Guitar Chord Chart PDF Walkthrough - Learn new chords & theory!

com on this channel i talk a ton about music theory and how to map out the guitar and how to do that in a really practical hands-on way so we can have control over music so we can express ourselves so we can be artists so we can really uh you know get get that feeling that we want from music by filling in all the gaps if you’re new here welcome please subscribe and hit the bell so you get notified when i put out new lessons all right so here it is it’s called chords with color and you’ll see why it is called that soon one of these ways that we’re going to use it but the first way we’re going to use it is just to find chords that sound good together within a key we’re going to i mean this is a very basic kind of music theory thing but super super useful so this alone was kind of one of the ideas of a chord a chord chart could totally do this by itself so you know i have this uh contents here uh table of contents interchangeable chord options in the key of c major a major you know major and minor we’ll go through all all of that how it works you can click on these to go to that area um if you’re looking at this on a computer or if you print it out that’s great too on any of these pages because it’s kind of long it’s 13 pages that you can kind of flip around to you can always click down here on the bottom return to table of contents and it’ll take you back to the top i’m i’m showing kind of a fuller screen view of this but of course you can you know look at it uh you’ll be looking at it more in a kind of a pdf um size uh way if you do that so let me resize it here um so a bunch of stuff about uh that i recommend reading but you know i’m going through it here in in the video so right now we’re just gonna skip that that’s just talking about what am i talking about with color what does that mean um what are chord extensions um how to use the chart and and whatnot but that’s what this video is for so the first thing is just chords uh that exist in a key so again this is like its own kind of golden piece of information right there if you don’t have that down or know that this could be super super useful if you’re either kind of studying what chords are in a song or writing your own songs or whatever so you might know this stuff already and that’s where some of the more advanced stuff down here is going to be very cool but we really really want to know this so um this is the basically like a scale but with chords right so this is the one chord the two chord the three chord it’s the chord that you can build off of the first note of the scale the second note of the scale the third one of the scale in a key through you know there’s seven notes in a scale so then therefore there are seven chords with the root of each chord being one of those scale notes so this is the key of c major and a minor which we’ll talk about you know using it as minor in a second um but if i play through these chords for you and and demonstrate um i’ll play that and demonstrate but i also want to say these little gray notes are um all uh options that don’t change the chord at all right so if you look here you see that uh i have three written there and i’m going to talk about what those mean and that’s one of the ways we want to use this in a second it’s very very cool to do that um so three it means it’s a third of the chord and this means it’s the fifth of the chord now if you if you play one or the other it doesn’t change the fact that it’s just a complete normal c chord at all so it’s kind of cool you can use those melodically actually you can put your pinky down on this five and then release it to have it be open and it’s just still a c chord so you see that’s over here on the g chord as well you can either have it be open or have that five so i might show that when i demonstrate a little bit here so here’s the c chord open e thank you down there so that’s kind of nice here’s to d minor the two chord of the key any order of these chords will always sound super good together okay g and then here’s that if you want to interchange that there’s a little bit of melody in there right very useful for finger picking too if you want to throw those um kind of interchangeable uh options in there so every time you see a gray note that’s what that is a minor is the sixth chord and b diminished this will be very rare in a lot of you know songwriting music or popular music um but it’s it’s the chord that is in the key it’s the theory of the chord that is in the key so the this first column here they’re all just triads they’re all just triads and we’re going to talk about why i have triads and then these other chords in a second um but um but that’s the first thing to do so just to make sure you understand that so if i go back to the table of contents here and then go to um the next key and i could just scroll down but it’s just it’s kind of easier to jump to it in this way so now it’s going to say oh well what if you want to play in the key of a okay well that first chord the one chord is a major two chord is b minor and this and the way i chose these chords for the entire chart is really trying to find the closest to open string chord as possible so there are some barre chords like this c sharp minor and the b minor and those are just like the closest that we can get to um and or you know i try to make it technique wise as easy as possible um and not having a bunch of hard you know crazy bar chords