Should You Memorize EVERY Guitar CHORD? And How?
To be a good guitar player, do you need to memorize every single chord shape?
We don’t want to be limited to just a few chord shapes, so surely to be a real professional, we need to know all of them, right?
Well, I’d say it’s pretty important to be able to play every possible chord shape... but memorizing every chord shape is kind of a different story.
It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s the difference between under a month of study, work, and practice, and several 1000s of years.
(That is, it's a difference you want to know and understand. Unless you have 4-digits-worth of spare years lying around in your house, itching to be put to good questionable use...)
Let me explain.
The guitar has 6 strings. Which means a chord shape, on the guitar, can contain as many as six notes. No more.
For a chord to be a chord, it needs to have at least three notes (some would say two, but that’s a whole other can of worms so for now, I’m sticking with three).
In music, there are twelve notes total. So, there are as many unique chords on the guitar as there are combinations of either 3, 4, 5, or 6 of those 12 notes.
This leaves us with a grand total of 2,431 unique chords.
Now. I did say unique chords. Not unique chord shapes.
Some chords can be played in just one way. Some can't even be played with a normal human hand. But some other can be played in several different ways (For instance, the simple C major triad can be played in at least 60 basic ways - though you can easily find 200 if you're thorough)
So if there was a book of all the potential chord shapes on the guitar, it would probably have at least, say, 5,000 playable shapes in it
That’s a lot of shapes to memorize! If you memorize a chord shape a day and never ever forget it in your life it will take just short of 14 years to go through that...
If you play a chord progressions made of 2 of these shapes a day... It will take more than 68.000 years to play all the possible 2-chord chord progressions. Several 1000s of years, as I said above.
Instead of doing that, you can actually do something significantly easier, that gets you a betterend result. If you want to know what that is, watch the video linked below.
Want a great way to learn everything there is to know about chords, how they're built, how to find them around the fretboard, and more? Then you should check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course to learn in complete detail, everything you need to know about chords!
Video Transcription
Hello Internet, so nice to see you! I've been receiving questions on how to play chords on the guitar, in the sense of how to find the shape of those chords. And it seems that a lot of people are concerned about how to find the shapes, and many are thinking, should I buy a book on chord shapes?
Should I buy a resource that gives me all the chord patterns that I have to learn? And my recommendation, actually, is don't buy such a thing, okay? Do not go and buy a book of chord shapes or chord patterns, because even if the book is correct, and even if it could be an interesting resource in some situation, if you are learning it, if you're trying to learn how to play chords on the guitar, you're going to have tons of shape for every chord.
I mean, the C major chord will have tons of shape, a C major 7 chord will have tons of shape, and so on and so forth. And you will not know which one to learn, okay? It's much better to have a more reasoned approach to that, okay?
But how do you do it, then? How do you play chords on the guitar? I'm going to give an answer that is going to be completely obvious to some people, but still follow me, because this obvious answer can take you places you have no idea, okay?
And other people find illuminating, because they didn't think about that yet. So, but the basic thing is that every chord is made of three or more notes. Simple as that, okay? The C major chord is made by C, E, and G.
That's basic theory, and I already made videos about that, several of them. If you play those notes on your guitar in any order, as long as you play this set of notes, you are playing that chord, okay?
It is simple as that. How do we do it in practice, okay? Well, you need to know the notes on your fretboard, but don't worry, it can just- Just use a diagram, and if you are searching for a diagram, you totally find a diagram in my e-book, in my free e-book, how to learn the notes on your guitar fretboard.
What is linked below, download it. It's free inside there is a diagram of all the notes on the guitar fretboard. Or if you have one already, that works too. I mean, you don't have to use this specific thing, but this one also shows you how to learn the notes so that you remember them, okay?
And it's free. Once you have that, you want to find those notes on the fretboard. So let me give you a few examples, okay? For instance, you could do that. You could say, I want to play, it's that simple, okay?
I want to play a C major chord. The C major chord is made by the notes C, E, and G. You just need to play the C note somewhere on the guitar, the E note somewhere on the guitar, and the G note somewhere on the guitar.
Whoop, whoop, and whoop, okay. Anywhere on your guitar, and as long as you play those, okay, you are playing a C major chord. I could be. playing the C, E, and G, okay, anywhere on this guitar. If I'm playing, for instance, and again, in any order, because I could play C, E, and G, here, okay, those are, I'm on string 2, 3, and 4 on fret 8, 9, and 10.
That's a C major chord, but I could play also string 2, 3, and 4 on fret 5, and I'm still playing C, E, and G, just in a different order, okay. Formerly some people will say that this is a different inversion of the chord.
Yes, it's true, it's correct, not a problem, but it's still a C major chord, okay, and as long as the three notes are ringing, and only the three notes, I am playing a C major chord, and again, I can make them separate.
