Hey, how are you doing? Justin here.
Today I want to give you a little gift a very empowering tool that will open
up your guitar playing in ways you probably might not have even fanthom
if you're a beginner guitar player. I want to remove your fear of exploring
chords. Now, I've actually done a whole series called the chord explorer where
I take each of the five chord shapes on the guitar and really explore what you
can do and why you might want to choose some grips over others and
use capos and stuff like that. It's a serie that I would recommend that
you do as a grade 3 thing and this particular lesson is part of grade 2.
But I just want to open the door a bit and give you some possibilities
to explore on your own and realise that there's a lot you can do with
chords, that are very, very simple that sound really great. A great
way of lifting your guitar game generally. It's centered around the
idea you should be using your ears when you play chords and not your
mind and not your eyes because up to this point we've learned specific
chords and we've learned that you play when there's a D chord you play
this shape and that's where your fingers go. Trying to get all of the notes to
ring out clearly and all of that sort of stuff. But actually the reality of
making music is that it's a lot freer than that and a lot of the creative
song writers and creative musicians are doing things a little differently.
Trying out new things. And it's something even as a beginner you can get hip
with that. It's not something that you can only do when you get advanced. You
can be exploring that stuff and getting creative with the guitar playing right
now. Let's get to a close up and check out how we might explore our chords.
Let's start off by having a look at a D chord. Now we all know that's the
regular shape. If your playing a D chord. But what if you didn't play the notes
say with your first finger.
Does it sound bad?
It doesn't really sound like a D.
Not sure I'd play this instead.
But this movement sounds great.
Just lifting that first finger off. What about the third finger, could we
lift that one off.
That's a pretty interesting sounding chord.
You have to make sure you can get that open B string ringing out there
between your fingers. A lot of you will be muting, it will be a bit dead.
But, lifting off that finger makes it a D6, doesn't really matter the name.
Waht about lifting first and third altogether.
I'm not massively sure I like that one but you might have a place.
Lifting the second finger off and letting your chord ring we will be
looking at in the next lesson when we talk about sus chords. This is a
sus2 chord.
What if we lift first and second altogether.
That sounds pretty cool. There's all sorts of things we could do here.
What if we move the fingers. All right.
Again, this would not be a substitute for a D chord but if your writing a song.
Or third finger back. Oh, Dmaj7. More commonly played
like that but...
It's fine. There really are no limitations here.
You could explore these chords in any way that you like. If you're playing
a song like doing the cover of a tune, some of the experiments won't sound
great. So you try a different one. It's that simple. There's no...
You could look at the complexities and look at the theory behind and
what notes you can choose and all that sort of stuff but at this point
I would recommend just using your ears. Because your ears will tell you
whether you like the sound of it or not. That's the key thing here is whether
you like the sound of it or not. You should try to be objective a bit
and go "Well may be that one not cool here". But there aren't any rules.
Maybe one that sounds not cool to someone else will sound great to you
and the other way around. It really doesn't matter. It's something I really
encourage you to explore this stuff and let's just go through some of the other
shapes and see what we come up with. Now A is a chord we learned pretty
early on. Let's lift off the second finger here.
That is cool, you know, it's kind of got it's place. First finger off.
It's actually an A7 chord. Something else we are going to learn a little later
in this course but definitely...
That one is really cool. Lift off your third finger, this is another one we are
looking at today and a little later on. This is a Asus2.
But experiment. What if you move it all up.
You would definitely think that is on the wrong fret. The sounds horrible.
That's pretty tense.
As long as you end up on the right chord actually it sounds pretty cool, you know.
And you could explore...
That sounds cool.
There's no limits here. Just got to try them out. E chord.
Lifting off second finger sounds great. Lifting off third finger gives you E7.
Very usable shape.
First finger lifting off gives you Emin, we already knew that one. So as far
as lifting off goes here, then, you know, there's not that many new thing,
new sounds here. But what about little finger?
So many different things you can do with this. G chord.
I mean it's a little bit limited here. If we lift off one of those, it sounds
a little too bass there. Changes the sound of the chord. That's less possible.
Little finger off. Just playing that one note on the bottom string.
As you get more advanced, I don't recommend you do this straight away,
but...
You could add any or all of those notes.
It really is open season there on the G chord. That's more mixing up the
scale with the chord. Again something that we learned in the intermediate
course in the folk fingerstyle ideas but... just in principle there's nothing
wrong with having a bit of an experiment seeing what you can come up with.
Last shape of the common five shapes that we've got would be a C chord.
Now, first finger off, lovely chord Cmaj7. Again you don't have to worry that
that's what it's called.
Just lifting your first finger off.
And then, put that in the wrong place. Lifting second finger off.
The C chord, lovely.
So the conclusion here, is that you could do more or less what you want
if it sounds good. And that really is the key thing. If it sounds good, it is good.
I would really encourage you to explore these ideas. Everytime your
learning a new tune just try the chords, try lifting a finger off if you got, if
you're stuck on one chord for ages. Try lifting diffferent fingers off see
if you can make a little riff out of it. Just don't be afraid of it.
For years and years when I was playing I didn't get into the idea of just doing
whatever ideas I wanted. You know, I always felt like even for writing
songs and stuff it had to be these chords or these are the shapes that
you should use. Or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't do that.
It really, I found difficult to break out of that. So that's why I think it's
important that at these beginners stages to never put those shakles
on in the first place. You know, there are things like chords in a key
that we've talked about a bit and that is a very usefull thing to know but it
certainly shouldn't define you when you are writing songs. You'd be using
whatever you like and there's no reason you that you can't explore the chords
completely. You know, really muck around and try moving the
chord shapes up and down the neck is another little tidbit for you.
Just take your C chord. Move it up. Hum that doesn't sound a bit weird.
Move it up again. Oh that sounds nice.
Now I know where that one is going to sound nice. If I put it here.
Doesn't really sound nice. But that just an experience thing.
Try E chord. Another nice one to move up.
Just go and have some fun with it. This isn't part of your practice routine, this
is bigger than that. This is, everytime your playing a song, everytime your
having a bit of a noodling, playing around on the guitar, try some new stuff.
There's no limit here. The more you do this, the more you learn about the
guitar, the more you'll discover cool things, the more you'll develop your own
musical personality and all of that stuff is super important.
I really hope you enjoyed this lesson. Remember this is a kind of introductory
thing to the chord explorer module which I'd recommend you get stuck in after you
finish Grade 2 where we go into each of the 5 chord shapes, look at them
in more detail. Maybe we try all of those things like lifting fingers
off and adding different fingers down in different spots but there are some
maybe some ideas that you might not think of straight away and I try and
encourage you into exploring certain areas of that. It's loads of fun.
So let me know how you are getting on in the comments. Love to know what
discoveries you've made. How much fun you're having with all of this stuff.
And if you've got any problems of course, let me know in the comments
on the website. I'll do my best to answer it.
Take care of yourselves. Bye bye.