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01. Green Day Guitar Tabs - Wake Me Up When September Ends tab
02. James Blunt Guitar Tabs - Youre Beautiful Chords
03. Led Zeppelin Guitar Tabs - Stairway To Heaven Tabs
04. Christmas Guitar Tabs - Jingle Bells Tabs
05. James Blunt Guitar Tabs - Youre Beautiful Tabs
06. Lynyrd Skynyrd Guitar Tabs - Sweet Home Alabama Tabs
07. Green Day Guitar Tabs - American Idiot Album Tabs
08. Eric Clapton Guitar Tabs - Tears In Heaven Tabs
09. Fall Out Boy Guitar Tabs - Sugar Were Going Down Tabs
10. Guns N Roses Guitar Tabs - Sweet Child O Mine Tabs
11. Christmas Guitar Tabs - Jingle Bells Rock Tabs
12. Eagles Guitar Tabs - Hotel California Tabs
13. Weezer Guitar Tabs - Perfect Situation Chords
14. System Of A Down Guitar Tabs - Hypnotize Tabs
15. Metallica Guitar Tabs - Nothing Else Matters Tabs
16. AC DC Guitar Tabs - Back In Black Tabs
17. Extreme Guitar Tabs - More Than Words Tabs
18. System Of A Down Guitar Tabs - Byob Tabs
19. Metallica Guitar Tabs - Fade To Black Tabs
20. Lifehouse Guitar Tabs - You And Me tabs

Those are the Top 20 most requested guitar tabs, according to Ultimate Guitar.

So I went looking for Guitar chord charts today. This was spurred by me not knowing the B7 chord - yesterday I was looking up Christmas songs (in particular, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen chords). Turned out it was a simple song, but it had the B7 chord… which I didn’t know. Now I don’t have a chord chart… so I went running off to look it up online, and I found my favorite guitar chord site (more on that later.) But that didn’t quite do it for me, I decided that I needed to have a…

Guitar chord chart - how cool would it be to have a nice wall chart in my practice room. Or even better, a nice laminated chord chart that folded up and went into my guitar case. Of course, I have actually seen guitar chord computers out there, but I was more interested in a chart - something I could hold and look at. So I went looking for something that fit along these lines… and a free guitar chord chart would be even better.

Here’s a series of free guitar chord charts at this link. However, it is spread out over a whole bunch of pages. A good start, but not exactly what I had in mind. Nevertheless, you could print this out and it should come out nice. Wouldn’t make much of a guitar chord poster though.

But take a look at this chord chart… this is starting to look a bit more like it.

That’s it for now… dinner time. But I will continue my search for the perfect guitar chord chart.

File under: guitar chord chart,
guitar chords

Looking for Christmast guitar chords - I got my guitar last Christmas, which means a lot of things… like I am coming up on my first year anniversary of playing guitar. It also means this is my first Christmas season with a guitar. So it has me thinking about playing some Christmas songs.

So I went looking for Christmas guitar chords just now. Of course, there are plenty of them out there… as I have mentioned before, I really don’t know how guitar players survived before the Internet. There are so many online sources of guitar tabs and chords, I still can’t believe it. However, this was a little different - I mean some of my favorite tab sites didn’t seem like they would be the perfect place to find Christmas tabs… so I searched around to find some other sources. And of course, I found them…

Here are a couple of interesting sites I found that are targetting Christmas guitar chords and tabs:

Tabworld’s Misc Christmast guitar chords

PJ’s Christmast songs

Wholenote Christmast guitar tabs

I am sure there are a bunch more… that is just a start. My daughter is working on “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on piano - maybe I will be able to play along with here if I get working on the guitar chords.

File under: Christmas guitar chords,
Christmas guitar tabs

After my last post about barre chords, I found this really cool video at Ultimate-Guiter.com. The video is basically a tutorial on how to play barre chords, and it is oriented towards beginners.

Check out the video on barre chords here.

This is the amazing thing about learning to play guitar in the age of the internet… I can’t imagine trying to learn to play guitar before you could download tabs, lessons, and entire courses about guitar.

I am pretty amped about this barre chord video… I just downloaded it and played it through for the first time. The download is huge - 35 megabytes, but it was worth it. As I mentioned before, I was just starting in on these barre chords, so this is pretty cool to come across a free video on how to play barre chords.

tags: guitar chords,
learn to play guitar
,
barre chords

OK, so every beginner hates the F chord (ie, the F major chord). And six months into learning to play the guitar, I have to admit that the F chord was a major hurdle. I mean, the G chord, C chord, D chord, A chord, and E chord are pretty easy to learn to form and get a good sound. But the F chord is one that can take a while - and I am talking about playing at a “no tempo” speed. Even if you take a minute or two to form that F chord, beginners often can’t get it to sound right.

