Essential Acoustic Guitar Chords: Play Songs Today!

1. About This Course: Hi, my name is Jacob Lamb. I'm a musician and the owner of Lamb lessons. Now, in this introductory course, we're going to talk about the essential chords that you need to be able to play any song you want on acoustic guitar. We're going to talk about fingering and how to place your fingers on the frets to create the right shapes for these chords. We'll also talk about the individual chord shapes and work through some exercises together on how to put them together and string them together into what's called a chord progression. And then you've got a song. We're going to do this in an easy step-by-step way that everyone can understand so that no one gets left behind. I'm really looking forward to beginning with you. So let's jump in and start 2. Basics of Chords: In this lesson, we're going to define what a guitar chord is and why it's important. And also talk about numbering our fingers. So as we go through the course and we talk about placing this finger number, you'll know exactly what we're talking about. Now, let's start with why chords are important in the first-place. See every single song out there can be boiled down into chords. They're really great way to start learning songs quickly. Not only that, but they're also the foundation for a lot of songs. Some of your and my favorite songs would feel really empty if they didn't have Guitar Chords in there. Now, more practically for you and I, they're also just a great way to sit around a campfire or sit with friends and all living room and play a song to sing over. Chords are just a great entry point and continuing hallways for playing music at all. But there's still the question of what is a chord? Well, really simply a chord is any three or more notes that we play at the same time. So we've got single notes on the guitar, which is just one note at a time. Maybe we're holding a fret and playing a string. Single notes are great and really important in music, but they're not Chords. Chords need three of these notes, three unique tones that are being played at the same time. Now of course, we don't want just any three notes to play our basic shapes. We want a specific three notes. We're going to learn in this course where to place our fingers to make the right Sounds happen. Now, you'll notice I said that Chords need to be at least three notes. We've got six strings on our guitar, and sometimes we use four of them, sometimes five, sometimes all six. And this is still a chord, C, we can add more than three notes, but we don't want to have less than three notes. The only other thing we really want to know that's important is how it a number our fingers, for the most part, we don't use our thumb when we're playing chords really easily. We can number our fingers 123.4. Now, for the sake of this course, we're going to color code each finger so that when we place chords down on this little chart here, you'll be able to really quickly identify what finger we're talking about. So our first finger is going to be blue. Our second finger is going to be orange. Our third finger is going to be green, and our fourth finger is going to be purple 3. Major vs. Minor: Now throughout this course, we're going to be talking about two different types of Chords. These are Major and Minor Chords. Major Chords tend to sound more happy. Something like this. Minor Chords tend to sound more sad or somber, something like this. Now, the difference between major and minor chords when we're thinking of notes that were playing, is actually just one note. You'll notice for all of these chords when we talk about the major type of chord and the Minor type of chord, only one note changes. We mentioned that we need at least three notes to make a chord. So let's put those three notes on the screen. Now, these aren't any specific notes on our Guitar, because this thing that we're talking about counts for every chord. So we're thinking more of an idea rather than a specific chord. See the three notes and all of our chords have a lower note called the root, a middle note, and a higher note. Now, when we're playing shapes on our Guitar, these aren't always in order, but they are always present. When we're changing from a Major chord to a Minor chord or a minor chord to a Major chord. The note that's changing is the middle note. That's the only one that shifts. Our low root and our highest note remain the same. Now, the reason that that's important for us is because it helps us to realize and see only one node is changing. And the chords major and minor are so similar to each other. Let's talk about an example. The two chords I just played earlier in this lesson. We're an E major and an E minor. Let's take a closer look at my hand when I'm playing both of those chords. Here's E Major, and here's E minor. You'll notice that only one note changed between those two chords. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to look at those two chords in depth. So that's a great chance to see exactly what we're talking about. 