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Alright, we have covered a lot of material so far with these lessons. The finger exercises listed in my last lesson should help a lot with your chord formations and your scale proficiency. Now before we continue with soloing techniques, I would like to revisit some chord applications and introduce some new bad ass chords.
When you first start playing guitar, you are introduced to the basic ‘cowboy chords’ and basic Barre Chords. These chords are cool and all, but when do you use them? I am going to try and shed some light as to when you can use these chords to help spice up your progressions.
The biggest thing you need to understand that for the most part, all chords are either Major or Minor, regardless of how complicated they look.
Now for a little dreaded theory. Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to know how to make chords. So it all begins with the trusty Major Scale. The following is the C Major Scale:
C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
In order to play a chord, we take notes from this scale (although not always), and play them together. Notes that are sitting right next to one another tend not to sound good when they are played at the same time, in the same octave. So if you were to play C, D, and E together at the same time, the resulting chord would likely sound unpleasant. So when we build chords, we tend to take every other note of the scale for our note selection. For instance, C, E G, comprise our basic C Major Barre Chord as such:
e|--8---|
b|--8---|
g|--9---|
d|--10--|
a|--10--|
E|--8---|
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And when we look at the notes:
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e|--C--|
b|--G--|
g|--E--|
d|--C--|
a|--G--|
E|--C--|
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We are actually only playing C’s, G’s and E’s, the first, third and fifth notes of the scale. Regardless of the fact that we are playing 6 notes, they are actually just C, G, and E notes repeated.
Now you are probably wondering why we don’t just keep going with the scale and keep adding every other note. Well we can! However, you start to embark upon Jazz territory. And I am not going there yet.
Now that you understand how to build a Major Chord form the Major Scale, lets try to make some other chords! Back to the C Major Scale:
C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C
We took C, D, and E and made C Major. But what if we started with the D note? Well it you take D, F, and A, you actually create D Minor. Lets keep going with this idea:
- CEG = C Major
- DFA = D Minor
- EGB = E Minor
- FAC = F Major
- GBD = G Major
- ACE = A Minor
- BDF = B Minor
So by taking every other note of the C Major Scale, and starting on a different note every time, we created 7 chords. Notice how they are numbered? Well in a C Major chord progression, the ‘One’ Chord is always C Major, the ‘Two’ Chord is always D Minor, the ‘Three’ Chord is always E Minor, ect..
What does this mean exactly? Well if you had song in the key of C Major that switched from C Major to A Minor, but you wanted to add another chord, you could use any of the following:
- CEG = C Major
- DFA = D Minor
- EGB = E Minor
- FAC = F Major
- GBD = G Major
- ACE = A Minor
- BDF = B Minor
Instead of just trial and error, you know that a D Minor, E Minor, F Major, G Major or B Minor would work with the progression. This concept is a huge time saver and will allow you to write songs with ease.
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