How to Play Guitar Chords

One of the most common mistake beginners make is grasping the guitar's neck with their left hand, with their thumb hanging over the top edge of the fingerboard. In the manner, the left hand fingers are slanted in relation to the neck. This limits the amount of mobility of the fingers, and makes the use of the little finger (which will have to stretch further to finger a chord) much more difficult.

With proper positioning, your left thumb will be in the center of the neck with the tip of your thumb pointing towards the headstock. This aligns your palm to be parallel with the neck, and your fingers will be parallel with the frets. Each of your fingers will line up one finger per fret.

Placing your thumb in the center of the neck, and fretting an A on the first string at the fifth fret, your second, third, and fourth finger should line up automatically on the sixth, seventh and eighth frets, respectively.

Your palm should no longer be in contact with the neck, and the shape of the outline between your thumb and little finger will droop towards the floor. This will naturally make your finger curve when you apply them to the strings. The curve or arching of the fingers will allow the open strings so common in beginner guitar chords to ring true, making the chords sound full and rich.

This arching of the fingers will also have you fretting the strings with the top of your fingertips, rather than the side of you finger opposite of you fingernail, allowing you to fret the string more accurately. Gripping the neck causes your fingers, especially on the lower strings, can sometime cause you to touch more than one string or deaden open string that are intended to ring out.

When you learn how to play guitar chords using this technique, you'll find it easier to fret the chords because you thumb reduces the amount to pressure your fingers have to supply to fret the chord cleanly.

But there's more to getting good tone than proper left hand technique. Proper right hand positioning and how you hold the guitar pick will allow you to control how you articulate what your left hand is playing as you work through your online guitar lessons.

Right hand positioning

It starts with a supple wrist. Many beginners tend to use their entire arm bending at the elbow when strumming the guitar. Doing so does create a large loud sound, but truthfully, it doesn't require that much energy to excite the string to get them to sound and failing away on the guitar in this manner lacks the control to play quicker rhythms and the subtler nuances the guitar is capable of.

By anchoring the meaty part of the palm your right hand behind the saddle on the bridge of you guitar, you can use your wrist as the pivot point to strum the guitar. You'll find that by using your wrist, your strumming becomes more concise and the distance your pick travels is much less than it is using a full arm strum.

After you master the use of your wrist as the pivot point for your strumming of these beginner guitar chords, you can lift you palm of the bridge. You'll find that in you keep you right arm near parallel to the string you can use that same controlled technique anywhere from the bridge to where the neck overlaps the body of the guitar.

Strumming for tone!

Moving your strumming hand closer to the neck produces darker jazzier tone, equal distant between the neck and the bridge is a lush full tone, and towards the bridge a brighter sharper sound even with the most basic guitar chords.

Many guitarists choose different picks for different tones. Thin picks sound much more percussive (actual sound of the pick hitting the strings) than thick picks (which have a stronger fundamental: the string causing the soundboard or top of the guitar to vibrate which produces the sound that we hear, and why each guitar sounds different).

But these same tonal characteristics can also be achieved by using a heavier pick, and gripping in lighter between your thumb and first finger to duplicate the percussive sound of a light pick. Varying the grip allows you to adjust how much of that percussive sound you want to have when you learn how to play guitar chords using this pick method.

You can make the most out of the chords you learn from the various online guitar lessons by using these techniques whenever study, practice, rehearse or gig and play the guitar ergonomically.