4. E Major and E Minor Chords: We're looking at our first two chord shapes. So far we've learned what chords are, why they're important, and the difference between major and minor chords. Now, when we're looking at the actual shapes, everything that we've talked about so far is really going to start making sense. So if anything has got you confused up to this point, that's 0, K. Just hang on and we'll see exactly what we mean with some of the more confusing stuff. We're going to actually start with the Minor Shape, the E minor. It's one of our easier chords because we only need to press down two frets. So we're going to need two fingers. For our E minor chord. We're going to strum all six strings. And I'll show that on this chart by putting open circles at the top of every string. Now, the two strings where we need to actually press something down, or the fifth string and the fourth string. Now as a quick note, we're counting strings from the thinnest string back. So our thinnest string would be number one and are thickest string would be number six. We're pressing down notes on the fifth and the fourth string, which are two of the more thicker strings. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my middle finger. I'm going to place it on the second fret, or right behind the second metal bar on my fifth string. Now, right behind that, I'm going to take my ring finger, my third finger, and I'm going to press down also the second fret, but on the fourth string. Now I can strum all six strings and I'm playing the correct notes for an E minor chord. It can be really easy to accidentally block out some of the strings with our fingers. So when we're playing, we want to make sure that we're pressing down more on our fingertips and moving our fingers as they need to move to just not block out the strings around them. As an example, if I lay my ring finger down to flat, my third string isn't ringing out at all. And it can sound a little empty. So I would roll my finger back to the tip and make sure every string is coming through nice and clear. Now, we know that the shift from minor to major is just one note. So that makes this E major chord really easy to learn. The only difference is I'm taking my first finger and I'm placing it on the first fret of the third string. So now when I play, we've got a nice full happy sounding chord. We've got E minor and E major. Now, if you're playing this chord and it's not quite sounding as full as you're hearing it in this video. There might be two reasons. It's not quite as clear or crisp sounding. First of all, we wanna make sure our guitar in tune. If you're six strings are out of tune, then when we play them all together, we might get some chaotic sounds in there. A second reason is maybe some of our notes are still getting muted or not coming through nice and clear. A great way to identify that note is to take, are picking hand and pick through the sixth string slowly, one string at a time. If we find any notes that way that aren't ringing out, then we can adjust our finger as we need to either by pressing down harder or making sure that they're just behind the metal bars? 5. A Major and A Minor Chords: Let's look at our next two chords, which are an a Major and a Minor chord shape. Now, before we continue, let's talk about why we're doing the chords that we're doing, right? Why did we start with E? Why did we go to a? Well, the chords that we're doing in this course are the most popular chords for any genre of music. We're just taking them both in terms of ease and in terms of popularity. So we've got a and a Minor. Now, something really cool about a is that all of the notes were playing are on the same exact fret. So when we're picking, we're starting on the fifth string, not the sixth string. We're going to need a little bit of aiming to make sure we're not accidentally hitting the sixth string when we're playing. Here's how I'm playing an a chord. I'm going to take my first finger and put it on the second fret of the fourth string. I'm going to take my second finger and put it on the second fret of the third string. And I'm going to take my ring finger and put it on the second fret of the second string. Now, this gets a little cramped, right? We've got all three fingers on the same exact fret. Now, something I've mentioned a couple of times is to push down right before the metal bar, but that's hard to do when the other fingers are forcing you out of position. The further away from the metal bar we are. That just means the harder we need to press down. So when we're planning something like an a chord, be sure to squeeze nice and hard. We've got an a Major chord. Now again, we know from major to minor, OneNote needs to change. And in this case, our OneNote is on the second string. We just need to move it down a fret. Well, that's easy enough, but we need to shift our fingers a little bit to do that because we can't really move our third finger down. By the way, I'm going to shift my fingers is I'm going to put my middle finger on the second fret of the fourth string, my ring finger on the second fret of the third string. And now my first finger is going to go on the first fret of the second string, and I've got my a Minor. Now, I learned by relating things to one another. So there are two things I want to relate here. First of all, I want us to notice that this shape is pretty much identical to the E chord that we just learned. The only difference is we're taking