in there um so it’s quite nice in in that uh setting of course with every chord there are many many ways you can play that one chord and a lot of chord charts focus on that and that’s what this this is different because it doesn’t do that at all um a lot of chord church will say hey you want to play you want to play d here’s 12 different ways to play the exact same d chord but with different voicings and stuff that’s very cool stuff to study it’s just not what the focus of this chord chart is instead i’ve focused on giving you um different options that can replace that that actually sound different so i’ll get to that soon but basically if you play this d um or the d sus as i circled there they can function the same you can replace them totally at any time so but basically that’s the key of a i’ll scroll down now to go to the key of g so just this top row where it says triad is the just straightforward kind of what you think of as your normal chords through any key so there’s g major and then e major right some of these have more barre chords than others okay really good stuff to study and then there’s one more key and it’s through the keys of c a g e and d just because those are the most have the most open strings in them they’re the most common keys to play around with so here’s g a so i’m just playing one chord two chord three chord four chord v chord six chord um so that’s really one of the initial kind of purposes to use ignoring everything else that’s super valuable just on its own if you don’t know just what the normal triads are through a key so in one of the updates i added what the relative minor key is so let me go back to the table of contents every major key has a relative minor key and every minor key is a relative major key so when you’re playing in a major or minor key they share the same key signature they share the same um collection of notes essentially so um let’s go ahead and go to g major and e minor because we say hey what if we want to play an e minor okay so what i did here it’s it’s hard when i’m scrolling in this way but when you look at the whole page it’ll be a little easier um you’ll see at the bottom here i have minor key i put it down there because i didn’t want it to get crowd you know crowd things up over here i wanted to be really clear on the top that we’re doing you know one chord two chord that’s really something to understand first but then the exact same chords um down here you can treat as minor so all that means is you’re changing the label of it so notice this is the one chord so the order is is out of order if we were just talking about the minor key i would put the one chord first and then have the two chord and three chord in that order but since it’s on the same chord chart here i’m just showing hey treat this as the main chord and then you’re playing in minor right so um yes we have all these chord options up there but um but here’s that normal kind of e minor chord okay well yes we have these uh labels down here that you can look at but i’m going to not keep scrolling back and forth because once you know that this is one and this is actually a big kind of music theory clue the one of the minor key is the six of the major key and the six of the major key is the one of the minor key but once we know that it’s one then we can just say oh cool well that means that this is two and that means that this is three and this is four and this is five and this is six and this is seven of the minor key okay of the relative minor key so if you focus on this minor chord a lot um and then you play this one you know that would be the this is one so this is seven and this is six and you’ll see down here it says flat seven major flat six major so if some of that is confusing don’t worry about it it’s just good to get exposed to this stuff and if you understand the theory of that and and kind of have been exposed to it but just have this as a resource to see it all in one place that’s what’s really super useful so if i play that e minor chord and then go to d and then c and then back to e minor that’s one of the common chord progressions that’s going to be on the the bonus page of this sheet that we’re going to talk about uh one minor flat seven major flat six major back to one minor so that’s just to show you yep there if you want to think of minor keys then it’s there as well whether you’re writing your own songs or trying to analyze what’s going on in a song that you’re playing so again i just want to say all of that major the major triads and the minor triads are the major triads through the major key and the relative minor key that’s in five different keys on this whole chart so if you uh there’s two pages for each key but we have the c major and a minor um the a major f sharp minor g major e minor etc etc so five different keys of that lots and lots of stuff to study even though there are 12 keys total these are very very common open string keys kind of the most common chords you’ll find on the guitar are from those keys right there so it’s just putting them into the context of how do they work together and why do they work together okay so the second use of this chord chart is that it shows chord tone numbers let’s just go to any key here going to e major and c sharp minor um and as you can see and as i already mentioned if we just look at this a chord here well what i have and i’ll zoom in on this is the chord tone numbers labeled r means root and that is just the same as 1.