This way, I can separate them even more, okay, okay, if I were able to play this with enough string, I would have a C, a E, and a G, okay, and you would have a C major chord. Some of those notes could be on open strings, so if I could play, for instance, a C here, a G on the open string, and the E here, on super high here, okay, the C is on the fifth string, fret 15, the G on the open third string,
and the E on the 17th fret of the second string. It's a C in an energy, I'm playing a C major chord anyway, whoops, okay. It doesn't, so that's for a simple chord, but here's the thing, it doesn't matter how complex is the chord, okay, if you want to play a C major seventh with a sharp 11, okay, and you know the notes of this chord are C, B, G, B being the major 7 and F sharp being the sharp 11, as long as you play those notes somewhere on your guitar in any order,
you are playing this chord, simple as that. Now you may think, oh I have five notes, it starts to become more complex, well at this point there is some trickery that comes in because one thing you can do with this kind of chords is that you can start omitting notes and you just need to know which one are safe to not play and which one are not safe to not play and which one you actually have to play and it's quite typical for these kind of chords to not play the fifth of the chords,
to not play the G. So again the reason for this is simply because by ear if you play all five notes or if you play only C, E, B and F sharp and not the G, the difference in sound is not much. There are more complex reasoning that they take you to these conclusion, but in general, you can omit the fifth of these kind of chords, okay?
So as long as I play a C, an E, a B, and an F sharp, I will have this C major 7 sharp 11, and again, it doesn't really matter... ...where I play them. As long as I play them, they don't even be on the same...
...on a contiguous group of strings. What I'm playing right now, for instance, if I put in a tablature, I'm playing three, two, four, and two here, and I'm not playing anything on the second string, okay?
That's one possibility for this chord, but there are many, so many. So for instance, another possibility is this... ...a C, a B, E, and a F sharp, and I'm playing here 8, 9, 9, 7, okay? So as long as you know what notes you have to play and where to find those notes, it's just a matter of sitting down and trying to find the shapes on the guitar, okay?
There are, of course, some basic shapes you can use to go faster because you can start from the shape and modify them to get those chords. There are some patterns on what shape sounds better and what shapes are easier to find and what other things you can do to move faster and find those chords faster.
But again, in principle, whatever chord you have, if you know how to spell it in notes, you just need to find those notes on the guitar and play them. as simple as that, okay. Then you can, once you know that, yes you can consult a book on shapes if you need confirmation or if you need some ideas on where to find the shapes, but it's better to actually get a complete course that explains to you how to find those chords and what shapes are more convenient and why,
what shapes play better, what shapes play together well, because I mean once you have one chord you don't play one chord for the whole song, right. You have one chord and followed by another chord, followed by another chord and you want those chords to be coherent, to work together, to be homogeneous, uniform, so that you don't jump on different sides of the fretboard with completely different sonic effect.
You don't want one chord to be something like that and the next chord to be something like that and the next chord to be something like that and then the next chord to be something like that again. I mean that's charming, sure, but it's not what you will normally do.
It's weird, it's quirky. You want to have a set of chords that work together so that when you play them, they sound together well. I mean, if this is your style, you want a set of chords that sound together well in the same style.
In this case, that's the style. If that's what you want to, in this case, let me take away the known thing. I would recommend you guys have a look at my course, Complete Chord Mastery. From there, we start from scratch on how to get to know the fretboard regarding chords and harmony.
We see how we find the chord, we learn ways to find the chords, remember the chords, play the chord, and play entire chord progression so that they sound well together, and we go well beyond just the basic cowboy chords.
We move up the fretboard immediately from session one, and then we go and study how the whole thing works. We get understanding of the fretboard, not just a bunch of patterns. If you want a bunch of patterns, again, I recommend you don't get a book, but I recommend you get understanding because once you understand that this stuff is built, then you can find your own pattern, and even studying a book on chord patterns becomes much easier because now you know how it's done,
and you have a lot of mental reference points to remember those things. In Complete Chord Mastery, we also study how to put together chord progressions, what sounds good, what are all the harmony tricks that we can use to make your chord progression sound better, chord substitutions, composing chord progression, and creating parts on the guitar that sounds, sounds guitaristic, okay?
It's not just this chord, and then this chord, and then this chord, and then this chord like a piano, okay? Nothing bad about the piano, but we want parts that sound more like a guitar, and how to make these things sounds that way.
So we're going to have sessions on the handling style and a session on other styles, a session on specific chords that work, specific sets of chords that work on the guitar, etc., etc., etc. So I recommend you check out Complete Chord Mastery at the link below.
This is Tommaso Zillio of musictheoryforguitar.com and until next time, enjoy! Thank you.