every single finger, moving it back by one string. We can think about the E and a Minor as being very similar chords in terms of the shape we're playing. Now, the second thing we can relate here is of course the a Minor to the a Major. But realize that if we used our pinky from here to play the a Major, we don't really have to shift our fingers around nearly as much. Now, both ways of playing a Major with the different fingers are really useful. Reason that is, is that it all depends on the next chord we're playing. Sometimes it's easier to transition to a different chord if we're moving from one shape or the second shape. So it really depends on what chord is next. So when you're practicing in a chord, practice it both with the first, second and third finger and the second, third and fourth finger. Now that we know E shapes and a shapes, we can practice jumping back and forth between these. So maybe we could create a happy sounding progression with happy sounding chords like E to a. Or we could create a sad sounding chord progression with the Minor Chords like E minor to a Minor. As we move forward, let's learn some more chords that we can start bringing into our chord progressions. Remember, the more chords we know, the more songs we can play 6. D Major and D Minor Chords: Let's take a look at the D major and minor chord shapes. Now with the E, we played all six strings. With the a Chords, we played five strings. Now with the D, we're only playing for of the strings. So when we're picking with our right hand, we're going to start picking from string number four. Now, when we're thinking about the actual shapes, string number four is going to be open, which means no frets press down on it. I'm going to take my first finger. I'm going to place it on the second fret of the third string. My middle finger, third finger is going to go on the third fret of the second string. Now, so far, this is my shape. I like to think of my first and third finger almost as a little doorway for my middle finger. It's going to tuck between these two fingers to grab the second fret on the first string. So if I connect the dots here with my finger, I've made kind of a downward pointing arrow. Now we're only hitting for strings and that can sometimes be really difficult to manage. So here are two tips that can help. First of all, it's okay if sometimes we accidentally hit the fifth string, that string actually sounds okay with our chord. Now from a theory standpoint, it's not quote-unquote, right? Because our lowest note of a D chord should be a D note, and that happens to be the open fourth string. If we play that open fifth string, our lowest note changes from a D, but it still sounds good. So I like to think that it's okay. It's okay to the ears even if it's not okay in the science of music. The other thing that can really help is actually bringing in our thumb a little bit not to press anything down, but to touch, just touch the six string. So since my sixth string is now being blocked by my thumb when I hit it. There's no note. You are the fifth string a little bit, but that sixth string is blocked. Now, I don't have to worry about aiming so much with my pick because that string I know is not going to ring out. Now let's look at a D minor shape. The note that needs to change for our Dean Minor is on the first string. It needs to move down a fret. So again, it's not a crazy change, but we do need to shift our fingers to make that happen. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to take my middle finger and now I'm going to put it on the second fret of the third string. I'm going to take my third finger, and I'm going to put it on the third fret of the second string. And now I'm going to take my first finger and put it on the first fret of the first string. And I've got a sadder sounding D minor chord. Now the same rules apply here. It's okay if we get the fifth string in there a bit, and we can use our thumb to block out the sixth string. So I've got D major, D minor. Now we're getting a lot of chord shapes in which is really cool, so we can start putting them together. Now, maybe we could play D to E to a Minor, start mixing up Major and Minor Chords. So that would sound something like this. Let's learn two more chord shapes together in the next lesson. 7. C Major and G Major Chords: These are the last two chord shapes we're looking at. Before we take a little break to bring in some FUN right-hand strumming patterns. These are both Major Chords, and we're looking at a C major and a G major. Now, one thing I want to pause and mention is that we're learning all these different letters of Chords. And the musical alphabet is broken up into seven letters, a, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Now we're learning our Chords again based on ease and some popularity as well. But when we put all our chords together, we can hear them slowly rise musically, right? We're progressing through each note and they're rising. You can hear it with a, B, C, D, E, F, and G, right? Everything is kind of going where we're taking a chord for each of these notes. We're just going out of order. That's what's happening. So now we're learning C Major and a G major. The C major we're playing five strings. So again, when we're