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There are two basic ways of learning guitar chords: the boring way and the exciting way. You might think that learning chords could never be exciting and that you don't have to learn them anyway since you want to be a lead solo guitarist, but you would be wrong on both counts.

Sure, if you buy yourself a guitar learning book and try to copy all these charts showing you where your fingers should be to play every chord imaginable, then it can be boring - very boring. You have no longer learned how to play the common major chords C, G and F, but you are shown C minor and then the diminutive versions, whatever these are.

That is boring: I can testify to that, and what you end up knowing is the finger positions for just about any chord imaginable. Get a friend to call out any chord, and you can immediately play it. But what good is that doing to your ability to play guitar? Where are you going to use all these chords? Perhaps in two or three years time you will come across a passage needing you to play E flat dim., but you are likely to have forgotten how to do it by then. You are better by far to learn chord theory so that you will be able to construct your own chords when needed rather than try to remember them.

However, that doesn't answer the second question: why should you learn chords? Most new guitarists believe that chords are only for rhythm guitarists; but even if that were true, that is a very good reason for learning them. Do you want to become a guitarist or just somebody that can jam without really understanding what you are doing? If your rhythm guy is sick are you going to be the one that stands down as a replacement because you "don't know how"?

If that's not a good enough reason, how about the fact that many of the world's greatest guitarists know their chords, because chords are no more than combinations of notes that sound good together because they follow certain music rules. They sound good when played together or separately, and many great riffs are no more than repetitions of the individual notes of chords and scales played as fast as necessary to sound impressive.

They are not tunes as such, and if you listen carefully to guitar solos you will notice that. They are repetitions of scales and chord notes played up and down the fret so that the player can produce lots of different note combinations from whatever chords and scales are being played. I bet you thought they were proper tunes, specially written and learned. In fact, most of them are improvised on stage; and if they sound particularly good when played back, then the guitarist might write down those particular scale and chord combinations and learn them for next time.

However, back to chords being fun to learn. The best way to learn them is by video. If you can see them actually being fingered and played in front of your eyes, and you are shown in slow motion exactly how to do it yourself, then learning guitar chords is much easier. It is also more fun if you can hear the sound they make, and how that sound changes as you change from one chord to another.

It's easier to understand the difference between a major chord and its minor counterpart if you can hear it. It is also more easy to understand why certain chords are necessary: such as why the diminutive versions of some chords have been devised, or why those dominant 7ths make all the difference in blues. Play a barred A chord, and then move your finger off the middle string of the five and see what difference it makes to the sound. That's a blues chord, and you if don't get fun listening to yourself doing these things, then perhaps a trumpet would be better for you!

It's also a lot more fun if you can listen to each chord you learn as part of a tune or as the backing for a song that you know. Not all tracks have a lead guitar, but practically all involve rhythm. It's rhythm that makes music what it is; and while lead might be flashy, it is the rhythm that provides the soul of passage of music.

You can also learn how to incorporate your newly learned chords into improvised lead passages and play them and the pentatonic scales, using the various techniques that players use both to speed up the sequence of notes, such as by use of hammer-on, and also to produce specific effects, such as vibrato.

Learning guitar chords is probably the most important aspect of guitar learning that there is, although if you are good enough musically to understand the musical theory behind them, then you will have to learn less by rote. This will also enable you to put together some theoretically good sounding notes and make you all the better a guitarist because of it. So, if you want to be a guitarist, rather than just somebody that can play a lot of single notes, no matter how fast, then you have to practice your chords as well as your scales, and having done so you can call yourself a true musician.

Learning guitar chords should not be boring, and it will not be boring if you learn using a video guitar teaching system rather than a book. The book is fine, but the video is better, especially if it is part of an online guitar course that allows you to learn all types of guitar playing in a variety of different styles.

Keywords: learning guitar chords, guitar chords, online guitar course, guitar learning book

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Andre Sanchez,