Play D Major The Easy Way
You’ve already looked at the G, C and Em chords. There are some songs you can play with these, but there are literally hundreds you can play when you add one more chord – the D major. Some people struggle with this to begin with, but not you, because you’re going to learn the quickest and easiest way to train your fingers to play this chord smoothly.
To start with, you’re going to play this version of D that uses fingers 1 and 2 like this chord box on the right.
Step 1: Touch your fingers where the dots are on the diagram to your guitar 17 times with your left hand. You don’t need to press hard, you’re aiming to train your fingers to know where to go and to memorise the shape.
Step 2: Ensure your fingers are not touching each other as best you can and strum from string three to string one with the right hand. Can you hear each string ring out clearly? If you can’t, don’t worry about it, you may need to adjust your left hand so you’re not touching any of the other strings. Then release your fingers. Then find the chord again. Do this 14 times.
Step 3: Change between this D chord and a G chord. Do this 20 times. The reason it will help you to practice this in isolation is that G and D chords will very often come up next to each other in songs, and if you can change between them already, you will be able to play those songs much more easily. It is fine to spend a few days or a couple of weeks with version 1 of the D chord, as I demonstrate in the first minute of the video.
Step 4: Now, place those fingers down as before, but put your third finger on the third fret of the second string. The full D chord has the third finger down, as you can see in the chord box in the video and in the demonstration later in the video. You can move straight on to this version if you want, or after a few days getting used to using two fingers.