picking, we're starting on the fifth string. I'm going to take my ring finger, and I'm going to put it on the third fret of the fifth string. Now, one important concept I want to talk about together is that every starting note of a chord is the same note as the name of the chord, which sounds really confusing. But it's actually really simple. There's just not an easy way to say it. The note where starting on is the same name as the chord. So this is a C chord and the note that I'm starting on is a C note. And that's just handy down the line to recognize, we start at D chord with a D note, E chord with an E note, and a C chord with a C note. Now, my second finger is going to grab the second fret of the fourth string. So far, what I've got, my third string is going to be open, and my first finger is going to grab the first fret of the second string. Now, my first string will also be open. So this is our shape. And it's a little bit of a stretch, right? It's not the most comfortable thing for our fingers to do. Well, I've got some practical encouragement and then some theoretical encouragement. The practical encouragement is, it hurts a little bit, but it doesn't have to write if we're having trouble just getting our fingers. That way, we can do a few things. First of all, we can make sure our thumb is on top and our wrist is forward enough so our fingers have the reach that they need if our wrist is too far back, fingers just can't get there. The theoretical part of it is that this just, it comes with time, which can be discouraging or encouraging depending on how you think about it. But I can tell you right now, when I first started learning guitar, this shape just hurt. When everyone starts learning guitar, there are shapes for different people that just hurt. But at this point, for me, putting my hands on a C chord is like a second language. And as long as you stick with it and don't get discouraged, it will be a second language for you too. I've seen student after student, after student struggle with things and then later down the road, look back and kind of chuckle at the things that they used to struggle with. And I'm convinced that that will be you if you stick with it. So the chords, we're diving into their a little bit of a stretch but stick with it and keep trying. Make sure that wrist is forward enough. Thumb is on top, and we've got a C major chord. Now talk about a stretch. We've got a G chord. I'm going to take my middle finger, second finger, and I'm going to put it on the third fret of the six string. Since this is a G chord, we know now that this is a G note. Now my first finger is going to grab the second fret of the fifth string. And here's the cool part. The next three notes are open strings. We don't need to press anything down. What we do need to press down is the third fret of the first string as far as we can go on the other side of the guitar. Now, I like doing this with my pinky. Some people like doing it with the third finger. You can do whichever one is most comfortable to you. I'm going to notate it here with the pinky, but here is our G chord. So we've got C and a G. Now, we're going to pause with those shapes. We will learn more together in this class. But we're going to go ahead and start practicing the shapes and we know a little bit more. We'll start doing some chord progressions together and looking at strumming patterns with the shapes we have and some cool strumming patterns. We are already ready to Play Songs 8. Strumming Patterns 101: So let's begin looking at some chord progressions and strumming patterns. Now, if you're unfamiliar with what a strumming pattern is, this is our right hand, whether we're using a pick or our fingers. Strumming is just a combination of down and up. Something really important to understand for this portion of the class is that songs are broken down into either four beats or three beats. So we can count 12341234, or we can count 123123. There are other beats for songs, but these are the two most common. Again, a beat is just a count. This is how we're counting and breaking up a song into understandable little portions. Now, for each type of song, whether it's got four counts or three counts, there are certain strumming patterns we can do. Now we're going to keep this super simple and learn to strumming patterns for each of these beats. The first is really simple. We're just strumming down and up for each number. So let's take a for beat count and maybe something like the first chord we learned in E minor chord. Now, I'm going to count 1234. And every time I say a number, I'm going to strum down and up. So something like this, 123. Now, something like that can be a lot of FUN when you speed it up and start bringing in different Chords. Let's do this. Let's move between a C chord, an a minor chord, and a D chord, practicing this strumming pattern. So it would be something like this. With my C chord. One more. Then I would shift to the a Minor for 1234 to the d1234. Now when we're actually playing, we don't want a big gap between the chords. Were just speaking in those gaps for the sake of teaching. So here's what it would sound like without me getting in the way. That's pretty cool. So this down and up for each number counts, for both the four counts and the three count songs. Now, let's learn one specific to the four counts, one specific to the three counts. Then we'll talk about how to transition between Chords. Make it a little easier for us. For the four count. One. We're going to go down, down, up, up, down, up. This is your standard for beat strumming pattern. I like to break it into two sections. The first one down, down, up, and then the second one up, down, up. Here's what this sounds like really slowly. I'll use an, a minor chord as my example. 