: G chord guitar fingering - one finger? I bought a guitar course on DVD and am puzzled by the way they have begun teaching the chords, specifically the G major. In the first lesson we were taught to put our third (ring) finger

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You can keep this DVD if it teaches you later what tones you are playing by holding those chord patterns. It is a reasonable methodical approach to start with simple patterns and reduced chords to ease beginners learning to play and right starting to make music.

E.g. I always explained to children how they can play on only 3 strings a nice accompaniment for I - V (C - G7). This concept can be very motivating.

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If you strum starting from the D string, you have a G chord (composed of the notes D-G-B-G). Since D is in the bass instead of G, this is an inversion of a G chord, specifically it is a G in second inversion. If you start from the open A string, you could call this a Gadd9 chord (composed of the notes A-D-G-B-G), or an even better name would probably be G/A (naming it as a so-called slash chord). This would also be an inversion since a note other than the root of the chord is in the bass.

It isn't a lot of information to go on, but if the DVD is really suggesting that you should play a G with an A in the bass as you have described, I would be wary of the rest of the content.

There are a lot of different ways to play any chord, and different note configurations of the same chord are called voicings. On the guitar, there are usually multiple fingerings for the same voicing.

Here is a typical open-string voicing for a G chord (sometimes this type of voicing is called a "Mel Bay voicing" or a "cowboy chord"):

%3/2.2/1.0/0.0/0.0/0.3/4[GMaj]

But there are a couple of other fingerings for this voicing:

%3/3.2/2.0/0.0/0.0/0.3/4[GMaj]

or this:

%3/2.2/1.0/0.0/0.0/0.3/3[GMaj]

Since a G triad only contains the three notes G-B-D, there are some duplications in the above six-string chord voicing. You can remove the notes on the lowest two strings, which are G and B, respectively. You are left with D-G-B on the open strings, and G again on the top string (E string). This is not an uncommon voicing, and sometimes you want a chord that is a little bit more dainty than a fistful-of-notes cowboy chord:

%X/X.X/X.0/0.0/0.0/0.3/4[GMaj]

Incidentally, there is a variation of the last voicing that is probably seen even more often, and which can be used as a movable form. By moving the pinky on the E string down one fret (or using the third finger on the second fret of the E string) you get a GMaj7 chord. You can move this chord form around by using the first finger to barre the second, third, and fourth strings (B, G, and D strings):

%X/X.X/X.0/0.0/0.0/0.2/3[GMaj7] %X/X.X/X.5/1.5/1.5/1.7/3[CMaj7]