The reason is that the F chord is really your first barre chord (that is pronounced “bar” chord)… where you have to use one finger to hold down two or more strings. At first this seems literally impossible. But take my word on this… it gets easier over time. In any case, with that F chord you have to hold down both the first and second strings at the first fret with your first finger (ie, you index finger.

Of course, that is not all you have to do to make that F chord… you also have to hold down the third string at the second fret and the fourth string at the third fret. Oh, and you have to be sure not to play the sixth string… and you probably shouldn’t play that fifth string either. That means that it might be a good idea to wrap your thumb around the neck and deaden that sixth string with your thumb (for you experienced players, I am not trying to start a debate here!).

So this is my question for you experienced guitar players out there… I often read about the various barre chords - the E shaped barre chord and the A shaped barre chord seem to be the most popular. But can I use the F chord as a barre chord and just slide it up the neck?

reference: barre chords,
guitar

OK, I am not the biggest country music fan… but Folsom Prison Blues is not your average country song. It is a really killer song, and I would love to learn to play it on my guitar“>. No problem… right? The guitar chords are super easy, even for a beginner like me.

The real problem is in the strum pattern, at least for me. However, I found a killer video online that shows a couple of different ways to do the strum pattern for Folsom Prison Blues.

This isn’t a professional video, it is just guy with a blog and a video camera. The video shows how to do the alternating bass picking strum style (also known as Carter picking). It is really cool, even though I am still struggling to really get the technique down.

In fact, there are really two videos… one that gives a pretty simple guitar strum pattern, and one that gives an even simpler pattern. Be sure to check it out.

Learning how to play acoustic guitar - some people say it is harder to play an acoustic than it is to play an electric guitar. They also say it is more fun to play an electric guitar. I suppose it is all about why you want to learn to play guitar.

I really want to learn how to play guitar so I can sit out on my back patio and play, and so I can take my guitar on camping trips and play while I am sitting around the campire. It is tough to do either of those with an electric guitar.

So one of the first things I did when I got my guitar (and one of the best things as well) was to get the online Jamorama course. It is packed with great guitar instuction that really walks you through all the steps to learning to play guitar.

Now don’t get me wrong… I fully plan on getting an electric guitar some day. And it will probably be this year (might make a nice Christmas present). However, right now I am going to stick with my acoustic guitar.

And for learning how to play, I am going to stick with Jamorama.

acoustic guitar,
guitar, learn guitar

Learning how to play acoustic guitar - some people say it is harder to play an acoustic than it is to play an electric guitar. They also say it is more fun to play an electric guitar. I suppose it is all about why you want to learn to play guitar.

I really want to learn how to play guitar so I can sit out on my back patio and play, and so I can take my guitar on camping trips and play while I am sitting around the campire. It is tough to do either of those with an electric guitar.

So one of the first things I did when I got my guitar (and one of the best things as well) was to get the online Jamorama course. It is packed with great guitar instuction that really walks you through all the steps to learning to play guitar.

Now don’t get me wrong… I fully plan on getting an electric guitar some day. And it will probably be this year (might make a nice Christmas present). However, right now I am going to stick with my acoustic guitar.

And for learning how to play, I am going to stick with Jamorama.

acoustic guitar,
guitar, learn guitar

Everyone is looking for guitar tabs (which is short for guitar tablature). I have found some of the best guitar tab resources on the internet. And by the way, I don’t know what guitarists did before the internet. All of a sudden a budding guitar player can find tabs for all kinds of songs… and you can find them almost instantly.

OK, let’s get back to guitar tabs. I really like going out and tabs for the songs I want to play. Some of the best web sites actually have multiple tabs for many songs. And if a song is performed by different artists, the tabs might be slightly different. And if you are looking for bass tabs, guitar tabs, or guitar chords… well you can often find them as well. So let’s get on with it… where do you find tabs?

Well, one of my favorites for guitar tabs is ultimate-guitar. This site has a nice search function, and the search results can be done by song title or artist. One nice feature is that the tabs are “rated” by the users… so when you get a whole bunch of search results (say you are looking for the tab for “Heart Of Gold") you can see which ones people really liked.

Another good place for guitar tabs is OLGA - the Online Guitar Archive. This site is amazing… you have to check it out for yourself.

guitar, guitar tabs, guitar chords

I am pretty excited about learning guitar chords. I mean the whole finger picking thing and flat picking thing seem cool, but if I learn guitar chords… well I am pretty sure I can be playing songs in a matter of days or weeks.

This is the deal, if I learn the basic guitar chords - often called the open chords - then I can play a lot of songs. I am talking about the D chord and G chord and C chord. If I have those down then I can play the basic 1-4-5 chord progression… and look out, there are all kinds of 1-4-5 chord songs.