1234, down, down, down, down, down, down, 1231234. Something that can help us understand this a bit is to subdivide these numbers by putting the word or the symbol and between them. So when we're counting in our head, we can think 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, 1, 2 and 3 and 4 and down, down, down. Now again, that becomes FUN. When we bring in some other chords. Maybe I go between a Minor and D Minor. Maybe to get very cool, Let's look at one that would fit a three beat or three count song. This one's pretty simple. This just goes down, up, down, up. Again. This is easy to visualize when we add in the ends. So now we have down, up, down, up. So we can count again. And I'll use the same, a Minor 12.3 and down down one, and 2.3 and 1.2. And again, we can bring some other chords into it, will do, well. We want to practice new ones. So let's do G to D to a, 123-12-3122. So those are two strumming patterns and you can begin to see when we combine strumming patterns with chord shapes or chord progressions. This is how we make or Play Songs 9. F Major and B Major Chords: Over the next two lessons, we're going to learn for chords together. They're going to be F major and minor, and B major and minor. Now, I want to learn some of these chords in different ways. And let me explain what I mean. For a lot of these chords, we're going to start using something called a bar chord. Now, bar chords are notorious for being the part where a lot of guitarists stop. Because really uncomfortable and difficult isn't that great encouragement. But there are two things I wanna do that help. First of all, for something like an F chord or a beam Minor cord, there are different ways to play these chords that aren't bar chords. We're gonna go ahead and learn the bar chord shapes because it's really useful and we'll talk about why. But we're also going to learn the not bar chord shapes so that you can play these chords as you work on these difficult bar chords. The other thing I wanna do that hopefully is really helpful is encourage you to skip them. And I don't mean skip them altogether and never learn them because they are useful. But I mean, right now, if you're finding them enormously discouraging, it is 100 times better to take what we do know and what we are good at and play with them and have FUN with them, rather than to grind away and force yourself to learn until you quit. So if we leave them at the door for a time when we're ready for them. That's perfect. For now though. Let's see how we do with them. We're going to learn the F major and the B Major chord in this lesson. Now, why a bar chord is called a bar chord is because we take our first finger and we lay it down on the side of the finger across the strings. As a great warm-up or practice, you can take all six strings open. Beautiful. And then take your first finger and try laying them across any fret, Maybe the third or the fifth fret. I'll use the third fret. I'm just going to push it down. I'm going to use my second finger to help and see if I can strum all six strings. Okay? There's that portion of it. Now on top of that, I need to use my other fingers to create a shape. So let's talk about the F chord bar shape. And then the F chord not bar shape. The F chord bar shape is, I'm taking, well, here's an easy way to think about it. We're taking an E chord and moving it up by one fret. But it doesn't sound very good. Because when we moved it up, we left behind all of the open strings. So now our shape is kind of messed up. What I need to do is if I'm moving my pressed down frets up by one, I need to move my open strings up by one as well. So here's what I'm doing. I'm going to shift my fingers around to free up my first finger. I'm going to use my third finger to hit the second fret on the fifth string. My pinky, to hit the second fret on the fourth string, and then my middle finger, my second finger, to hit the first fret. Now I've got an E chord with different fingering. I can slide it up by a fret and now comes the bar part of the bar chord. My first finger is going to lay down and cover what open strings I need to bring along. The reason this is so difficult is because it's really hard to get each of those open strings sounding nice and clear. So let's go ahead and learn the non borrow version of this F chord. We can actually start from a C chord shape. So let's go ahead, put our fingers down on a C chord. Now for this version of the F, I'm not going to play the six string. I'm going to start on the fifth string. I'm going to move my second finger from the fourth string to the third string. So that's our first shift. Our second shift is I'm going to take my pinky, tuck it behind the third finger and play the third fret of the fourth