All You Need to Play 100s of Songs on Guitar – 3 Chords & The Truth

There’s an old saying in music that all you need is “3 chords and the truth”. This quote originally came from Harlan Howard a country music writer and has been used as a line by U2 in their version of Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower from the Rattle & Hum album and its even been used as an album title by country singer Sara Evans.

When beginning guitar it can be daunting opening a chord book and seeing 100s of chords that you have to learn. The truth is you only need a 3 chords to play 100s of songs on the guitar. Harlan Howard was definitely telling the truth about that!

For all beginners I recommend learning these 3 chords:

• A major
• D major
• E major

I recommend these 3 chords first as they are the easiest to play and change between (much easier that changing between C and G major!). Once you learn these 3 chords you can play songs such as:

• Bye Bye Love by The Everly Brothers
• Desire by U2
• Free Falling by Tom Petty
• Gloria by Van Morrison
• I Can’t Explain by The Who
• Louie Louie by The Kingsmen
• R.O.C.K in the USA by John Mellencamp
• Three Little Birds by Bob Marley
• What I Like About You by The Romantics
• Wild Thing and heaps more.

To learn the 3 chords I’ll introduce chord diagrams showing you where to place your fingers in the fret board. For the A major chord diagram you can see that fingers 1, 2 and 3 are placed in a row on the 2nd fret of the 4th, 3rd and 2nd strings. Use the photo to help you correctly place your fingers.

The chord diagram for A major also shows that the 5th and 1st strings have a 0 above them. This means that you play these open strings when you strum the chord. You’ll also notice that the 6th string has an X above it. This indicates that you don’t strum this string. You will find that there are many 5 string chords where you only strum 5 strings and not 6.

Some people do struggle getting all 5 strings to ring out clearly with this fingering for A Major so there is another way of playing the A chord. In this version finger 1 is placed in the middle with finger 2 on top and finger 3 on the bottom.

When holding all guitar chord shapes:

• Use the tips of your fingers to hold strings down. They should be “standing upright” as shown in the photos for the chord shapes. It can also help to keep the top knuckles of the fretting hand curved.
• Apply a firm amount of pressure to ensure that the strings ring out. As a beginner it will be a bit painful on the fingertips at first. The pain will diminish as you develop calluses during the first few weeks of daily practice.
• Place fingers in the middle between or close to behind the frets.
• Pluck each string individually checking that every note is clear. Once each note is working strum the chord and it should ring clear as long as you maintain fingertip pressure on the fret board.

The next chord is D major which uses a triangle shape. Follow the same steps as used for the A chord ensuring that each string rings clear and that the fingers are standing upright on their tips on the fret board. Check that finger 3 on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string doesn’t block the 1st string and prevent it from ringing out. This is a common problem for people when learning this chord.

For the E chord place finger 1 on the 1st fret of the 3rd string. Finger 2 then stretches over to the 2nd fret on the 5th string with finger 3 taking the middle spot on the 2nd fret of the 4th string.

Watch the video showing you how to play the A D and E major chords.

Wild Tune

Now that we’ve learnt 3 chords we are going to use them to play a rock song called Wild Tune. Strum DOWN on each chord twice before changing to the next one. The music below shows that you play A D E D chords then repeat several times.

Wild Tune Audio | Download Listen to the A D E chords being played in Wild Tune.

The trick here is to learn the steps that your fingers have to make to move from one chord to the next. It’s like learning dance steps for your fingers. You will have to practice changing between these chords back and forth many times before they become smooth and automatic.

Once you can play Wild Tune search online for the chord progressions for some of the other songs mentioned above and see if you can use these 3 chords to play these other songs.

This is a small sample from the book Learning To Play The Guitar – An Absolute Beginners Guide now available at Amazon.co