How to Read Guitar Chord Charts

Hey , how you doing , Justin ?

Here today we're gonna check out how to read a chord diagram something you're gonna find very helpful on your guitar journey .

I can assure you so let's start by having a look at a chord diagram for a decor , which is the first chord we're gonna learn today .

So let's get one of those up .

There we go .

Now you'll see that there are six vertical lines and these represent the six strings on the guitar .

OK , I often think like if I'm holding a guitar up like this , you'll see that we've got the thickest string on this side and the thinner string on the other side of the chord box .

Now , some chord boxes have a thicker line for the thickest string and a thinner line for the thinner string .

That's not always the case .

Sometimes the lines are gonna be exactly the same thickness all the time .

Now the horizontal lines represent the frets on the guitar .

OK , so you'll often see here .

These are the frets going along like this now , at the top of the guitar , particularly for beginners .

You're gonna see this thing .

This is called the nut of the guitar .

Now this is either represented by a different coloured line .

Sometimes you like a black line or a darker line .

Sometimes it's a a double line .

Uh , sometimes there's nothing really there that indicates that it's the nut at all .

So a little bit it depends on which diagrams that you see , I tend to favour the thick black line , uh , to represent the nut in the diagrams that you'll see on my website on the neck diagram .

You're going to see some dots and these represent where to put your fingers .

Yeah , you'll very commonly see a number next to these dots or inside the dots .

And these tell you which fingers are gonna press down where ?

On the guitar neck .

Now , we don't tend to use the thumb very much on the guitar .

If you do use it later on , you're gonna see it notated with a T for thumb .

Surprise Finger one is our index finger Finger two is your driving finger finger .

Three is your ring finger and finger .

Four .

Is your pinky OK , so 1234 and T for thumb .

But you're not gonna worry about using the thumb in those early beginner stages for sure .

If you've ever learned piano before , make sure that you don't get confused .

Cos with piano , they called Thumb the first finger .

Confusingly , it's not a finger , it's a thumb's T .

So at the top of the diagram , you'll also see some Xs and some zeros .

Now , an X at the top of a string means that you won't play that string .

Now you notice here with the D cord , we've got two Xs on the thickest two strings .

So we're not gonna play the thickest two strings at all , and then we've got a zero , Which will mean that we play that string open with that me and playing a string open means that we're gonna play the string with no fingers on it Now on the decor .

Then you'll see that we've got our first finger down in the second front of the third string , the third finger down in the third front of the second string and the second finger down in the second front of the thinner string .

Don't worry about that .

We're gonna go through that in a whole lot more detail in just a second .

But that's the basic idea of learning to read a core diagram , and we're gonna be using those right through this course