Here are five very cool guitar chords that will give your songwriting a boost. Take your rhythm guitar playing beyond the basics...
Cool Guitar Chords That You Can Use In Your Own Songs
Looking for some inspiration or for some new sounds that will liven up your songs? Here are five cool guitar chords that may be able to help. Once you've learned them, try dropping them into your own chord progressions.
Movable Chord Shapes
All of the cool guitar chords below are 'movable' shapes. This means that they can be used to play chords of that type with any root note. For example, if you move a G minor 9th chord shape up two frets, it becomes an A minor 9th chord. Use this guitar notes chart to find out where to play the chords.
Root notes are shown as blue circles in the diagrams below.
1) Minor Seventh Add Nine Chord Shape
This is a jazzy-sounding chord that can often be used instead of a standard minor chord. It is also a good chord to end a minor key song with. As the name suggests, it's a minor seventh chord with a ninth note added. Try it out...
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2) Diminished Seventh Chord
Diminished chords are rather enigmatic. Each note in the chord can be considered to be the root note, and each note is a minor third interval from the next. Basically, this means that you can move the chord three frets up or down the fretboard and you'll be playing the same chord!
Diminished seventh chords can often be used instead of normal seventh chords, but the diminished chord should be played a half-step higher than the seventh.
Here is a nice diminished shape that you can use to experiment with:
3) Seventh Sharp Nine
No list of cool guitar chords would be complete without the seventh sharp nine. This is a great chord to play instead of a standard seventh chord to create a more 'interesting' sound (i.e. to mess with the heads of your listeners!). You may already know this one: it is also known as the 'Hendrix Chord', and was often used by the man himself.
4) Add Nine
Add nine chords are often used instead of major chords. They are very sweet-sounding chords that really can add life to a chord progression.
5) Dominant Eleventh
The full versions of dominant eleventh chords contain six notes, so guitar chords usually omit some of the less important tones. Dominant eleventh chords have a nice 'open' sound, and sound great in fusion music. Try using them instead of standard seventh chords – whatever kind of music you play.
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Cool Guitar Chords Conclusion.
We hope that you have enjoyed trying out these cool guitar chords, and are finding ways of using them in you own music. We have created a huge resource for guitar chord theory information, so if you want to know more about chords, check it out here: Guitar Chord Theory.
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