string. So now I've got this. You'll notice that sounds very similar to our full F bar. If we're able to, it would be great to lay our first finger down and try to at least grab the first fret of the first string as well. At this point it's the whole chord, except barring our finger to that sixth string. So we got a C and an F. Now I want to learn a B Major chord. And again, It's a bar chord, but it's the same exact idea as the F. This time though let's relate it to an a chord and stay with me here. This will make sense in a second. Let's start by playing an a chord. Now, in our alphabet, B comes after a, which means a B chord comes after an a chord on the neck of our guitar. So we just want to move it up a little bit. Right up is coming down the neck of the guitar. Or coming up might be an easier way to think about it. Up is coming up the neck of our guitar. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to take my a chord shape and I'm going to slide it up by two frets. But I have the same exact problem where I want my open strings to come with me. So I'm going to take my first finger and put it on the second fret. Since I moved up by two frets, that would be my be chord, but again, really difficult to get your fingers there. So one thing we could do is forget the bar and only hit the three drinks, the three notes we're pressing down. So I have a, a B, just hitting these three strings, which makes it a lot easier on the left-hand, but a little bit harder to aim with are picking hand. Now, those are difficult chords. So thankfully, since there at the end of our course, you can guess they're maybe not as popular as some of the others we've learned. Definitely F is more popular than a B chord, but we'll come across them both. So do your best to practice those and bring them into your current chord progressions. But we should at least know how to do them. Even if we're not perfect at doing them. And then the perfection will come with time 10. F Minor and B Minor Chords: Okay, Let's see if we can learn the minor versions of F and B. Now, these, again are a little difficult. Be Minor, especially as got a version of it that's not difficult, it's not a bar chord, so we'll learn that along with the bar shapes. So stay with me here. Again. If you ever get discouraged or you're like, oh man, now the class is getting difficult. That's okay. You can either skip forward or go back and play the chords you're having FUN with. If you move forward, we're going to talk about how to find chords to your favorite songs, but I'm really encouraged you to give these a try, at least watch through and see how it goes, and then move forward. These chords will come up. Eventually in a song you're interested in learning, even if you're not using them right now. If we start practicing now we'll be ready when the time comes to play them. F-minor though. It's the same idea as F-major, right? We took an E chord, we moved it up a fret and then Bard our first finger. Easy enough. Now we're doing the same exact thing, but we can relate it to E minor instead of E major. So I'm gonna take that E Major I was doing. And I'm going to take off my middle finger. So now I'm just holding down the two frets that make an E minor chord just with different fingers. Now, same exact idea. I slide it up by a fret. The open strings don't fit, so I'm going to bar my first finger. Helpful part right now is I've got my middle finger free. I can actually use that to press down on my first finger and help it along, right? I'm squeezing these two fingers into my thumb. I'll show you here. I'm squeezing hard as I can so I can play each note nice and clear. Now, the non bar chord version of that is going to sound a little hollow because we're only pressing three strings down. But I'm going to remove the bar portion of it. My ring finger will go on the third fret, the fifth string. My pinky will go on the third fret of the fourth string. So I've got that E minor slit up. Now I first finger will go on the first fret of the third string, and that's going to be my F minor without the bar. Again, it's not nearly as full. But it will get us by, while we're learning that bar chord shape. As for the be Minor, we can think of it like an, a Minor slid up. So the bar version is I'm taking my a Minor, playing it with my third pinky and second finger. And I'm sliding it up by two frets. Now again, I want my first finger to press down on that second fret. So it's all a unified shape. Now, the non bar version of B is almost like some of the starting chords we were learning. We can count it as an open chord. