Hi guys! In this lesson we're covering how to play the D major chord (on guitar!)
This is one of the basic Open Chords that is essential for beginners and is used in so many songs
But, we can actually learn a song before you cover this chord
So if you haven't got a song covered already I'll check my website and check out how to
play a song with the chords E & the A chord, that's the first song that is on my
website as part of my beginner's course
This is how to play the D major chord
So, for the D major chord we have our first finger on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string
and that finger needs to be right on the tip, but it can be handy
to have your finger on an angle and your hand on an angle so your finger is
essentially pointing towards you, or towards your strumming hand shoulder
That means that the middle finger will sit quite comfortably directly
underneath it, but on the first string. So, same fret (2nd fret) but on the 1st string, the thinnest string
Then we can extend the 3rd finger and it can reach
hopefully quite comfortably to the third fret of the second string and we
create this triangle shape which is the D chord. If you try and make this chord with
the fingers parallel to the frets going straight down you may find this chord
quite uncomfortable and it can be tricky so we want to move your fingers on an
angle and have your thumb just creeping over the top
ever so slightly of the fret board, and (place) fingers 1, 2, 3 and then we would strum, ideally
from the D string so E A D, our thicker 3 strings are (the same as) our first 3 chords (in this course) E A & D.
And we strum, from that D string
You can pick each individual string
to make sure they're ringing out and if any one (string) doesn't (ring out) you know that that finger
that isn't pressing down hard enough or more likely it's just not over this
side of the fret enough it's maybe over this side and you're actually if you're
over this side of the fret you have to press down far harder, especially on acoustic guitar
than you need to, to get it ringing out if you're at this side.
You've probably already got big lines in your fingers from having a go at these basic chords so
let's try and prevent as much as we can and be at this side of the fret, not over
here, and be on this angle to make that stretch as comfortable as possible.
This is how that D Chord would look in a diagram and we can see we've got those
two little crosses for the thickest rings which means we don't want to
strum them. Now, practically in songs when we're trying to miss those thickest
two strings, every now and again the fifth string (the A string) can ring out
and that's not bad at all, that can be entirely fine if we listen to it
strumming from string 5
that sounds fine because that note is part of an A chord, but it sounds
definitely bad if we strum the thickest E string
with this D chord- so you don't want to do that at all. We wanna ideally strum from string 4
but if string five rings out too thats okay
You just want to be missing that with your pick for the time being
So that's how to play our 3rd Chord - the D major - and in the next lesson in this
series we're gonna be covering how to change between the E A and the D chord
which are the three chords that I've covered in my beginner's course if
you're not aware of that beginners course it's at www.andyguitar.co.uk
we've got loads of songs that we can play with E A & D - nice and easy songs but some
great ones in there- that are very entertaining to play and sound great so make sure you
check out this next lesson of how to change between these chords and I'll see you there!
You can download this video and the eBook that goes with this entire chords
by clicking in this area here, click over there to watch the next lesson here on
YouTube, please subscribe if you haven't already and all those links in the
description if you are watching on mobile!
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