Barre chords are an important part of a guitar player’s repertoire and really expand your ability to navigate the fretboard beyond open chord playing. That said, they can be a bit of a pain to get down as they require a good bit of hand strength and dexterity to play well.

Sus chords, or suspended chords, are variations to traditional major and minor chords. While the name might seem unfamiliar, you’ve undoubtedly heard them many times and would recognize them immediately in popular songs like “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” by Queen and many others. They have multiple uses and really help to add color and movement to chord progressions, particularly around a single chord.

In previous lessons we’ve learned about major, minor and diminished triads. In this lesson we’ll round out the triads with augmented triads. We’ll take a look at the interval structure that creates the augmented triad and map them to the guitar fretboard.

Guitar double stops can add a lot of flavor to your playing. They add life and fullness to both rhythm and lead playing, creating interesting textures not achieved by basic chords or single notes alone.

In a previous lesson, we looked at how to build chords from the major scale, which is an important concept when it comes to understanding diatonic harmony. In this lesson we’re going to go through the process of building minor scale chords, which follows the same process as the major scale.

In previous lessons we’ve explored both major triads and minor triads, which are two of the most commonly used triads. In this lesson we round out the triads of the major scale with a look at diminished triads.

Seventh chords are chords that include the root plus the 3rd, 5th, and 7th intervals above the root. Another way to think about it is a seventh chord is a triad plus a 7th interval.

Slash chords are chords in which a note other than the root note is in the bass position. You might think this sounds very similar to chord inversions and you’d be right.

When first starting out on guitar, simply fingering guitar chords is quite the challenge. Some fingerings are super awkward, making smooth chord transitions on guitar feel like an insurmountable task.