The Most Beautiful Open Chord Shapes – Part I

A great way to make your chord progressions and songs sound awesome is to use open chord shapes.

I always love to use these chords to add some flavor to my chord progressions. One of my favorite chords is Fsus2, it contains the complete package. It’s sounds beautiful, gentle, tight, cool and rough at the same time.

Moving Open Chords

When you move an open chord up the neck the name of the chord changes and the chord gets extended with 1 or 2 notes. This way you can get beautiful sounds.

While you can play barre chords at any fret on the fingerboard, open chords can only be played at certain frets. If you play them at the right frets they sound amazing, if you don’t… well they just sound terrible. So be careful.

Because of all the extended chord names I didn’t bother to name every single one of them. That’s not the point here.

Experiment

It’s all about incorporating these chords into your songs and chord progressions, putting your creativity to the test, experimenting with all the possibilities, replacing some basic chords for these extraordinary ones, learning to hear what sounds right and what feels good.

Check out the youtubes Part I, II & III and the corresponding chord fingerings below.

Have a great time!

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