Master Chord Theory in 11 Steps

Why Guitar Chord Theory Falls Apart When You Skip Steps
This year I developed an unhealthy obsession with chord extensions, and with how guitarists can plug them into their own playing without needing years of classical or jazz harmony first.

Here's what this, combined with 14 years of teaching experience has shown me.

There are 11 stages to understanding chords on the guitar, and each one is required before the next. Skip a stage and the next one either won't make sense, or worse, you'll guess what you're supposed to do for the chords. And that guess becomes a habit, and habits are harder to unlearn than the right shapes are to learn the first time.

Why the order actually matters

Music theory works a lot like learning a language. You don't start with sentences, you start with vocabulary, and only once that's in your head do you start using it conceptually, in the music you actually play and write.
Chords work the same way. The early stages are the vocabulary. The later ones are what you actually say with it. Skip the vocabulary and jump straight to the sentences, and you can still sort of communicate, but you'll be guessing at grammar the whole time, and a guess you keep getting away with eventually turns into a habit that's harder to fix than if you'd just learned the word in the first place.

That's the whole reason this is taught in 11 stages instead of "here are some cool chords." Get the order right, and a chord type that looks intimidating on a chart stops being a puzzle to solve and starts being something you already understand, just built one level further than where you already are.

I'm not going to list the 11 stages here

Not because it's a secret. Because the video's built to reveal them one at a time, and that reveal is half the point. Watching a stage you thought you'd already understood get reframed by the one that comes after it is a better way to learn it than reading a table of contents first.

A taste of what's coming

One thing I can tell you without walking you through it: every 7th chord you'll ever need is one note away from a chord shape you already know how to play. One note, moved a fret.
Which note, and which direction, depends on which 7th chord you're building. That part's a lot easier to show than to describe. So I'll show you.
Watch the full walkthrough

FAQ

Do you need to learn guitar chords in a specific order? By this approach, yes. Later concepts are built directly out of earlier ones, the same way sentences are built out of vocabulary. Skip ahead and you're memorizing shapes instead of understanding them.
How many stages are there to understanding guitar chords? Eleven, moving from shapes most guitarists already half-know through to chord extensions like 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. Each one gets its own chapter in the video.
What happens if you skip steps when learning music theory? Either the next concept won't make sense, or you'll guess your way past the gap. The guess is the worse outcome, since it becomes a habit, and habits are harder to undo than a shape you simply haven't learned yet.
Do you need years of theory to play chord extensions? No. Treat it like a language: learn the vocabulary in order, then learn to use it. That's the whole premise of the 11-stage approach.