How To Make a Chord Chart for Guitar

PART ONE

I am a “D’Addario Education Collective Teacher” and periodically, I’ll get e-mails from the Collective on a variety of topics. Today I got one that caught my eye.

I’ve played with all sorts of people in all sorts of musical contexts over the years and believe me, I’ve seen just about every kind of ‘chart’ that you can imagine. Some of them are well done and some of them are almost impossible to follow.

In my experience, one type of chart is pretty much ‘the standard’ for allowing folks to share tunes and communicate their musical ideas with others. It simply lays out the ‘bars or measures’ in a tune, indicates the number of beats in each bar and indicates the chord (or chords) to be played in each bar. If done properly, it’s almost impossible for anyone that you’re playing with to ‘get lost’ while playing a tune following a chart like this.

Not everyone knows how to create this type of chart even though the process for creating them is pretty easy and straightforward. So, when I saw these videos I thought I’d pass them along to you. The videos are nicely done. In fact the instructions are so clear that even if you only invest the five minutes necessary to watch Part I, you’ll know pretty much all you need to know to create or to read through one of these charts …. but do watch Part II as well! 🙂

PART TWO


Comments:

Michael Sassano: I say….
‘Is that a G or is that a D???

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