This will be a relatively small, (hopefully) informative article, but one that will set the foundation for subsequent chord lessons that I will be posting soon.

Consider, as a standard practice, that you have four fretting fingers available when playing. Without the use of barring or double-fretting, you can play one note on any one of the six strings on the guitar, which means you can play four strings simultaneously. This seems rather obvious, but many people overlook the fact that playing four strings simultaneously doesn’t mean that all four strings need to be adjacent to each other.

On a six-string guitar there are 15 possible four-string string groups available to use at any given time. For the sake of clarity, each string is assigned a number:

1 – high E string
2 – B string
3 – G string
4 – D string
5 – A string
6 – low E string

So, for example, when you say you are using the 1235 string group, you are talking about playing with the high E, B, G, and A strings.

Simple enough, right? With those string numbers in mind, here are the 15 string groups:

For now, if you are interested in toying around with the different string groups, I suggest you take something simple like a standard min7 chord from the 2345 string group and see what chord shapes you come up with to play those same notes on the different string groups.

In the next lesson we’ll be applying this idea to a jazz standard.