14 Essential Chord Movements Beginners Should Be Exploring

31 Jul 2024

Kiall Freeman

Hello strummers, Kiall here taking you through the 14 Essential Chord Movements You Should Be Learning Exploring! This blog post is all about encouraging you to explore finger movements within your familiar open-position chord shapes through one of these four methods: Losing, Adding, Pushing, or Dragging a note. The aim here is to achieve three key goals:

1. Building left-hand dexterity, perfect for chord embellishments.

2. Training the ear to hear melodic movements within a chord and their effect on tonality.

3. Adding new chords to our vocabulary. You may not use these chords right away, but when you start searching for songs, you may just come across these names, and it won’t feel so daunting to tackle!

So, let’s start with one you have most likely done already! Take this E Major chord and If we lose the note being held by the first finger on the G string we get the E minor! You tip the balance of this beautifully happy-sounding E Major chord into a dark, miserable-sounding chord now called E minor. 

Okay, maybe a bit over the top, but maybe not. Grab your guitar and really— I mean, really—analytically listen to the shift in the emotional sound of the chord, going from Bright to Dark. Powerful, isn’t it?

Kiall Freeman

So, for every possible combination of changing just one note within an existing chord shape, the sound can change dramatically as well as the name of the chord. Given the large number of combinations available, I'll take on the heavy theoretical work for you and provide the most suitable ones to start with. However, don't hesitate to experiment on your own as well!

Losing A Note

The first chord we're going to tweak is the C Major chord by Losing a Note on the B string. This gives us a sweet-sounding chord called C Major 7, which can usually be easily substituted for the C major chord. We can also apply this same method by Losing the second finger on the 2nd fret of the D string. We get a chord called Csus2, which stands for suspended and has an airy and floaty sound to it. 

Again, this can easily be interchanged with the C major chord to add tonal variation. Artists like Oasis and Neil Young often employ this technique to add melodic movements within a chord progression. Sometimes it's strummed, other times it's played as a melodic riff.

Adding A Note

Okay, time to move on to another method, this time Adding a Note. If we keep the same C major chord shape and Add the little finger to the equation replacing the open G string to the 3rd fret. We get this strong bold sounding chord called C dominant 7, or in shorthand C7. You will no doubt see this chord in a lot of songs! While you can substitute this chord with C Major, it may not always play so nicely! So, for the time being, consider this as its own distinct chord, unlike the first two examples which can be easily swapped. The next one we have is very appropriately named Cadd9 and instead of placing the little finger on the G string, we are adding it to the B string, 3rd fret. Cadd9 is also another chord you can count as a C major substitute chord!

In fact, check out the song Dust In The Wind by Kanas. The first passage of chords is actually, C, Cmaj7, Cadd9 and back to C. This is a beautiful example of how you can take this whole concept with a finger-picking pattern and ultimately, just playing a C major chord with different melody notes on the B string! 

Kiall Freeman

Pushing A Note

Let’s take a new chord form, A major and look at Pushing a note forward on the B string from the 2nd fret to the 3rd fret. For this, we are going to hold A major with fingers 2 3 4 as it will be clearer when we get to dragging a note later on! 

Extra side note: You can definitely use other finger combinations to hold these chords when appropriate! My aim here is to make the concept visually clear without requiring you to change all of your fingers to form the chord shape.

Dragging A Note 

Going back to our A major chord, let’s Drag a note on the B string backwards. One challenge you might face is the difficulty of dragging a finger backwards. To address this, we'll remove the little finger and instead add the first finger to the 1st fret. Focus on the note being dragged, rather than the finger, in this example.

Conclusion

Alright, there you have it: four methods to explore discovering new chords based on your existing shapes. Below, I've provided you with 14 examples to explore, based on the following chords: C major, D major, A major, E major, and F major. As you go through these examples, consider whether you're losing, adding, pushing, or dragging a note.

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