so i like to put the r there because it’s the root but it’s the same thing as one so the root is always one so these numbers though and this is something i haven’t seen any other chord chart do this i’m sure they’re out there i’m sure people write out chords like this all the time because it’s so useful but it’s just not very um just really not what is most common you know if you look at a bunch of chord charts it’s going to show you usually fingering numbers instead and i don’t like to do that because um there are so many ways you can place your left hand fingers on uh any one chord for example this could be finger one finger two finger three or it could be finger two finger three finger four or you know some people use their first finger and then they bar the two you know there’s so many ways and the best way to best fingers to use for your left hand on a chord have so much to do with the context of where you’re coming from and where you’re going to in the piece and and when you should put those those notes down um in a piece of music so you know that’s stuff that’s great to talk about but i don’t want to lock it into a chord shape so it’s much better to think of the theory of the chord tone numbers so what’s going on with the theory of the chord tone numbers um again the root is the root and then the number is the distance that it is away from the root let me grab a different pin there the distance that is away from the root so if you played a scale from here and then landed on this note it would be five notes away in the scale okay also this is so useful because you can really see clearly oh these are the same note this is a root and this is a root so that’s really nice this um not only is great for mapping out the fretboard obviously super good for mapping out the fretboard but you can start to listen for like is that the same note oh yes it’s an octave away but it’s the same note and so the ear training aspect of it is very powerful if you choose to listen for oh this is one this is five oh that’s the sound of a root to a fifth or one or five or a fifth interval and it will always be the sound of a fifth interval anywhere you play even if you move it around um right so if i look at this g sharp minor over here and you look at the root of g sharp minor same sound moved on to a different note um but if you um you know i’m not talking about a specific a specific exercise for doing that yet but you could focus on that and just say what does that sound like you know here’s the root here’s the third that’s the that’s the root and that’s the third of this chord that’s the sound of it and that will always be the sound of the root and the third yes there’s an octave in between them but that third will always sound um like that what it sounds like is sounds like three notes away from the root so i just played three two one um and that’s how i hear you know you kind of you could just hear it kind of jumping there but internally a lot of people will hear that in between note in their mind as i made a smiley face yay chord chart um a lot of people will hear that that the in between notes kind of traveling to um the traveling the distance that they’re trying to hear the interval that they’re trying to hear so um you’ll see relationships i mean this is a long game thing right it’s not gonna happen overnight but with this chord chart you can start to see um and if you find that useful um just little by little kind of studying what what the heck is going on in this in this uh chord you know what is there so root to flat three that’s really useful well check this out if we know that stuff we already know that this shape and this shape are the same obviously we see that so anywhere on the guitar that’s always going to be root to flat three always unless you’re in a different tuning right sixth string to third string same fret that is a if that’s the root then that’s flat three um and so again what that means is if you played a scale from here to here then you would get to that note by playing a whole step and then a half step or it would take you a minor third distance it would take you three notes because it’s a third but that third would be flat so it would sound like this g sharp and i’m gonna play a scale and i’ve talked about this a ton in my music theory series so if you’re if you’re curious about this skill it is so clearly explained in the first um in like the second and third video of the music theory series that i linked to in the description it’s so it’s such a crucial thing to be able to do one two three four five six seven one two three flat three right that’s actually different than i usually teach it i usually say count with a major scale one two three four five six seven one two three oh it’s a flat three right so if that’s confusing that’s stuff that i explained really well in those other videos but um you know just getting excited about showing you yeah these chord tone numbers are all here so you know we’re going to talk next about what the heck is going on with all these other chord options and and how awesome that is but that’s why it’s great that it shows this stuff too what is f sus2 f-sharp sus2 even mean well it has a root it has a fifth it has a root again here and then it has a 2.

the fact that the root is doubled doesn’t mean anything doesn’t change the chord but um it shows oh sus2 what is sus2 i did a video on sus chords actually in that series too um but we see okay we have a root a fifth and a two in all those chords in all the chords of of this category here of sus two and that row of sus two so any of these other chords you know what does major nine mean um not only is that a chord shape for it you know not only is that the shape to use if you want to play um e major nine but now we see oh well e major nine has a root a third a seven and a nine it also does have a five don’t sweat about that but it at least shows and and it’s fine to not play that but at least shows you what’s in there here’s one that has you know if it’s a minor nine chord this is everything root and then there’s a flat three there’s a five there’s a flat seven and there’s a nine so the spelling of these chords is a big big thing to understand if you want to kind of understand how to create all different kinds of chords so the chord tone numbers um just huge to understand just huge to understand and then you know if you do understand that stuff you can make your own chord shapes because you can count around and say well what’s another way to play a if i don’t want to play this exact shape you can use some of that music theory knowledge and chord tones