10 Beginner Guitar Chords (with Pictures)
Published on 18 March 2025
Are you just starting out on your guitar playing journey? Congratulations on starting and the best of luck to you for your continued improvement!
It’ll get easier and easier the more you play, so the ‘little and often’ mantra is the one to apply here. But where to begin? You want to learn some songs, but to play songs, you need chords, right?
Today, I’ve put together what I consider to be ten essential chords for beginners. These will be absolutely fundamental to your playing: they are firm building blocks for endless songs, and they will give you an idea of how chords are put together.
Contents
More Easy and Essential Chords
Open Position Chords
Since a regular guitar has 6 strings and over 20 frets, you’ll already understand that the notes on the musical scale (there are 11 in all) will repeat themselves in various places throughout the guitar neck. This means you can play many different versions of any given chord in different places. This is something you don’t have to worry about today, because all of the chords I’ll be showing you are ‘open position chords’.
Open position chords are chords that are all played within the first few frets of the guitar neck, and often contain open - i.e. the unfretted string is played - strings. You won’t have to move your left hand up and down the neck to play these.
Two Versions of F?
I’ve included two different versions of one chord today, but in the same open position. Why did I do that? Well, F is a bit notorious in guitar circles for being a tricky one to get the hang of for beginners. Since there is no ‘open F’ note like there are with D, A and E chords, you have to fret every note of the F chord with your fingers.
That sounds fine in theory, but with F being right at the bottom of the fingerboard (it’s the first fret of the lowest string), it can prove difficult to hold down, particularly if you want to play it as a barre chord like this:
It’s called a barre chord because you hold your first finger down across all of the strings and then use your other three fingers to make the rest of the chord. It takes a lot of hand and finger strength, and you may find yourself struggling for a while.
Because of this, I have another way for you to play it. Check this one out:
You don’t have to barre anything, and it’s one note per finger. Three fingers, all sitting in roughly the manner that they’d fall naturally anyway, and a much easier shape to make.
More Easy and Essential Chords
This is how I’m approaching the whole subject today: what is essential, and how can it be made easy? Every chord I’ve selected today is easy enough to get under your fingers, but I’d still encourage you to take your time and make sure that each note within the chord rings out. If they don’t, you’ll need to adjust your hand shape until it all sounds smooth. If it feels uncomfortable to begin with, that’s perfectly normal! Time and repetition will acclimate your muscles and joints. Just keep playing!
Here are the chords, in no great order since they are all equal. Now and then I might suggest a song to check out that begins with a chord, to give you some context. Here we go!
C
C is one of the most well-used chords in music. That’s music in all genres and on all instruments, so it’s a good one to get right! You can put your pinky finger on the high G (3rd fret of thinnest string) if you want a different sound. It’s still a C chord, but a different way of playing it.
A
This is A major, or just plain old ‘A’, since we don’t tend to mention the tonality of a chord unless it’s minor for some reason. So we’d say A and A minor rather than A major and A minor. Does it make sense?
For a great example of an A chord in action, it’s hard to beat the intro to The Boys are Back in Town:
A minor
A minor, or Am for short, is the minor key version of the A chord we just looked at. Tonalities and keys are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but you can see from this chord diagram that there is only one note that’s different, and that note is one fret (also known as a semitone) lower than the A major chord.
Even though it has only one different note, you may find that you need to reposition your fingers to form each chord. This is totally normal! A minor is one of the most important chords in music, so make sure you get this one!
G
G is a very satisfying chord to play because it utilises all six strings. Only four are fretted though, so you get the added resonance of two open strings in there, making this a really big sounding chord.
I’m going to show you D next, so to bridge that space, here’s David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, which starts on the G and moves to a D chord!
D
D is a very cool and handy chord shape to have under your fingertips. I always see it as a sort of triangular delta shape, with the root note (the D itself) being the open string.
The fretted triangle part will come in handy later on in your playing life, because you can move this around the fingerboard in very handy ways.
But that’s for another time. Try this D, and then we’ll move onto E.
E
So this is E - or E major of course, because these chords all follow the same naming conventions. E is used a lot in guitar music since that is the note that that guitar itself is tuned to, generally speaking.
This one’s pretty straightforward, but here’s some fun for you: see some of those chords we’ve looked at? The E, the D and the A?
Put them together in that order and you get the beginning of this:
E minor
As with the A and A minor chords, I’ll show you the E minor (or Em) next. This is partly to reinforce the knowledge of what makes a major and minor chord different, but also because Em is massively popular in songwriting.
The Em chord uses all six strings but requires only two fingers to construct.
B
B is relatively unusual amongst open-position chords because it doesn’t utilise any open position notes at all. Everything must be fretted, just like the F chord we saw right at the beginning. There is actually an open B note on the guitar (it's the second lightest string), but most people feel like that note is too high up to form a good anchor for the chord.
For this reason, most people play a B chord as either a barre chord (remember again from the F chord?) at the 7th fret, or the play a B ‘power chord’ at the open position.
What is a power chord? A power chord is a kind of guitar-centric thing. You don’t often (or ever, to be honest) see power chords being played on pianos or keyboards. A power chord is a chord that is neither major nor minor. In theoretical terms, it’s a chord made of the Root note (in this case of B, it’s a ‘B’ note), the 5th (5th note in the major scale, which would be F# here, though that isn’t too important now) and an ‘octave’ note, which is simply the B note played again on the higher register, or octave. In this case, that higher B is the one on the 4th fret of the 3rd lightest string.
The power chord is a shape you can use in almost any place on the guitar, with a couple of exceptions.
Now, you’ll notice that my diagram features another note! I have added an Eb (E flat) note to the 4th fret of the second lightest string. Why? Because this note transforms the B power chord into a proper B major chord! Try it and you’ll immediately hear the difference. I’d recommend using just two fingers for this chord, laying them flat across the intended notes like two barres.
Once you’ve got that, let’s check out a final chord, B minor.
B Minor
This may start to look a little familiar to you, am I right? We’ve moved one note down by one fret and now we have a minor version of the B chord. You’ll need to rearrange your fingers for this one, but it’s worth it: how cool is this chord?!
We moved the major 3rd note down one semitone (one fret, remember) and it is now a minor 3rd. This change gives minor chords their sadder or at least less optimistic sound.
It All Applies
So there you have it: ten chords for you to get involved with and develop opinions on. They will all come in handy, and probably sooner rather than later!
What’s great about all of this knowledge is that you can apply it to loads and loads of other musical situations: those power chords will work all over the fingerboard, as can the barre chords. The major-to-minor thing is going to be very important to your music too, so spending a little bit of mindful time with these chords will help provide you with a grounding that you can build on and improve from.
I hope you found this guide useful! I’ve tried not to get too technical, since I don’t see a massive benefit in doing so at this point. Taking your time, forming the chords and playing them cleanly is all you need to do. After that, try changing from one to the next, all the while knowing that any and all practice will contribute to your improvement.
Take these chords and run with them! There is so much cool stuff to learn: this is just the tip of the iceberg! Good luck and have fun!
If you’re blazing through these chords, why not try out some songs from my 5 Easy Songs on Guitar for Beginners blog!