Now it might sound like I know a lot about guitar chords, and guitar playing in general… but I really don’t have a clue. I just started a few months ago, and I have exactly zero musical talent. And believe me, I am not just being modest. I really am slow at this stuff. But when you just have to learn to play three chords to be able to start playing songs… well that is achievable by just about anyone.

There are some other useful guitar chords to learn off the bat. I like the Em chord (that is the E minor chord). I like it because I like the sound of it, and because this might be the easiest chord there is to play. The Am is another chord that is easy and sounds cool. Then there is the F chord… every beginner’s nemisis (including me). But if you just keep banging away on it, you will get it.

learn guitar chords

Today I went looking for free guitar chords. As I have mentioned elsewhere… the Internet has to be the greatest thing for guitar players since the invention of wood. Well, that might be exaggerating things just a bit, but finding free guitar chords is a whole lot easier than it used to be…

This is the deal with free guitar chords - they are pretty much everywhere online. You can find tabs and chords for your guitar for free just about everywhere. In this case, when I was looking for chords… I wasn’t looking for song chords or song tabs for guitars, but I was looking for some good resources on how to actually play chords…

You see, I am very much a beginning guitar player, so I am still working on chord basics… so I definitely want to find those free guitar chord resources. I mean, like everyone else I have the obligatory beginning guitar book that has diagrams of the basic guitar chords (and not so basic chords). But sometimes that book can be hard to find, or hard to use. So I wanted to find some good rescources for beginners - people who are jus learning the guitar and may not have one of those books.

So here are some of the cool resources I found that have free guitar chords:

http://chordfind.com/
http://hatbox.lib.virginia.edu/gtrchord/gtrchord/
http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/guitar/index_db.html

These are all great resources filled with tons of guitar chords… and they are all free. Now it is time to get to work and start making your fingertips sore. Spend an hour a day with these chords and you are going to be playing for friends and neighbors in no time. Just keep working on those guitar chords.

OK, now let’s go looking for guitar chords for Green Day. This search is in part sponsored by my search for Johnny Cash guitar chords… and partly because I’ve been into Green Day since their first record. If anyone can’t see the connection between Green Day and Johnny cash, well, it is plain as day to me.

In any case, back to guitar chords. They are generally pretty darn easy to find online. One place that I like to start is Ultimate Guitar, and they didn’t disappont me in my search for Green Day guitar chords. Here is just a bit of what I found:

1039 (album)
16
2000 Light Years Away
409 In Your Coffeemaker
Alone
American Idiot (solo)
American Idiot
Android
Are We The Waiting
Armatage Shanks
At The Library
Ballad Of Wilhelm Fink
Basket Case
Chords
Best Thing In Town
Blitzkrieg Bop
Blood Sex And Booze
Boulevard Of Broken Dreams
Brain Stew
Brat
Burnout
Coming Clean
Deadbeat Holiday
Good Riddance
Give Me Novacaine
Hitchin A Ride
Hold On
Holiday
Homecoming
I Fought The Law
I Was There
I Wanna Be Alone
I Want To Be On TV
I Was There
In The End
Insomniac
Last Ride In
King For A Day
Poprocks And Coke
Paper Lanterns
Panic Song
Only Of You

That was just a tiny sampling of Green Day chords… there are many more pages worth here: more chords

It also appears that Green Day chords and tabs are really popular. Almost every one of those Green Day songs has many versions of guitar tabs, guitar chords, and bass tabs.

Today I went on a search for a free guitar chord chart. Don’t get me wrong… I am now amassing all kinds of good learning resources, including books that have all kinds of guitar chords. And I also have the fantastic Jamorama program - which I am REALLY pleased with.

But even with all those resources, I just wanted to find a free guitar chord chart that I could print out and have a few copies laying around. Maybe have one in my guitar case, and one downstairs, and one upstairs. Well… once again, the Internet is an awesome thing for new guitar players. Let’s have a look at what I found…

This first site is a bit on the crude side (although I admit that my site is not any masterpiece of design)…. but it does have most of the common chords all on one page, and it is definitely a printable free chord chart. The same site also has a pretty interesting page explaing some of the basics of moving between various guitar chords. That page is here.

This site has some nice free guitar chord charts, but they are not exactly printable. They are spread out over a bunch of pages. The nice thing is that you can hear sound samples of the chords. To tell the truth, I am really not sure how important that it… but it’s sorta cool.

Well, yesterday my 12 year old daughter picked up my guitar and started playing some guitar cords.

Of course, she was really playing guitar chords, not guitar cords. But to a 12 year old, sometimes that silent “h” can be a bit of a spelling dilemma… and not something to be overly worried about.

What was really cool wasn’t when she was playing “cords” however. Her fingers had a hard time, and she needs to cut her fingernails (and for fashionable young girls, it is questionable whether playing guitar is worth compromising your style by cutting your fingernails).

