Chords I: The Essential Chords Every Guitarist Should Know

The short answer: a chord is just two or more notes played together — but in practice, chords sprawl into a zoo of variations. Gitori's Chords I course cuts the zoo down to the essentials: the chord types that cover the vast majority of real songs, taught as formulas you can build anywhere on the neck rather than grips to memorize.

Formulas, not grip charts

Chord books teach chords as photographs: put your fingers here. The problem is a photograph only works in one place, and there are thousands of them. The formula view is radically smaller:

• Major = 1-3-5
• Minor = 1-♭3-5
• and every other chord is a small edit to one of those.

If you know where the degrees are, a chord symbol becomes an instruction you can execute anywhere: find the root, add the degrees the formula names. That's the skill this course trains — the full theory backstory is in How chords are built from scales.

What the course covers

The essential chord vocabulary, one type at a time — the major and minor foundation and the everyday extensions and colors built on it — each introduced by formula, shown as fretboard shapes, and drilled with the Find the Chords game: you get a chord symbol and a highlighted zone, and the clock runs while you build it.

By the end, a lead sheet full of chord symbols reads like instructions instead of trivia. The 4-note family — Maj7, min7, Dom7 and friends — gets a deeper treatment in Chords II, and if you want the pure theory first, see Seventh chords explained.

Before you start

One prerequisite, and it's load-bearing: scale degrees. Chord formulas are written in degrees, so building chords on the fly requires seeing 3s and 5s from any root without counting. The Scale Degrees courses exist for exactly that.