to to create another shape for it one more little thing about being able to see the chord tone numbers i’ll just grab like the c sharp minor chord here um one more thing about that and that’s that if you want to actually let’s grab a let’s grab a seventh chord because it gives us more stuff to play around with so we’re gonna do um sure why not c sharp minor nine so um one other thing by knowing this um if you did want to add other notes to play around with uh maybe uh adding a melody that works over this or improvising or something like that actually a pretty cool thing to be able to do or that that really works is that you can kind of fill in a scale around it by by placing notes that are nearby and you can just use your ear there’s kind of not a right or wrong way to do it that whatever you use technically comes from a different mode or a different scale or has a different theory explanation but there’s not really a wrong thing to do you know so if you added this note here it would be uh it would be the six if you added this note here is actually just the root right so um that’s the same note as there even though it’s not part of this chord shape um it’s there so you can think of that’s why thinking of the numbers is so helpful how would you know that um certainly you could find it by ear but how would you know that if you weren’t thinking okay nine which is the same as two and anything i say theory wise that’s confusing here go check out that theory series um everything’s in there everything you need to know um so one two two um we’ll know that you know much more quickly if we can think of the numbers so therefore if this is flat three and if we know our structure of our of our major scale where the normal three is here well four is there right so if you want it to fill in some of these notes and then like we see that flat seven’s here well again if we know our structure of our scale we know seven is right below the root and then therefore flat seven is here those are the same notes as each other so now we have some notes that we can play around with um and fill in i didn’t complete a scale but that doesn’t matter root plot seven root flat seven major seven root i played just the note in between those two right there so flat seven major seven blue flat three four here’s that flat seven six okay so i don’t want that to seem you know too overwhelming to you because i’m just like now just playing around with it a bunch because these things take time but if you did want to start filling in other numbers again don’t worry about what scale it comes from or anything like that you can just start exploring so if that’s six well that’s flat six and if that’s flat six then five is here right um and these all have sounds that remain you know always the flat seven always playing oops let me get back my pen always playing flat seven to six to five is gonna sound the same way that’s what ear training is that’s what ear training is is understanding oh that sounds like the natural six whether you call it that or not um that’s how we recognize things by ear so so again if if that sounds interesting to you but that sounds like a lot just know that knowing the structure of the major scale is the foundation of all of that stuff if you understand the structure of the major scale really well and then understand uh just like oh if you the three is in a major scale and if you go down a half step it’s flat three that’s that’s all you need to do that really it’ll seem really obvious once you know that so if you don’t know that check out episodes two and three of that music theory series so that’s it for talking about the chord tones let’s go on to the next topic okay the absolute coolest part of this chord chart um and really why it’s called chords with color and why it looks so hectic you know all the stuff we talked about so far could have been a simple chart with just these kind of main chords but the interchangeable chord options that add color now color tones are extensions extensions are sometimes referred to as color tones i’m going to jump to a different page here so an extension is something like nine i have videos thoroughly explaining how all that works in that series so you can just kind of search for that and find that i’ve i have several that really if you want to get it down so seven could be considered an extension or not um usually an extension is something above seven so nine eleven thirteen so um don’t sweat about the theory of that right now as much as just let’s just look at this at the most basic level and just say um the point of this is that if you are playing any of these chords or that’s in a song right you’re playing any of those chords and you have an understanding of of like okay this chord is the four of that key in any any key any context if you’re like this okay i’m playing the four chord right now um well if we go through and over here i have triad then sus2 then says four what i’ve done is i’ve said for each chord in the key the one chord two chord three chord what is it as a triad what is it as sus two what if you make each chord what if you make the one chord sus two you get that one if you make the two chords plus two you get that um and it goes through um each uh or many chord types as many kind of chord variations that i could think of um and it just means that it doesn’t work adding sus2 does not work with the 3 chord don’t worry about y for now but it just can’t exist in that key in that way certainly e sus 2 the chord exists but not in this key so when there’s an in a not applicable kind of grayed out box it just means that chord type doesn’t exist but look at that you can make the one chord sus two or the two chords us two or the four chords has two or the five chords s two or like super cool so like that a sus2 that’s what that sound is right there right so in some ways this could be kind of an encyclopedia chord thing where you if you want to know kind of a chord type you could find it in here that’s not really what it’s meant for but you can definitely use it that way you can also use it by just pulling up the screen and just you could jump to any chord from any chord it’s going to sound freaking awesome and use that for just kind of being creative and making songs out of it so yes i do talk about understanding theory as part of this but you don’t need to know any of that and there’s no reason that you should or shouldn’t it’s only if you’re curious about it and it excites you and stuff like that so don’t everyone has their own path right some people don’t bother with theory at all they just get hands-on just use their