Originally Posted by: morefoilI am asking more why is there a difference between the Fm in the tutorial i.e. no finger on the e string and the chord finder. I found the same variation in Christopher's beginner blues riff. The B7 he shows is three fingers and it is four fingers on the chord finder. Since they do sound different I was wonder how two different chords could be called the same thing.

The same chord can be built with different fingering, which sometimes will create different chord voicings. A good example is a G7 - the open version of it sounds very different than the barre version played on the third fret. Though they sound different, the still sound like a G7. Which one you use depends on the context - in some songs one version may sound better than the other.

In beginner lessons, sometimes chords are abbreviated to make them easier to play. They are still correct. For a major chord, you only need 3 notes (1st, 3rd, and 5th). Same is true for a minor chord (1st, minor 3rd, and 5th). When you use a chord shape that uses all 6 strings, there are redundancies in there. Look at the open G chord - it is made up of G, B, and D. If you look at the note of each string in the open G chord shape, you'll only find these notes with some that repeat (the G note appears in there 3 times, and the B note twice).

As you go through the core lessons, this is covered and will make more sense. Chris does an excellent job covering this topic in his chord inversion tutorial.