second string (B).
- Second finger, second fret of the fourth string (D).
- Third finger, second fret of the third string (G).
Strum: Five strings, from the fifth string down.
Am is E major moved across by one string. If you can already shape E, you can already shape Am: same three fingers, same relative positions, one string further down.
Am to C moves a single finger. Am to F is the one that will later push you toward barre chords.
D minor (Dm)
x x 0 2 3 1, read from the thickest string to the thinnest.
- First finger, first fret of the first string (high E).
- Second finger, second fret of the third string (G).
- Third finger, third fret of the second string (B).
Strum: Four strings only, from the fourth string down.
The hardest of the eight for most hands, because the fingers are close together and at different frets. Keep the thumb low behind the neck rather than hooked over the top, and the fingers get the room they need.
Dm sits naturally between Am and C, and that run of three is the backbone of a great many sad sounding songs.
The order to learn them in
The order above is not alphabetical and it is not by difficulty alone. It groups the shapes by what your hand has to do, so that each new chord borrows from the one before it instead of starting over.
E, A, D first. These three live in the same corner of the neck and share the same two fret span, so your hand barely travels between them. They also happen to be a complete set: a great many songs are built from nothing else. Learning them together means you are playing music within the first week rather than practicing positions.
G and C next. These two stretch further, G reaching across all six strings and C climbing diagonally away from you, and the change between them is the first genuinely hard one, because every finger has to move at once. Learn them as a pair rather than separately: the two of them turn up together in a great deal of music, and the change between them is the real work.
Em, Am, Dm last, and they are the easy ones. Not last because they are hard, but because each is a small edit of something you already know. Em is E with a finger removed. Am is the E shape moved across one string. Dm is D with the note on the thinnest string pulled back one fret. Arriving at them in this order turns three new chords into three small changes, which is a very different job.
Your first chord changes
Knowing eight shapes is not the same as playing a song, and the gap between them is the change. A song does not ask you to hold a chord, it asks you to leave one and arrive at the next in time. That is a separate skill and it has to be practiced separately.
The pairs to drill, in order
- Em to E. One finger. It teaches the motion with almost no cost.
- E to A. The hand stays put and the shape rotates around it.
- A to D. The first real move across the neck. Let the first finger lead and the others follow.
- Am to C. Two fingers stay put and one travels. It sounds like a much bigger change than it is.
- G to D. The third finger never leaves the second string at the third fret. Let it be the pivot and the others swing around it.
- G to C. The one that stalls people, because nothing stays behind. Place the third finger on the fifth string first and let the other two find their places around it.
How to practice a change
Take two chords and nothing else. Hold the first, strum once, then move to the second as slowly as you need and strum again. No rhythm, no counting, no metronome at this stage. What you are watching for is the moment your fingers lift: they should leave the strings together and travel as a group, not one at a time.
Once the move is reliable, give it a pulse. Four slow strums on the first chord, four on the second, and keep the pulse steady even if the change arrives late. A late chord played in time is progress. A perfect chord that stops the music is not, because the thing you are training is the arrival, not the shape.
The one thing that speeds everything up
Keep the strumming hand moving through the change. Beginners stop both hands while the left one rearranges itself, and that stop is what makes the playing sound like practice rather than like a song. Let the right hand carry on in the air, hitting nothing if it has to. The left hand then has to catch up, and it learns to, because something is waiting for it.
How long all of this takes is a fair question with an honest answer, and it is counted in hours of practice rather than in months: see how long it takes to learn guitar.
Songs you can play with these chords
More than you would expect, and that is not a sales line, it is how popular music is built. A very large share of songs stay inside one key, and the chords of a key are a handful of the shapes on this page. In the key of G you mostly need G, C, D and E minor. In the key of C you mostly need C, F, G and A minor, and F is the one exception that will send you looking for a barre later. In the key of D it is D, G, A and B minor.
That is why four of these eight shapes turn up again and again, in song after song, across decades and genres. Learn the changes between them and you are not learning one song, you are learning the mechanism that most songs share. The orders those four chords are played in have names, and our page on chord progressions lists them in all twelve keys.
Our list of easy guitar songs for beginners is sorted by real difficulty rather than by chord count, which matters more than it sounds: a song with two chords and a fast right hand is harder than a song with five chords and a steady one.
When do barre chords come?
When a song you actually want to play asks for one, and not before. In practice that means F or B minor, the two that show up earliest, and it usually happens somewhere in the first few months rather than in the first few weeks.
A barre chord lays one finger flat across several strings at once and lets the other three build a shape above it. The payoff is large: a single barre shape slides up and down the neck and gives you every major chord there is, which is why it is worth the trouble. The cost is that the flat finger has to press evenly along its whole length, and a hand that has only ever played open chords has not built that yet. Our barre chords guide covers the two shapes and, more to the point, how to make one ring without the hand ache.
So the honest sequence is this. Get the eight open chords clean, get the changes between them smooth enough to play a song from start to finish, and let the hand strengthen while you do it. The barre then takes weeks instead of months. Starting it early does not make it arrive sooner, it just makes the first months discouraging.
There is a second way round, and it is not a cheat. A capo clamped across a fret turns these same open shapes into other chords, which means a key full of barre chords can often be played with the eight shapes you already have. The guitar capo chart shows which shape sounds as which chord at every fret.
Frequently asked questions
What are the basic guitar chords for a beginner?
Which chord should I learn first?
Why do some of my strings buzz or sound dead?
Do I need to learn barre chords?
How long should I practice each chord?
Who made this
Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. The order on this page is the order he uses in lessons, which is why it starts with the chords that lead into each other rather than with the ones that look simplest on paper. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.