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to take my first finger and I'm going to put it on the second fret of the fifth string. My fourth string will be open. My middle finger will get the second fret of the third string. My ring finger is going to get the third fret of the second string, and then my first string will be open. So this is a B minor chord played without the bar 11. Reviewing All Chords: We're almost at the end of this course, which is crazy. Now, next we're going to talk about in the next lesson, how to find chords to your favorite songs so that you can sit and start playing through. For right now, let's make sure we're comfortable with all these chord shapes by just running through them. So this time when we look at the seven letters of our musical alphabet, let's go in order. We'll start with a and a Minor. We've got a Minor. We've got be, be Minor or the be Minor. Open shapes. We've got C. And we realized we didn't talk about C Minor. What did we do with that? Well, here's the really cool thing about bar chords. They are movable shapes. We can take the starting note of our C chord and play that Minor Shape. We're sliding and a up to B and C. If we start it from the C note, we've got to see Minor. It's exactly the same shape as the be Minor we learned. So that's really cool. We can translate one shape into another court. We've got D and D minor, E minor. The ever difficult. I've also got this without the big bar. And F Minor, or the one without the bar. We've got G. Now we're up to G minor. We just talked about how we can translate one shape to another chord with the bar. So let's think about this for a moment. Maybe we can take our F-minor shape and start it from the same note. We start a G chord from, and guess what? We've got a G minor. Now we've got, hey, we're back to the start. Which is really neat. Look at that 14 chords that you've learned by this point, along with some strumming patterns. That's actually super impressive. I know you're watching a course right now, but I've gone through this with a lot of students. So if you're comfortable with those chords, that is genuinely impressive. Now, in the next video, we'll talk about how to find Chords to Your Favorite Songs. Remember as well, out of this pool of 14 chords we just learned, you can also write your own songs. Find chords that you think sound good together. Put them into a repeating pattern and add a strumming pattern to it. You've just written a song 12. Finding Chords to Your Favorite Songs: Knowing Chords is great, but they become a lot of FUN when we're able to play these chord shapes to a song we love. So let's open up a screen on the computer and figure out how to do this. Really simple way is to look up the name of the song, the artist, and then type the word Chords. There are a lot of websites that show you Chords to songs. I personally think ultimate guitar is just a really easy one to use. So if we click on this, we are immediately taken to a page. And there are a couple of things we want to note here. First of all, at the top, you're going to see a strumming pattern for the song, Hey, we know how to use that. That's really cool. We'll see chords or chord names above words in the song above the lyrics. Typically, the chord is going to be with the word where you change the chord. So we're not going to change to this chord until we would sing or hear this word. If we scroll our mouse over a chord, it's going to show us that chord shape, which is really useful if we maybe forget one or two of them. At the bottom, there are a couple of really important things. First, the simplify button sometimes will come across a seven or a cis or a slash. And we don't know those Chords yet. But when we hit simplify, they vanish. And that's because the chords that we've learned are the main substance of the chord. Other things can be added onto, make them fancy, but we only really need the main chord and to know whether it's major or minor. Which, by the way, if there's a little M next to the chord, it's Minor. If there's no M, It's assumed the chord is major. Finally, there's a transpose button, which is a fancy word for changing the key. When we move that up or down, the chords change. Now it's still the same song because the relation between the chords doesn't change. They change together. We can just move it until we see chords maybe that we're familiar with or comfortable with. The only downside to doing it this way is we might move them too high or too low where it becomes uncomfortable to sing along. Or we can't play along with the song if we like playing with the track, because now we're playing the chords in a different key. Other than that, we can use transpose and simplify to really make any song approachable for us. 13. Final Project and Congratulations!: Congratulations, You made it to the end of the course. Now we want to figure out a final project that's going to take everything we've learned and to be able to show it to other people in the course. What we're going to do is pick a song that we really like, one that you're a fan of and look up the chords for it. Like we just discussed how to do in the last video. Or if you're feeling especially adventurous, you could even write your own chord progressions and then share audio or video of yourself working through your progression or the song that you chose. Now, we love seeing video or hearing your song, but if you're a little recording shy or you don't have the ability to record, you can also just write out the chords you chose or the song you chose and how it went, what you struggled with, what you didn't struggle with. I'm really looking forward to seeing them. If you have any questions or comments about anything in the course. I love hearing from you. You can email me at Jacob at Lamb lessons.com and I'll see you there. Otherwise you can visit me www.lamblessons.com. Congratulations again, and I'll see you in the next course.