The 2,500-Chord Trap

When I started playing guitar, I was about nine or ten years old. Back then, I was getting by with whatever little songbooks I could find, Beatles songs and stuff like that, or learning La Bamba, which only had three chords.

My dad, God rest his soul, was very supportive of my pursuit of becoming a musician. He was a lawyer, and he loved reading, so he spent a lot of time in bookstores. One day he found a book that caught his attention because of the title. It was called “2,500 Chords for Guitar”.

Without hesitation, he bought it. We're talking about the 1980s, so maybe it cost five bucks or something like that. Maybe even less.

Anyway, he was fascinated by this idea of 2,500 chords. To him, it meant, "Man, if I give this to him (me), he's going to be a genius."

And when I saw the title, I got carried away too. I mean, I was nine or ten years old, and I thought, holy shit, this is amazing. I'm going to study this thing and see what it's all about.

Then I opened the book. There were no explanations, nothing. Just diagrams and more diagrams, one after another, maybe organized by key.

But again, since I got carried away by the title too, I thought this book was going to make me a better musician because I was going to learn a ton of chords.

And I was thinking, “man, I'm going to find the missing chord or the magic chords that will help me play every song I want to play. This is the only book I'll ever need in my life.

Little did I know with my 10-year-old brain.

So, I started looking through the first pages and there was a C major chord that I already knew, then maybe another way of playing C major, like a barre chord on the third fret, or another one on the eighth fret. I already knew some of that stuff.

Then I opened the book at a random page, wherever it happened to fall.

It landed in the key of F, and there was a chord I'd never seen before. It said "F augmented".

I thought, "wow, finally something new".

Obviously it had the little X's and O's that tell you which strings are open and which ones you're not supposed to play. There were four notes to fret, and the other two strings had X's on them, meaning you weren't supposed to play them.

So when I played that chord, I just sat there thinking, what the fuck is this?

I mean, this sounds like a made-up chord. I could have come up with this myself. This sounds awful.  What am I supposed to do with this?

So, I looked at that 2,500-chord book and thought, you know what, I don't even want to keep any further. This chord sounds horrible, and on top of that it's hard to play. I have to use all four fingers; my hand hurts.

Fuck this shit.

And I never picked up that 2,500-chord book again. I just went on with my life and kept learning guitar the regular way, I guess; little by little, learning songs, figuring things out, and doing what everybody else does when they're starting out.

Later on, I studied classical guitar, got theory books, learned songs by ear, and eventually started playing some of those same songs in bars when I was in my early twenties. Then I went to the Conservatory of Puerto Rico. I mean, a lot of things happened.

And during all that time, of course, I wasn't even thinking about that famous 2,500chord book anymore.

I think at some point during my jazz studies, either on my own or at the conservatory, something clicked about these types of books, because I used to read a lot of Berklee Press books and I liked analyzing them, so then I understood what was really going on.

These books themselves aren't bad. Chord books, I mean, 2,500 chords, 5,000 guitar chords, whatever. It's not that they're bad because they have a lot of chords.

What happens with those books is that the chords have no context.

An augmented chord has no context by itself. I mean, it's not going to sound good on its own. A diminished chord isn't really going to sound good on its own either.

Those are passing chords. Those are intermediate chords between one chord and another.

That chord doesn't make sense by itself. You need to know where point A is and where point B is, and this chord type goes in between them.

So really, the chord books that are useful are books about chord progressions, chord movement, things that teach you how fourth movements work, third movements, stepwise motion, that kind of thing.

Then you start learning inversions, and you start learning different voicings in the upper register, middle register, lower register, and so on.

Those are the things that are useful.

And when you think about it, the chords a professional guitarist knows are way more than 2,500 chords or 5,000 chords, because then you start counting all the keys, all the inversions you can play.

But at the end of the day, what matters is the context; where you're moving to.

And some chords are simply passing chords.

I learned that in practice, out in the field, learning how songs are actually played.

Speaking specifically about that augmented chord, there is a song that ilustrates this point perfectly. But it's probably not a song that will mean much to a lot of people unless you grew up listening to Spanish pop in the early 2000s.

Back then there was a very famous pop song by Alejandro Sanz called “Corazón Partío”.

The first verse, it starts with chord is F, the second chord is actually that  F augmented chord, and the third chord is F6, followed by Bm7b5, which would be a ii-V going to the third degree (Am).

Yep, that was a progression for a pop tune in 2001.  So anyway, that’s where that chord sounds great.

And if you play that song without that damn chord, it doesn't sound right. People are expecting that sound. So Corazón Partío is the perfect example of that same chord I saw as a kid and thought was complete bullshit; it was actually the heart of Corazón Partío.  Pun intended.

That chord is one of the many things that makes that song sound cool.

But you need context.

And hopefully some of you will listen to that song. Even if you don't understand the lyrics, I recommend checking it out because that's one hell of a song.

My take away with this long story is that musicians may be making the same mistake when they buy these kinds of books and fail to understand that context and chord movement are more important.

So instead of looking for books that say, you know, some huge number of chords,  chord encyclopedias, or 1,500 chords, or 2,500 chords, or 5,000 chords for guitar, I would look for books about chord progressions for guitar and try to learn as many progressions as possible, especially the most common ones, because at the end of the day those are the ones you're actually going to use the most.

And I'd want those progression books to offer different ways of playing the same progression.

That way you'll find useful approaches that are immediately applicable to the music you're working on, whether it's original music or cover songs.

L. D. Bonilla

The Band Coach Method