There are around a dozen or so guitar chords that every beginner guitar player should learn. It takes a little work right at the beginning but once you have started it will just be a matter of routine practice to get these guitar chords under your belt. There is a piece of guitar wisdom you should learn right from the start, and that is there are different arrangements of any particular song. What I am getting at is that if you hear a song on a CD and would like to learn it, the original arrangement might be beyond your capabilities as a beginner guitarist. But by using simpler versions of the song's chords, or by changing the key the song is in, it becomes more accessible to someone who does not have alot of technical skill or a large arsenal of chords.

So with your collection of beginner guitar chords you will be able to play practically any song that you hear. Another tool I should mention is the capo. You probably know that this is a bar that fits tightly across the guitar neck to make the strings sound higher. Using the capo you can change your guitar to a higher key to suit the voice of the singer without learning new chords. The beginner guitar chords I will show you are all "open" chords which means one or more strings will be sounding without the need for you to press down on it with your finger.

In this example, which is the A minor chord in the first position on the fretboard, the X tells us that the sixth string is not played. Where the figure 0 appears the open strings sound. As for the rest of the strings, the B string is played at the first fret, the G string is played at the third fret and the D string is played at the second fret.

E 0---------------------

B --1-------------------

G --3-------------------

D --2-------------------

A 0---------------------

E X---------------------

The actual work of playing these chords is quite easy after the first few days of practice, and your main focus will be learning chords for your favorite songs and practicing changing smoothly from one chord to another. Changing chords is a physical activity that needs a particular kind of attention paid to it. It is very tempting for a beginner guitar player to try to "move quickly" when learning to change chords, but the way to practice chord changing or any kind of movement associated with guitar playing is to do it slowly. If you have seen guitarists fluff chord changes while they are playing it is because they have rushed when they were doing their practice.

This is a quick guide to guitar chords for beginners assuming that you want to start playing the guitar by learning songs you have heard on the radio or on CDs. If you learn in this way you will be getting your basic chords quite quickly without learning much about the theoretical framework. You can take another approach and learn your guitar chords according to the "families" they are in. A chord family is a set of chords that are related to each other because they sound good together. As an example, if you are learning a song where the chord at the end of the song is an A, you will be using the A family of chords which consists of the A, D and E chords. You can find out more about chord families from your teacher or by doing an internet search.