I just did another google search looking for a good "chord builder" site that I could recommend to Megan. Putting "guitar chord diagram" into the google search box can turn up a lot of stuff. I found a lot, but they all seemed pretty messy and possibly confusing. I was looking for one particular site that I'd seen before and thought was clear and concise, but I couldn't find it again. Anyway, some of these sites might be worth a look.

But better, I would recommend getting a good manual that gives chord diagrams all over the fingerboard (all the possible C chords, all the possible Am chords, etc.) and then take them one key at a time, one chord at a time. One of the books my first classic guitar teacher had me get was Fundamental Fingerboard Harmony for Guitar by Richard Pick (odd last name for a classic guitarist). It showed all possible chords on the guitar, major, minor, augmented, and diminished, including 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths in all inversions, in both regular music notation and chord diagrams, along with just about all possible right-hand picking and arpeggio patterns. It was a fantastic book for both learning the fingerboard and turning the right hand into a little electric motor. Unfortunately, the manual is long out of print. My own copy is well worn and nearly falling apart. But there must be other good ones out there.

Another good way of exploring that terra incognita (here be dragons!) above the fourth fret is to take a simple tune, play it in first position, then play the same tune in the same key (exactly the same notes) everywhere you can on the fingerboard. I spotted this exercise in The Christopher Parkening Guitar Method, Vol. 2, page 40. Parkening takes a three note segment at the beginning of a French folk song, "Au Claire de la Lune," (using only E, F, and G) and puts it in three different places on the fingerboard, first string, second string, and third string, with a total of eight possible fingerings, some of them on only one string, some moving across strings. Trying this sort of thing with various familiar tunes is a great way to learn the fingerboard!

Don Firth