Well. There is, but it's relatively hidden, I find that many beginners will search on youtube for "beginner guitar lesson" or something similar to find an "Expert Village" or similar video which teaches the C chord.
This is all well and good, but isn't the best approach for teaching beginners!
What I shall be writing here will be a set of simple beginner lessons which will teach any beginner the basics of playing and understanding scale and chord diagrams, all major and minor open chords, the pentatonic scale, and understanding TAB (which may be looked down upon by many musicians of other instruments or older guitarists, but is a sure-fire way to get learning songs quickly, standard notation can come into play at a later date!) to start learning songs.
This first part of the lesson will cover Major and Minor Open Chords.
This may sound a bit daunting at first, but is actually quite simple.
First we'll tackle the term "chord". A chord is generally more than one note played at the same time.
Though of course, not just any two, three, four, etc notes played at the same time will make a pleasing sound.
This is where the terms "major" and "minor" come in.
To describe these two terms in the simplest way possible:
Major chords are often described as "happy" sounding.
Where Minor chords are seen as "sad" sounding.
Though by now you're probably aching to actually play the guitar!
We'll start with what are called "open" chords, which essentially means that these chords use some of the open strings.
The Major open chords are as follows:
These diagrams represent your guitar neck. Each vertical line is a string (the left side being the thicker strings, the right side being the thinner strings) and each horizontal line is a fret (except for the thick black line which is the nut of your guitar).
To give a bit of a clearer example, we'll take the A chord. The dots that sit behind the thick black line are open strings, meaning you play these strings without fretting any note.
Then you'll see the three dots which are all on the second row of blocks. This means that you need to hold the second fret of these three strings.
Now, if you play all those strings which have a note on them in the diagram, you should have an A chord. This is where you should be able to hear the "happy" sound that I previously mentioned, which should hopefully match your mood as you've just played your first chord! Congratulations.
Now do this with the other major open chords.
After you're comfortable with these we'll move onto the Minor open chords.
These are as follows:
These should be a lot easier for you as you will now be comfortable with understanding chord diagrams (hopefully! If not, please complain at me for not being clearer and I will help you to understand these!).
Also. As a note, to save time when writing chords down, all of these major chords are simply named after their letter (so "A Major" will just be called "A"). With Minor chords it's very similar, though you put an "m" afterwards. (So "A Minor" becomes "Am")
But as you may notice, there is still no "B" or "F" in either Major or Minor open chord sets. This is simply because there are no open chords for B, Bm, F or Fm!
These will come a bit later if I choose to continue these lessons into more advanced chords.
Next lesson I will write about putting these chords into use, so that you can create music, which is the best thing about playing the guitar!
Thanks for reading, and I hope I helped!
If you have any questions, please comment on this blog post, email me at rory.guitarist@gmail.com or get to me at any of my networking sites:
http://www.youtube.com/roryrockssocks
http://www.twitter.com/rerellison
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http://www.myspace.com/roryrockssocks
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