The open chords worth learning first

What makes a chord "open"

An open chord is one held in the first three frets that leaves at least one string unfretted, ringing at its full length. Those open strings are why these shapes sound so much bigger than the effort they cost: the guitar is doing part of the work for you, and it is doing it with the longest, loudest strings it has.

They are also physically easy. No finger has to lie flat across the neck, no chord needs all four fingers, and every one of them is within reach of a hand that has never done this before. That combination — cheap to hold, expensive-sounding — is what makes the first fortnight of learning a guitar feel like progress.

The order to learn them in

Not alphabetically, and not by difficulty. Learn them in the order that gets you a playable pair fastest, which means learning chords that live near each other.

Em first. Two fingers, side by side, four strings ringing open, and almost impossible to get wrong. Then Am — the same three notes' worth of effort, one fret over, and Em to Am is already a change you can loop. Then C, which shares a finger position with Am and is the first shape that feels like a chord from a record. Then G, then D, and now you have G, C, D and Em: the four chords of an enormous amount of music. Then E, A and Dm, which fill in nearly everything else you will meet early on.

• Em
• Am
• C
• G
• D
• E
• A
• Dm

The change, not the chord

Everyone practises chords. Almost nobody practises changes, and the change is the entire difficulty. Holding a clean G is a matter of a few days; getting from G to C in time is a matter of a few weeks, and it is what separates someone who knows eight chords from someone who can play a song.

Practise a pair rather than a shape. Set a slow beat, put four strums on one chord and four on the other, and keep going for two minutes without stopping to fix anything. The buzzes clean themselves up faster this way than by lifting the hand off and rebuilding the chord, because what you are actually training is the moment of transit.

One thing to watch for: most pairs share a finger. Am to C keeps two fingers exactly where they are. Em to Am moves the same two fingers across one string. If you are lifting the whole hand off and rebuilding, you are doing more work than the shape requires — find the finger that does not have to move and leave it down.

Why these eight and not others

It is not arbitrary; it is the tuning. A guitar's open strings are E, A, D, G, B and E, and those notes happen to spell out most of the chords in the keys of G, C, D, A and E. Those five keys are therefore the ones the instrument plays most easily, and popular music written on a guitar tends to be written in them for exactly that reason.

Which is why the two chords that trip everyone up are F and B. Neither can be held open in any convenient way, and both turn up constantly — F in the key of C, B in the key of E. That is the moment the barre and the capo stop being optional.

Add the sevenths early

Once the eight are steady, the cheapest upgrade available is the open seventh chords: E7, A7, D7, G7, B7, C7. Most of them cost one finger more than the plain chord and several cost one finger less.

They are worth learning early because of what they do. A seventh chord sounds unfinished on purpose — it leans towards the chord that follows it, which is why blues is built almost entirely from them and why a G7 just before a C makes the arrival on the C feel like an arrival. For one finger, they add more to how a progression sounds than any other single thing at this stage.

• E7
• A7
• D7
• G7
• B7

A realistic first fortnight

Ten to fifteen minutes a day beats an hour on Sunday, and it is not close — the fingertips need repeated short exposures to toughen, and the hand learns shapes in sleep as much as in practice. Expect sore fingertips for about a week and then not again.

Spend most of that time on two-chord changes with a beat running, and the rest playing an actual song badly. Playing a real song badly is the single most motivating thing available to a beginner, and it is what the song pages here are for: pick one where the page says every shape is an open one, let the lane show you where the changes land, and be prepared to be slower than the recording for a while.