Creating Awesome Guitar Chords

It's hard to come up with chords that sound fresh and inspire our creativity but here's one guaranteed way to create chords that will sound awesome together.

For this guitar lesson we're working in the key of E major today and we start things off with 6 amazing guitar chords that might help start the creative juices flowing.

The chords can be thought of as being created from notes of a scale pattern on the fretboard. If we can memorise (or at least reference) this scale pattern when we come to play guitar chords, we can create new, beautiful guitar chords by adding in notes from the scale pattern.

You will always get guitar chords that sound good together because chords in a key have been derived from the same scale (i.e. the same notes). The first approach is to use a guitar chord that you already know.

I use the examples of A major (the IV chord) and E major (the I chord). Alternatively, you could create a mini chord pattern in the high strings and be changing the bass notes (staying within the scale as you do so) to create some fresh, inspiring sounds. This works particularly well with picking patterns.

TABs for the lesson are available to all my supporters on Patreon.

Don’t forget to check out my free eBook ‘Fretboard Mastery’ and, if you’re looking to go deeper into guitar music theory, you should definitely check out my premium video course ‘Guitar Rut Busters: Essential Theory’.