Guitar Chord Lesson: How To Get Clear Sounding Chords For Beginners
Hey there, Tomas Michaud here. Hey, do you ever have problems when you�re fingering
a chord, your fingers touch the other strings and deadens them or mutes them? Well if you
do, you�re in the right place. You�re gonna love this video. Come on back and you�ll
see.
Hi again. Thanks for joining me. Hey, I got a question this week about somebody fingering
the C chord and he says his finger is hitting the other string. This is a common question
I get not just a C chord of course but I�m gonna addressed it using the C chord and this
will apply to chords in general.
Now first of all, there are some tips I can give you about fingering chords and I�ve
done a whole post on this but I�ll just give the basics here and you can find my other
post. I�ll put a link to it on my website so the first thing is you want to have your
fingers so they go up and then angled back down. Take a close look at my hand here. They�re
not flattening out and that�s what a lot of beginners tend to do. You see when your
fingers go up and down first of all you less likely to hit the other string because of
the angle. You wanna get to angle as much as possible straight down and the other thing
is it is much easier to press down the string so up and down hand position � hand position.
Secondly, you want to make sure using as much as you can the fingertip now of course these
two tips are connected. The fingertip as opposed to the flat pad of the finger when you�re
using the pad, you�re also flattening out the knot. Keep the knuckle bed and use more
of the fingertip. Now it�s not exactly the very tip, tip of the finger. You have to play
around with it a little bit but more the fingertip than the pad will be my way of saying that.
Make your C chord, finger it the best you can, strum it. Listen to where some strings
are deadens out, take your fingers off, put them back on, try to move things around a
little. Don�t wait to get it perfect then take it off again, shake your hand out and
keep doing that. Fingers on, strum the chord, see where the fingers are muting, move the
fingers around a little. Get your fingers as close to the frets as possible. Even though
that doesn�t usually make the surrounding strings mute it will make the string your
own buzz if it�s too far away from the fret. As close as you can you can�t always get
it up right there but as close as you can. Strum, adjust, strum again then take your
hand off. Shake it out. Do that about 20 times a day for about a week or so. You�ll see
that chord will get a lot better.
The second tip that I have for the person with the C chord is you can start off with
the simpler C chord. It looks like an A minor. Take a look at that. It�s just a C chord
without the third finger so by not having the stretch of your third finger it does make
it easier to actually get a good hand position. It sounds good too. The thing is you don�t
wanna hit that fifth string that�s not part of the chord if you�re making a C. you�re
aiming just the top 4 strings. Don�t worry too much about it but you wanna aim for the
top 4.
Third, find a guitar with a wider neck, now that was the choice I would use after you�ve
gotten a good practice routine and then maybe try the two finger chord to start with if
you need to. A classical guitar has a wider neck. If you�re using a steel string like
a lot of people do, it�s a thinner neck. The classical guitar has a wider neck which
makes the strings wider apart. It�s made this way so you can pick easier with the right
hand but it does help some people with fat fingers to play chords on the labtab.
One final note I want to mention is that a lot of people say they�re having problems
with chords. Really the problem is they don�t have a practice, a way of practice, a routine,
a systematic approach to practicing and they tend to lack the patience to kinda stick with
something else just not working. They look for a magic bullet either a new guitar or
another way of playing the chord or something that sort of just makes it happen.
I would first emphasize that you need some systematic way of practicing because that�s
an underlying issue and it will apply to many things that are to come in learning to play
guitar so if you can deal with the practice find a way of systematically practicing. You
might wanna listen to a teacher or good systematic online approach like Real Guitar Awesomeness
but if you don�t have a practice routine, every magic bullet will eventually fall flat,
believe me. I tried it. I�m just guilty of you as looking for the magic bullet to
fix something that I don�t like or is not working so that�s it for
this video.