Guitar chords are arguably one of the most important and difficult aspects of learning how to play a guitar properly. You’ll need chords to learn new songs, compose your own pieces, and communicate with other members of your band. Those are just some of the many reasons why most guitarists prioritize chords over other elements of music theory.
The tricky part is that there are dozens of chords and hundreds of their variations; the good part is that beginners and musicians who don’t aspire to play in ensembles don’t need to learn them all.
If you want to learn chords and some of the most popular guitar techniques, we’re here to help. We are The Music Box, Tampa’s premier guitar school, and our coaches specialize in helping students of guitar master their instruments and music theory in a fun, engaging way.
We invite musicians, both beginners and more experienced guitarists, who’ve hit a wall trying to learn guitar chords from YouTube tutorials and tabs. Let our coaches show you simple tips and tricks that can help you flatten the guitar’s learning curve and have plenty of fun while you’re at it.
The Music Box – Our Guitar Coaching Method
You can learn all about guitar chords from virtually any music teacher, but the problem is that you’ll typically need to spend a small fortune and months before chords even come next in the curriculum.
What sets us apart from guitar instructors, coaches, and contemporary music schools is that we work with highly experienced guitar coaches. As opposed to guitar teachers, The Music Box guitar coaches strive to uplift the students, learn their ambitions, and fuel their dreams. If you want to learn how to play chords, we won’t drown you in boring lessons that you’ll probably never find use for in real life.
The Music Box coaches have decades of combined experience coaching groups of students how to grow together, inspiring them to create music together, and ultimately even form real bands and perform live together. Check us out on Facebook if you want to learn more.
Guitar Chords 101 – Learning the Basics
Many online guitar lessons and music schools devote dozens of classes to chord history. This is perfectly fine for musicians who want to become music educators later in life, but the majority of our students come to The Music Box to learn how to “play” guitar and chords so that they can rock out on the big stage and record their own music.
That’s why we begin some of the first guitar lessons by playing the most popular chords, such as the E Major, A minor, or D Minor. Believe it or not, the vast majority of contemporary songs are built on just 3-4 chords, and we strive to explain these chords right away.
With simple demonstrations and illustrations, we ensure our students know what we’re talking about. Even students who’ve never played an instrument before can easily follow the lesson after such a simple breakdown. Swing by our Instagram page to see how it works.
Helpful Tips & Tricks
Everything is connected in the world of music, and experience can greatly help unveil these connections. For example, all major chords sound “happy” while all minor chords sound a bit “gloomy” and “dark”.
Our guitar coaches have discovered connections between dozens of guitar chord variations through experience and trial & error so that our students don’t have to. How to perform a bar chord right, how to properly build chord progressions, and transition from a difficult position into the next chord – nearly everything in music has a connection, and understanding where it comes from speeds up the progress.
We’re here to help share an abundance of experience with our guitar students so that they can start shredding, soloing, and building riffs, as soon as they’ve mastered basic chords. If you want to see how some of our youngest students have progressed in just a few weeks, come on over to our TikTok page.
Inspiring Good Habits
Muscle memory is of great importance to guitar players. Whatever you learn, it gets embedded deep into your fingers, so much so that they will act before your brain can register it. That’s why The Music Box coaches pay extra attention to the habits our students develop while learning chords.
Are you fretting chord positions with the right fingers? Are your palms flexible enough to play another chord? Do your fingers feel stiff when you play chords with more than three positions? These are just some of the things our coaches constantly keep an eye out for so that they can help students avoid bad playing habits.
Even more importantly than bad habits, The Music Box coaches constantly strive to instill good playing habits into our students. From simple things such as the angle of the pick to more complex ones like eye-hand coordination, our coaches diligently work on reinforcing good habits and helping students become better every day.
Improvisations, Songwriting Sessions, and More
With the basics covered, we usually see our students hungry for more knowledge. They quickly grasp the fundamental elements of guitar chords, and we’re more than happy to give them a few challenges to test how much they’ve grown.
That’s where improvs and songwriting sessions come into play. With improv jams, we put our students on the stage to play along to a backing track. This creates a controlled environment for guitar players to test how well they recognize chords they hear, and which chords they can use in the given key.
Songwriting sessions are arguably even more important, but they typically come later when the group has progressed to a certain level as a whole. In a gist, these sessions help students understand how songs are constructed, which parts play which roles, the basics of melody & harmony, and more.
Ready to Join The Music Box?
Not only will you learn how to play guitar chords quickly – you’ll also learn how to apply them in songs on the spot. You’ll learn how to use chords to cover songs from other people and build your own. Our HQ is located at 4321 Gunn Highway in Carrollwood, FL, but you can also enroll online by following this link.
