There really isn't a set of guitar chords especially for beginners, but there is a limited number of chords that beginner guitar players can learn so they can start learning to play songs on the guitar right away. You have probably seen guitar players moving chord shapes up and down the neck of the guitar using their index finger as a bar across all the strings. This kind of chord is called a barre chord, and at this stage you will not be needing to learn any of these chords. The kind of chords beginner guitar players usually learn is the "open" chord which uses only two or three fingers to make notes on the fretboard and the other strings in the chord are played without any fingers pressing down on them - that is "open".

Let us assume that you want to start learning your favorite songs on the guitar as soon as possible. To do this you choose simple arrangements of your songs that make use of open chords like this:

E 0---------------------

B --1-------------------

G --3-------------------

D --2-------------------

A 0---------------------

E X---------------------

The above example is the A minor chord. The X tells us that the sixth string is not played. On the first and fifth strings where the figure 0 appears, the open strings sound. As for the rest of the strings, the B string is played at the first fret, the G string is played at the third fret and the D string is played at the second fret.

Learning to play open chords is quite easy even for beginner guitar players. You will get some resistance from your body at first because you are trying to get it do things it is not used to but after a day or two the routine of learning chord shapes will become quite enjoyable. The thing most people need to pay attention to is HOW you change over from one chord to the next.

When you see amateur guitar players fluffing chord changes it is because they do not practice their chord changes slowly, carefully and smoothly. This is the essence of learning guitar chords for beginners. You need to begin fresh every day, practicing slow chord changes as though for the first time. After a while this will become second nature and your chord changing will become faster.

This is a short article on guitar chords for beginners which has the starting point that you want to begin playing the guitar by learning songs you have heard on the radio or on CDs. If you learn in this way you will be getting your basic chords down fast and easily without learning much about their theoretical framework. You can take another approach and learn your guitar chords according to the "families" they are in. A chord family is a set of chords that are related to each other simply because they sound good together. As an example, if you are learning a song where the chord at the end of the song is an D, you will be using the D family of chords which consists of the D, E minor, G and A chords. You can find out more about chord families from your teacher or by doing an internet search.