I regularly get enquiries from people who've seen my guitar tutorials on YouTube, and from people who've seen me play live, for information about aspects of playing guitar or musical theory applied to the guitar. Everyone learns in an individual way, so a teacher - of whatever subject - has to be able to communicate the knowledge in different ways for different people. This is easier to do face-to-face than by a video tutorial, which is inevitably fixed - which is why people email me for more info.

I'm always happy to assist when I can, and I can usually help most of the people who email me, but there's one aspect of music that seems to faze some beginner guitarists: the way in which chords are constructed. I had a correspondent only recently who wanted to know why some books show different guitar chord shapes for the same chord - he was referring, not only to root and inversions, but to the slight variations that you can apply to all chords. C major, root position, for example, can be played as:

332010 or x32013, etc.

I tried explaining, as simply as I could, that every chord is constructed from the notes of a major scale and gave examples of some basic chords in C, such as C major being formed from the 1st (C), 3rd (E) and 5th (G) notes of the scale of C - and that they can be played in any order while still being a C major chord.

And so on and so forth, at some length... to which came back the comment, "I'm not mathematical, I don't really understand all this". In the end I advised him just to go out and buy some books of chords and learn them by rote!

Perhaps I don't explain chord construction theory very well. Perhaps some people just don't get it. Perhaps it doesn't matter a jot if all you want to do is to play some basic stuff. I personally think it's a fascinating aspect of playing the guitar but - there you go! Anyone else got a better way to explain it? If you have, let me know - I'd be very interested.