ear and just play i think it’s all great i think it’s all great obviously oops obviously i like that stuff but i’m not saying it’s it’s better or worse or should i talk about how it’s powerful to know but if if you’re not interested in it then it’s not going to be that that useful but what if you make sus4 you know any any of the chords one chord two chord if you make him add not an add nine chord if you make them a six chord you know what chords in the key can you turn into a six chord what chords through the key can you just turn into a seven chord so now we have all the seven chords through the key that alone is really handy c major seven d minor seven e minor seven just kind of looking at that f major seven g dominant seven um a minor seven b half diminished or minor seven flat five so those are all those shapes and that alone is just a great exercise too hey what if i play through uh in order back and forth all those chords you can create your own exercises with this chart by even just going through and say i’m going to play through up and down everything that is seven now i’m going to go through and play up and down everything that is um major nine so oh gorgeous sound major now it says c major nine okay here’s here’s the d minor nine ah lovely here’s f major nine because i skipped the three there okay um here’s kind of an open string uh version of g add nine not a common chord shape you can find but it’s because i’m trying to include some open strings where i can oh one of my favorite voicings ever is this a minor 9 shape that’s actually really hard you can see my hand position kind of reaching for it uh totally doable just takes maybe some flexibility uh takes some time to get the dexterity or the the technique reached for that but oh just a gorgeous chord so um so back to kind of practically using this and i guess i’ll just show you know what’s a six nine chord adds the six and the nine if you turn them into an 11 chord if you turn them into 13 um just going through any of those options is great but back to kind of this right now we’re looking at the row kind of view left to right all those chord types but what if we’re looking at the column view and you have an a minor chord and you know it’s the sixth of the key well then you can turn it into this it’s not going to interrupt the music at all it’s going to add you know a little bit of spice to a little flavor to it but it’s not going to interfere with the functionality of the nothing’s going to sound weird about it it’s just going to add more texture so you have all those options really interchangeable right look at this a minor 11 chord oh my gosh this is such a beautiful chord one of my favorites ever just straight up that voicing one of my favorites right you get you have a whole step between these notes and a whole step between these notes so you get these these stepwise distances in the chord which is less common on on guitar than it is on something like piano or in uh orchestras um so if you just have a normal a minor chord and you know you’re and you know it’s the six of the key then you can play that minor 11 chord we just played instead or this or this and you know if you’ve watched a lot of my videos you might be familiar with some of this because i’m always talking about you know getting this chord jar but i’ve never done a walkthrough of it like this so really wanted to just emphasize it in this way okay and lastly i got this bonus page that the latest version i just added this into the sheet and it shows 20 common chord progressions uh using the theory kind of roman numeral versions so you can do it in any key right so i actually did a whole mini series on each of these i did a video on the comment on these uh chord progressions i did a video on these three chord chord progressions you know four part video on on all of these progressions giving examples uh playing them so i don’t need to do that here i’ll put a link in the description to that series of the common chord progressions but of course that prompted me to say there should be a resource where this is just written out as a list so you can play with it and no better place to put it than this chord chart because now if you wanted to play this progression here two five one uh with those seven chords um you have you can just go um look at okay the two chord as minor seven because you have all of those options as minor seven as dominant seven as major seven um through any of those five keys you’re gonna have the shapes to do that as well you can i talk about this here with a little note you can you know take a normal normal chord progression like this absolutely most ubiquitous chord progression ever um one five six four and then look at oh how do i make that more my own how do i make that more um interesting to me right now or you know whatever you want to hear add sevens to it add nice to it make it sus you know do do whatever you want because you have all of those here you look at oh well the one chord of any of those keys the five chord of any of those keys and then all their options so anyway i think that this is this is a cool thing totally of its own but i added it onto the chord chart just so everything is in one place and just wanted to kind of let you know that that is there if you downloaded a version of this chord chart before um and don’t have this bonus page on it because i updated that recently i sent i would have sent you an email that sends you the updated version of it so check your email and just search for chords with color or chords with color update and you should have that there if you don’t just send me an email jared soundguitarlessons.

com that’s totally fine because if you do the normal use the link to try to get it again the thing that sends it doesn’t send the same thing twice to people unfortunately so so that’s it that’s my walkthrough of my free guitar chord chart pdf hope you find it useful of course like i said you can just use the link in the description to grab totally free copy of that let me know if you have feedback questions you know anytime totally fine you can just reply to the email that gets sent to you when you get the pdf when you get the chord chart i put out a new lesson video every week next week’s lesson is going to be about how i wrote and recorded guitar parts for macklemore a few years ago so i’m going to tell a story about that and i’m going to teach the guitar parts that i wrote and that they used on the record so that’s going to be a unique fun lesson hope to see you there make sure you subscribe to check it out see you next week take care and happy practicing.