Beginners Guitar Chords, Rhythms & Fingerpicking Exercises - 2025 Edition

You can also buy the first book with different exercises here: Guitar Chords and Rhythms Exercises - Beginners to Intermediate - 2022 Edition.

Beginners Guitar Chords, Rhythms & Fingerpicking Exercises (2025 Edition) is a pdf guitar ebook for for beginners and advanced beginner guitarists that would like to improve their basic chords, strumming patterns, and develop some skills with picking and/or fingerpicking.

• 21 Page PDF ebook
• For Guitar Teachers, Students And Self Taught Guitarists
• Printable Pdf Ebook Containing Exercise Sheets
• Chord Diagrams / Chord Progressions / Tab
• Guitar Chords / Strumming / Fingerpicking

Is this for complete beginners?

The sheets in this book could be used by a new beginner, especially if they are good/quick learners. I also have a ‘first’ beginners book called ‘Beginners Guitar Chords Book (Easy Reading)‘, that might be more suitable for new guitarists, especially if they are young.

The book is for learning alongside grade books, learning songs, and other exercises such as scales, and it’s not designed to be a full beginners course.

Why I wrote this book

I wrote this update to my previous 2022 book called ‘Guitar Chords and Rhythms Exercises - Beginners to Intermediate (2022)‘. I felt like I could improve on the book, but also I’ve not covered everything in this new book, so the old one will still be valid and useful. I thought that there could be more focus on some of the main beginners chords, so I focused the exercises on these and also introduced some fingerpicking exercises based on the chords in the strumming exercises. Sometimes I wrote the fingerpicking parts first and then the chords, so the fingerpicking parts of this book are just as important to me and my teaching, but perhaps they are not as easy for beginners to get into. Some of the fingerpicking exercises are a lot harder than others so please feel free to skip some and move on if needed.

Who is the book for?

The book is written for guitar teachers and their pupils to work on in guitar lessons, and it could also be used to help to teach yourself guitar. The ability level is beginner to advanced beginner (Grades 1-3). 

I decided to drop the words intermediate from the title because the focus of this (and the first book really) is towards beginners and advanced beginners and it doesn’t really go fully into intermediate territory. However, there are elements of grade 1 to 3 and perhaps some grade 4 guitar too. 

What does the book achieve? 

By practicing common strumming patterns with fundamental chords in an easy to read layout, the learner should sail through the content and be in a much better position for playing songs. 

The fingerpicking exercises could be left out completely, or you could come back to them at a later date if preferred, but if they are followed too then the learner will be forced to notice any errors in their finger positioning of the chords and to work on improving them. You might hear muted strings or unclear notes in the wrong places unless the chords are played correctly. This should hopefully encourage self analysis and adjustments in order to improve the chord sound quality.