Beginner Guitar Lessons-Learn to play chords in D (Part 5)

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A guitar is an amazing instrument. Sometimes hard to play but with easy nice sounding guitar chord secrets everywhere. Let's explore some easy but nice guitar chords.

Our first guitar chord will be Dmaj7. It is played in this way for example:

Dmaj: 0/4 2/3 2/2 2/1

An explanation of the notation. The first number indicates which fret to press down. The number after the slash which string. 2/3 means, press down the second fret on the third string.

If you lift up your fingers from this chord you will get a very easy guitar chord to play indeed! We can call it an Em7. It will look this way:

Em7: 0/4 0/3 0/2 0/1

This little chord progression makes a nice little intro to a song in D-major. If we write down a little guitar chord sequense it might look like this:

Dmaj7 / / / Em7 / / / Dmaj7 / / / Em7 / / /

We will now spice the second chord a bit by playing a Gm6. It looks like this:

Gm6: 0/4 3/3 3/2 0/1

We can use this guitar chord in an intro with the same function as the one above:

Dmaj7 / / / Gm6 / / / Dmaj7 / / / Gm6 / / /

Let's introduce a new guitar chord. We can call this chord D11:

D11: 0/4 5/3 5/2 5/1

As you maybe already have figured out you can slide the Dmaj7 chord up a few frets and you will get this chord. We will now create a progression with these three guitar chords:

Dmaj7 / / / D11 / / / Gm6 / / / Gm6 / / /

The next guitar chord is easy to play too. It is a G-minor chord. It is actually the same chord shape as the guitar chord Dmaj7 but on the third fret. It looks like this:

Gm: 0/0 3/3 3/2 3/1

Now we will create a guitar chord progression with these four chords together:

Dmaj7 / / / D11 / / / Gm / / / Gm6 / / /

The art of sliding chords to new frets is an exciting and easy way to find new guitar chords and sounds to use in your playing.

We will end this article on easy guitar chords in D by experimenting a bit with the D-major chord. Here is the most common D-major chord:

D: 0/4 2/3 3/2 2/1

By sliding this guitar chord up three frets up you will get the Dm7 chord or D-minor seventh. It looks like this:

Dm7: 0/4 5/3 6/2 5/1

Slide it up two frets from this position and you will get a G-major chord. It looks like this:

G: 0/4 7/3 8/2 7/1

The last guitar chord to explore will be A-major with D bass, notated A/D. Here it is:

A/D: 0/4 9/3 10/2 9/1

Let's make an impressive intro with these four chords but with the same chord shape by sliding the D-major chord up:

D / / / Dm7 / / / G / / / A/D / / /

The guitar really is an amazing instrument. Many more chords can be changed in similar ways to create new interesting sounds that will enrich your playing!