Beginner Guitar Chords - How To Read Chord Diagrams

Reading chords isn't rocket science but for a beginner guitar chords can be daunting and hard to understand. This post has been written with those people in mind.

I am now going to show you how to read a guitar chord. Here is the C chord


The chord box is written like this

1. The top thick line going across is the end of the fretboard/nut of the guitar
2. The lines going across are the frets
3. The lines going down are the strings
4. The strings go thickest to thinest from left to right

The dots on the chord box indicate where your fingers should be to play that chord. The numbers indicate which finger should be placed on which string. Number 1 will always be the index finger and will go in order to the little finger which will be number 4. The number 0 indicates that the string is played but without you touching the fretboard, this is known as an open chord. Finally the x means that the string is not played.

So in other words you would play the c chord like this

6th string = play without touching a fret
5th string =1st fret with index finger
4th string = play without touching fret
3rd string = 2nd fret with middle finger
2nd string 3rd fret with third finger
1st string = do not play

I hope this has been easy for you to understand and hopefully will show any beginner guitar chords aren't as difficult to understand as they look.