Chords are a staple for most acoustic guitarists, so I’m often asked whether chords can be used to play classical guitar. With the styles being so different, you’d be forgiven for thinking there is no common ground. Fortunately, there are ways to use your knowledge of chords to help get started on your journey to becoming a classical guitarist!

Chords are a key feature of classical guitar music, but they are often disguised. Instead of being strummed in the way you would might when playing a pop/rock song, classical guitarists often pick out individual notes of a chord and play them in a sequence. This has the effect of making the music sound more melodic, rather than sounding like an accompaniment (or ‘rhythm guitar’) part.

I’m going to show you a few examples of how chords are used in classical guitar music. Feel free to try them out for yourself.

Chords are such a big feature of classical guitar music that Mauro Giuliani, one of the instruments most prolific composers, based a series of short studies around them. His ‘120 Right Hand Studies’ are based on the same two chords, C and G7. He introduces a range of different right hand patterns (acoustic guitarists might refer to these simply as ‘picking patterns’). The purpose of these studies is primarily to train the right hand fingers, but you can also use them to practice a couple of the most popular guitar chords.

If you know your chords but are new to the classical guitar, this is a great place to start. You won’t even need to work through all 120 studies before you start to sound like a proper classical guitarist. Most of the simpler exercises in Giuliani’s right hand study collection can be found in pieces of music he wrote.

Before you begin working through the examples in this lesson, it would be a good idea to get an understanding of the right hand finger names classical guitarists use, as these can be found on the notation.

Try these selected examples from his 120 Right Hand Studies to get started:

Speaking of Mauro Giuliani, here’s an example of how he uses common chord shapes to form the basis of a simple classical guitar etude. Notice how the right hand picking pattern is very similar to the exercises above (No. 81 and No. 83) but using different chords.

As you can see when comparing the chord shapes side by side, the chords Giuliani has used in this piece are slightly easier than the standard most common chord shapes.

• For his Am chord shape, simply omit the note on the 4th string from the standard Am chord shape.
• His Dm shape is exactly the same.
• For his E chord, simply omit the notes on the 5th and 6th strings from the standard E chord shape.

Using the smaller chord shapes can actually make playing classical guitar pieces like this one much easier!

Take a look at the chords Mauro Giuliani uses in this short etude versus the standard chord shapes you may already know below:

Here is another example of a classical guitar piece that uses chords for it’s foundation; An Andantino written by Matteo Carcassi. Take a look at the music. Recognise those chords? That’s right, the same chords used by Giuliani in his 120 Right Hand Studies!

The trick to playing classical guitar pieces like this lies more in the right hand. If you’ve mastered a range of chords and you’re now keen to develop your classical guitar playing, focus on developing your right hand. This lesson on right hand technique would be a great place to begin if you need to know the basics.

So, if anyone ever asks can you play classical guitar using chords? The answer is yes, absolutely! Classical guitarists use chords all the time, it’s just done in a different way to most pop/rock songs. Because classical guitarists use their fingers to play notes, you’ll often find smaller fragments of chords rather than the full 5/6 string versions you might be used to seeing. Notes also tend to be played one or two at a time, rather than all together too often. Look close enough and you’ll begin to see how the chord shapes on the guitar are essentially the same across all genres.

I hope you’ve found this lesson to be useful. Be sure to check out our other lessons too!