Learning Acoustic Guitar

By Yna Costales

Open Position Chords

Okay! So, I decided to get into learning acoustic guitar a lot more for my IRP. Some background about guitar playing for me is that I got my first guitar when I was twelve and have played it on and off since then. Although, I have never really tried to learn it in great detail, so with this I hope to learn it a lot more and further my abilities in playing guitar.
This month I practiced the six basic open position chords. According to the my book Acoustic Guitar Complete "These are the most fundamental chords to all styles to guitar playing."
The open position chords includes:

• The E major chord
  


• The A major chord
  


• The D major chord
  


• G major
  


• C major
  


• B7 chord
  

This is a Picture of me practicing the G major chord.

This is another angle of the G major chord. In order to play the chord cleanly you must play on your fingertips, holing your finger perpendicularly to the neck. It is also important to keep your fingers from interfering with strings that they are not playing.

Relearning these chords was a little tricky for me. It's important to press down all the way when playing chords. Otherwise, when you strum, the chord won't sound clean (I had a lot of trouble with this). It's also important to know when you're first starting out or coming from little experience when playing the guitar that you will most likely sound pretty bad, but with patience and persistence you will gradually get better.