Have you ever had the experience of really wanting to play a song but not being able to find a chord sheet that has the correct chords? This is very frustrating! The fact is that a lot of online chord sheets are just plain wrong! Why is this?
Well, there are a few reasons:
- The person who wrote the sheet simply doesn't know the correct chords because they couldn't hear the right harmony when listening to the record or they guessed them.
- The person is giving you the chords of their own version. In other words they are aware that the chords of the original are different but they have decided to play it a different way.
- The person has simplified the chords as the original is too complicated.
Whatever the reason, the problem is that you are at the mercy of what random people have decided to display as accurate information.
How do you counter this? I think that the best answer to this is that you simply become better educated. You "learn to fish" as they say. You learn to hear different types of chords and chord progressions. You learn to play them properly. You start transcribing your own chord sheets. The better you get at all of this, the more you will begin to recognise when chord sheets are incorrect.
A good resource when starting off is to look at the official sheet music. Even though sheet music can also be wrong or in places (Billy Joel has famously complained about the chord being wrong in the sheet music of Just The Way You Are) or simplified too much to make it more accessible in general they are correct. When I was starting out I would take out six popular music books from my local library here in Cork and play through them. It got me really good at seeing and hearing common progressions and appreciating the function of different chords. You need to get these things “into your fingers” as it were. The more varying types of songs you play through the better you get at hearing harmony and how it works in music.
Another great resource is YouTube tutorials. Again there are good and bad ones but you will find that the ones at the top of the list and the ones are the ones with the most views and this is because it is the more correct version.
Finally, listen to the record itself and see if you can pick out the chords yourself. This is a great exercise for your ear. Even if you have no clue the first few times you do it stick with it. Your ear will develop!