Home
Rock Guitar For Dummies
Explore Book
Buy On Amazon
Learning to play the guitar is a lot fun. Use this cheat sheet to help you get started with your guitar finger placement and guitar chords. If you need help with finger placement on your guitar, use tablature (tab) and fingerboard diagrams.

Practice playing the most common open-position chords on your guitar to get that “jangly” sound, and make sure you know the notes on the neck of your guitar to change starting notes in scales, chords, and arpeggios.

Applying fingerboard diagrams and tablature to a real guitar

You don’t need experience reading music to use tablature (tab) and fingerboard diagrams to play your guitar. Check out these diagrams to help with finger placement on your guitar:

Fingerboard diagram and tablature to help with finger placement on your guitar

Open position guitar chords chart

Open position guitar chords sound twangy because they include unfretted strings that are permitted to ring open. This chart represents 24 of the most useful open chords you use to play guitar:

guitar open chord chart

Notes on the guitar neck

This figure of the nine-fret guitar neck has the notes in letter names for all six strings’ frets up to and including the 9th fret. Use this diagram to help you move any scale, arpeggio, or chord to a different starting note.

image0.jpg

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

About the book author:

Mark Phillips, a guitarist, arranger, and editor;

Hal Leonard Corporation is a United States music publishing and distribution company currently headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It is the largest sheet music publisher in the world.

Desi Serna has built a substantial online platform as an engaging and approachable guitar guru-a guitar player and teacher with more than 10,000 hours of experience providing private guitar lessons and classes. Serna is hailed as a "music-theory expert" by Rolling Stone magazine.