Hi! How you doing, Justin here.
Welcome to Stage 8 of your guitar beginners course.
I'm sure you're gonna be enjoying this one,
cause, what we're gonna be checkin' out, is a few variations of a G chord.
I've shown you one, kind of, standard way of playing G chord,
but there's quite a few, that are really, really useful
in specific circumstances.
And you'll find, as you play more and learn more songs,
that you think: "I wish there was an easier way of doing this"
Now we are going to learn easier ways of doing the G chord.
So let's go to a close up now, and I'll show you these
other ways of doing this very, very common chord.
Ok, here we are for our first G chord variation,
I call this a "big G".
And if you look, there was our standard regular G chord
just using the three fingers.
All we've done here is move the third finger
over on to the B string, the second string.
And the little finger has gone where that third finger used to be.
So you see now, we're using all four fingers,
if I just give it a strum..
It's a really good sounding G chord.
All we've done in fact is change the open B string,
obviously, the note B, into a D note.
Which is still keeping our G chord, still named a regular G,
cause we're only using notes G, B and D.
This chord is particularly famous in Guns'n'Roses, and Poison,
and Bon Jovi in the 80's.
All that acoustic guitar rock stuff all of the acoustic guitar songs
nearly always used this version of the G chord.
And it does sound a little bit bigger and kind of more poppy or rocky
than the original G.
But there is one version which is considered even rockier one.
Which we're gonna go to now.
So here is our big rock G.
All I've done is... The last one that I just told you I called "Big G"
All I've done is lifted of my first finger and now it's suddenly a rock G.
And the reason this sounds more rocky, and I've actualy renamed it as being a G5,
It's because it now only contains the notes G and D.
We don't have any more the note B involved with this chord.
If we looked at the notes one at a time, we've got a G here,
the A string is muted by the underneath of that second finger.
That finger is muting that string.
Then we've got open D, open G, then another D and another G.
And this is a big rock chord, with distortion this chord sounds huge.
It's very, very cool, indeed.
There is another very common way of playing a G chord.
Which is a little bit more funky than anything else.
You tend to use it
when you're changing from a C chord to a G chord very quickly.
Which is quite common,
because the C and the G chord occur very regularly together.
There's your regular C chord.
If we want to go to this new G chord, all you're doing is just splitting
your third and fourth fingers on to the two outside strings.
This can be a little bit tricky, especially when you're starting out.
But have a go, because it does make changing C to G a lot quicker
These two fingers I'm pointing out just to keep them out of the way
but you would normally just leave them hanging around.
I didn't want you to get confused and think they were down.
What we've got here is the third finger over on the thickest string
and it's a lot flatter than normal and that's deliberately
to make sure that that string there is muted.
The same as what we had at that rockin' G,
but this time we're getting rid of that A string there
It's muted by the third finger.
Open D string. Open G, open B
and little finger down there playing the top note - G as well.
So this is a full G chord, but you can see, if I'm changing from C to G
There's C. There's our new G.
C, G
And that used to be one of the hardest changes, all fingers off.
Now it's a lot easier.
There's some people that put actually that second finger
and play the same dots as that initial G that we learned
just without the first finger.
That's ok, a lot of people like that
and that's fine to play it that way, I just think that this note
is a little bit redundant and if I play this one (strum)
and then without it (strum) we hear very little difference,
but it's a hell of a lot easier to play it like that.
Now the important thing with these new G chord variations,
is making sure, that you use them in the right circumstance.
Particularly the big G and the rock G worked really, really well
doing chord changes going from G to D.
But I'm gonna explain that a little bit better in the one minute changes.
So just get your fingers around these chords
and I'll see you for another bit of a lesson very soon.
Bye - bye!