Should You Learn Guitar Chords In Each Key?

One of the hardest tasks to master in the beginning of your journey into guitar chords is to get your fingers to do what you ask them to do. Independence will not come easily, that’s just the way it is. That is probably the reason why most guitar players when starting out down this long winding road, focus on and learn the easiest guitar scales and chords and use those chords for most, if not for all their playing.

Guitar players don’t seem to want to experiment with different parts of the guitar or mess around with the structure of the chords to give some kind of a new personality to the sounds being produced, that is why I think a lot of guitar music around today is so uninspiring and un-original.

Once guitar players get a few tricks and licks into their fingers, they become a bit less inclined to learn new things. If you think about the combinations that are available from a tiny chord in one place on the fretboard, it is absolutely amazing how many permutations you can create, let alone the thousands of other possibilities you can conceive. If you experiment with just one chord shape or scale on a different fret on the neck, you can explode your playing to uncharted regions you would not have thought of before.

Here are a few suggestions why you might want to break out of old routines and learn some guitar chords and scales in a different key.

If you have a song that you know quite well, transpose those chords to another key. What you will find is that the song can have a different feel and take on a whole new life of its own.
Play through those chords and just listen to the sound those new ‘shapes’ are making in the new position. You are breathing new life into your tired, worn out, over used chords. Remember that discovering new, original ideas and sounds is part of why guitar playing can be so much fun in the first place.

Inspiration can come immediately from taking one of your most prized over used chords and moving it over one fret to a new key. You probably will have to re-arrange your finger to accommodate the new shape, but persevere with it, this new chord is no harder than any chord you have learnt so far. Now try moving all of the chords to this new key. Now you have just increased your knowledge of the fretboard.

Most people who learn to play guitar, usually play for a lifetime. I have never met any guitar player that played for a year or two then declared they didn’t like playing the guitar and just stopped. It is an ongoing pursuit, a skill to be mastered over the course of a lifetime, something to be enjoyed.

If you decide to learn some new guitar chords, it doesn’t have to be a chore. If you learnt just one different chord in a month, you will be in front of most of the guitar players on the planet.

I know that you enjoy the chords that you are already playing, but if you break out of the same old guitar chords and scales that you play all the time, I promise you, you can rediscover all the amazing feelings of why you started to play guitar all over again.

So I ask you – do you think it might be a good idea for you to learn guitar chords in each key?

Click here if you want to find out more about guitar chords in each key