What's Better, Learning Chords or Notes First?

The style of music helps determine where you start

Beginning guitar students face many choices early on, some that they're not prepared to make. Electric or acoustic guitar, nylon or steel strings, reading music or tab, and today's subject, notes or chords. I help them decide by making the first lesson more about finding out what they like to play, whether or not they're going to sing, and why they decided to play guitar. If you're going to focus on playing and singing, then chord playing is usually the way to start. Chords are what you hear people play in the background while someone sings or another instrument plays a solo. When you see a guitar player strumming instead of picking out notes, he or she is most likely playing chords.

Playing notes is helpful because you feel like you're making progress sooner

One advantage to picking out notes is that after a couple lessons you can play the tune to a song. Even if it's a simple song, you hear progress right from the beginning. If you're reluctant to sing, you can play thousands of songs with the same chords, so it won't necessarily sound like the song. Note playing can be a fun way to get started on guitar. There are two notation systems for guitar, reading music or playing tablature, or tab, for short. Tab is a number system so it's really quite easy to learn. See my previous post about learning to read music. That will help you decide if you even need to learn standard note reading.

Strumming along with recordings

If playing chords is what you and your guitar teacher choose to do first, there's a great learning tool called Riffmaster Pro (affiliate link) which slows down songs so you can play along with them. The nice feature about this program is that is doesn't change the pitch of the songs so you don't have to re-tune your guitar. It can also be used later on to learn more advanced soloing techniques.