Lesson 1 - C Major Chord

Ok. Let’s get ready.  The best position for learning is to sit on a chair without arms.  Sit with your back straight, put your left foot on a couple of books or small footstool so that your left knee is slightly higher.  Rest the body of the guitar on the left thigh.  This places your body right between the neck and the sound hole or pick-ups.  And raises the neck so that the head of the guitar is about shoulder high.

Now let’s revisit that C-major chord.  As a chord diagram, we see it like this:

And the tablature for this lesson is this:

The key to learning to play chords is using the tips of your fingers, not the fat part.  This isn’t a smartphone!

Here you can see the lines the strings have made on my fingers making a C major chord.  If you use the fat, fleshy part of the fingers, you will inadvertently mute (deaden) strings you want to hear.  So it is best to keep your thumb in the middle of the back of the neck so your fingers curve around and come into the string at a 90 degree angle to the fingerboard.  THIS WILL HURT.  You may want to cry.  Go ahead. No one can see you.  After a few days/weeks of playing you will build up calluses to protect your fingers from the pain, but for now this will be painful.  Like my middle school gym teacher wisely told me… “walk it off.”

Another little tidbit… There is a lot in life I wish I could go back and do again, but learning to play chords is NOT one of those things.  It will be frustrating.  First you will not be able to play the fretted notes (fretted notes are played by pressing down behind the fret) without getting some buzzing.  Second, you will start to get the buzzing under control but the open strings will be dead (muted).  It will take some time and patience to get this right.  Thirdly your fingers will just feel plain uncomfortable between stretching them in new weird ways, over the fingerboard while maintaining correct posture to make all the notes heard, and not wanting to cry while the wires dig into your fingers.  If you find it too much, don’t hesitate to take a break. 

For this lesson all we want to do is to make a C major chord and make each note ring clearly. 

In the tablature above you will see a strum of the chord, feel free to strum all you like, the key is to hear every string with the exception of the low E string.  Strum up, strum down.. just get used to moving your pick hand up and down the strings and wiggle your fretting hand slightly to play all the strings clearly. 

The second part of the tablature is picking each note from low to high and making sure that you can hear each and every individual string.  This will take time and practice.  The key for this first lesson might very well be mostly of patience and not breaking the guitar out of frustration.  Stick with it.  I promise you will get it.

When you are satisfied that you can hold a C major chord without moving your fretting hand and can hear every string clearly, we can move on to lesson 2.