memorizing every single guitar chord
Hi Visitor
To be a good guitar player, do you need to memorize every single chord shape?
We don’t want to be limited to just a few chord shapes, so surely to be a real professional, we need to know all of them, right?
Well, I’d say it’s pretty important to be able to play every possible chord shape... but memorizing every chord shape is kind of a different story.
It may seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s the difference between under a month of study, work, and practice, and several 1000s of years.
(That is, it's a difference you want to know and understand. Unless you have 4-digits-worth of spare years lying around in your house, itching to be put to good questionable use...)
Let me explain.
The guitar has 6 strings. Which means a chord shape, on the guitar, can contain as many as six notes. No more.
For a chord to be a chord, it needs to have at least three notes (some would say two, but that’s a whole other can of worms so for now, I’m sticking with three).
In music, there are twelve notes total. So, there are as many unique chords on the guitar as there are combinations of either 3, 4, 5, or 6 of those 12 notes.
This leaves us with a grand total of 2,431 unique chords.
Now. I did say unique chords. Not unique chord shapes.
Some chords can be played in just one way. Some can't even be played with a normal human hand. But some other can be played in several different ways (For instance, the simple C major triad can be played in at least 60 basic ways - though you can easily find 200 if you're thorough)
So if there was a book of all the potential chord shapes on the guitar, it would probably have at least, say, 5,000 playable shapes in it
That’s a lot of shapes to memorize! If you memorize a chord shape a day and never ever forget it in your life it will take just short of 14 years to go through that...
If you play a chord progressions made of 2 of these shapes a day... It will take more than 68.000 years to play all the possible 2-chord chord progressions. Several 1000s of years, as I said above.
Instead of doing that, you can actually do something significantly easier, that gets you a betterend result. If you want to know what that is, watch the video linked below.
https://musictheoryforguitar.com/book-of-chords.htmlEnjoy!
Tommaso Zillio
Music Theory Education Expert
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