In any case, the cool thing was when I showed her the basics of guitar tabs (ie, guitar tablature). She actually knows how to read music from her piano playing, but she didn’t even need to apply that knowledge. I showed her the basics of guitar tabs and she was able to immediately get through a basic lesion of “Ode To Joy” and “Jingle Bells".

That is the really cool thing about guitar - in just a few minutes, armed with the basic guitar “cords” or guitar tabs, you can actually play recognizable music. Now I just need to find some more really easy tabs - we will hold off on the guitar cords for a while.

I just love easy guitar tabs… the question is how to find them. There are lots of great tab sites (I have already written about some of my favorites here). And plenty of those sites have easy guitar tabs (ie, tablature).

Those sites usually let you search their tabs for a given song or a given artist. Those search facilities are truly great… it is amazing how many songs you can find really fast. Whenever I spend five minutes there, I find so many songs I want to play… well it is just incredible. But inevitably, I end up searching through those songs looking for easy guitar tabs - lots of those songs are songs I want to play… far fewer are songs I can play.

What I would really like is an “easy guitar tabs” site - the best would be a site where I put in the chords I can or I want to play, and the search engine spits out the songs that can be played with those chords. For instance, I love the Em (e minor). I love the way it sounds and I think it is the easiest chord to play. The C chord is a close second. And the G chord is awfully sweet as well.

So I could envision an easy guitar tabs site where I go and put Em, C, and G in the search box, and it would give me the songs with just those chords or tabs. Sweet idea, eh? And it would really not be very hard to implement…. I will have to give that some thought.

Where there are guitar tabs, and there are guitar song chords. It seems like lots of times people use guitar tabs and guitar chords as interchangeable terms… but there is a difference.

And then lots of times, when you look at song guitar tabs… they also have the guitar song chords. That makes me happy, because at this point I am pretty much just playing chords. As far as I can tell, guitar tabs are more for playing leads and/or playing some additional bass rhythm. At this point, I have a hard enough time getting the song chords down.

I mean, when I am just noodling around, I don’t have any problem playing the chords on my guitar. But when it comes to playing song chords… then everything falls apart.

In any case, if you (like me) are really looking for song chords for your guitar… just go check the guitar tab sites… and you will likely find the chords right there side by side with the tablature.

Now if I could just find a search engine that can search by what chords I can play (or I am WILLING to play).

(And by the way, am I the only person in the world who has SO much difficulty with the spelling of the word “rhythm"? I don’t even try… I just go straight to my spell checker!!!)

UPDATE: I nailed an F chord a few times yesterday. Not consistent by any stretch of the imagination… but I got it a few times.

Well, I am still trying to piece things together, but I know what open chords are now.

Open chords are sometimes called campfire chords - they are some of the rally basic chords, like the G chord, C chord, and D chord. There are a few others, and once you learn them, then you can play an awful lot of songs. They are called open chords because when you strum them you leave some of the strings open.

This makes them easier to play than barre chords (a subject for another day).

That term, campfire chords, I think is supposed to be somewhat disparaging. Open chords are pretty much the first thing that most guitarists learn, and I think that once people get good at guitar they sorta look down their nose at open chords.

The funny thing is that I really want to sit around the campfire and play open chords. I mean, I can certainly imagine a time when I am working on more complex skills, but my real inspiration for learning to play came from sitting at a campfire and watching a bunch of people play simple songs with simple open chords.

So right now I am just working away at my open chords… really trying to nail down the Key of G, and every now and then adding a chord that might be just a little more complicated.

I suppose there are lots of places to start when you are learning to play guitar… but most people start with some basic chords. And that is where I am starting.

I have a book, and it has lots of chords. It is a really lousy book… it’s title is something about easy learning methods for guitar chords, but it is really just a bunch of chord diagrams. No instruction, no method… nothing but diagrams of chords.

I am another book, a really good book called the Skeptical Guitarist. That book walks you through chord by chord. It starts off with the E minor chord (that is written like this: Em). I really love that chord, and not just because it is one of the easiest guitar chords to play. I just love the sound of Em… it is definitely a melancholy sounding chord.

I am going to digress a little bit… because I am writing this blog on learning to play the guitar, you might have the crazy notion that I am a musician, or that I have some type of musical talent.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sometimes I suspect that I am tone deaf… but I really don’t know what that means.

In any case, when I play that Em chord… I can hear that it sounds melancholy. The book says it is going to, then I play it, and sure enough… that is a melancholy chord. THIS is the kind of thing that gets me excited - if I can recognize that, maybe there is some hope that I can be SOME type of a musician!!

OK, I will get back to guitar chords another time. I might be write about the key of G… I sorta have an inkling of what that means now!