22nd Sept 2021

This is a Chord

In 1976 a writer called Tony Moon had a blank page to fill in his punk fanzine “Sideburns”.

He quickly drew diagrams of three chords, scrawled ‘this is a chord’ next to each one, and concluded “Now form a band”.

This is a pretty well-known story, although the article is often wrongly attributed to Mark Perry of “Sniffin’ Glue” magazine.

But it’s pretty much exactly how I got started playing the guitar (5 years earlier) – and probably lots of others like me.

Plugged in, and turned up loud, you can do an awful lot with 3 chords, and to be honest, these three are pretty easy to play! It’s probably why the guitar has always been such a popular instrument since rock’n’roll began in about 1955.

I’ll take things a step further – here are 8 chords. They are my ‘page 1’ of learning the guitar, and with these chords you can play loads of songs. Buy yourself a capo and you can play them in the original keys – in other words you can play along with the record! (I might do a blog on the Capo next time – I love capos!). Anyway – here are the chords:

(the numbers are the fingers to use and the curly brackets at the bottom show you which strings to strum with your strumming hand).

Matt G, 22/09/2021