Learn Guitar: Power & Bar Chords

1. Introduction: This class is all about mastering power and bar chords. When I first encountered them, they expanded my playing immensely. They vastly improved the shrift of my hands and as they're shape that can be moved up and down the fretboard easily, they made me feel a lot more confident about jamming and playing with other musicians. Hey everyone, welcome to the second class in my series, guitar classes on Skillshare. If you got involved in the first one I uploaded, "Learn Guitar, The Complete Beginners Guide", then a huge thank you for that. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you're feeling confident and creative on the guitar and ready to take your playing even further. If you're new to the guitar, then that's fine too, because this class is perfectly suitable for the absolute beginner on both acoustic and electric. It's also relevant to those that have been playing for a while, but want to effectively master power and bar chords, learn a wide variety of songs and just improve their overall technique and playing ability. I've been playing guitar for just over 20 years and teaching for 15 years. I also co-run a music service for people of all ages and abilities, which means I'm continually adapting my approach to teaching, enabling people of all levels to get involved in music, and become confident guitar players. We're going to look at exercises that will strengthen your fingers and make playing these chords a lot easier. These will also be relevant to helping to improve your overall playing ability. We will learn the correct techniques to fret these chords. We'll also show you how they are a great tool to help you learn the notes that exist up and down the fretboard. We're going to cover a wide range of music and learn numerous songs from different styles. I'll also add a ton of extra PDFs to this class so there's a wide range of music for you to go and choose from and challenge yourself with. Finally, I will provide a demo of me putting these chords into practice and I will leave you with plenty of advice, encouragement, and examples of how you can begin to utilize these versatile chords and start composing your own music. If there are other areas of guitar you wish to cover, then please visit the first in my learn guitar series. That link will be in the description. We cover so many topics in that first class, it really does take you from that pure entry level to the point of where you feel really confident with the guitar but if you're ready to tackle power and bar chords, then please join me in the next lesson. Take care. 2. Practice Efficiently: First thing, we're going to quickly discuss is how to set up an effective practice schedule to get the best out of your learning experience. At times, this is something that people could find pretty daunting. The actual task of picking up a guitar and getting up and running is easy to put off. By giving yourself a clear scheduled to follow, it can usually make this process a lot easier and far more efficient. The following are some tips to help you through the order of this class, but they can also be applied to your entire approach to learning. It might not be for everyone, some people feel like they can manage their time really well. Others it helps to have that clear coordination and schedule put in place. To begin with ease yourself into the process. You don't want to be overwhelmed early on. I like to advise time with some exercises that are going to improve your technique. I also like to think of these as stretching, warm-up exercises. Much like if you was about to undertake some exercise or sports, you'd do something to get yourself warmed up first. Well, playing an instrument is the same. In this class, I'm going to provide you with some good stretching and warm up exercises that will put you in really good stead for the rest of your playing. You could also apply scales. If you're learning notes at the moment, that could be a good thing to start your practice schedule with. They're not the most exciting thing in the world scales, but it's a great way of getting your hands and your fingers loosened up, building strength and improving your technique every time you do them, you can get that bit done first and then you can progress to some more rewarding and exciting things. Next I recommend starting to shape the chords you're working on. You want to become familiar with these patterns. It's all about muscle memory. We're first learning the chords we're going to cover in these lessons. They're probably going to feel like they're a million miles away on your hands, just weren't adapt to it. But I promise you with regular practice and the right patience and aptitude, you will just find that your hands and fingers start to slip into place. Now reward yourself with something fun. Something exciting. I believe it's best to be learning pieces of music you already love, as this will inspire you to continue along your learning journey. You need to balance the less exciting things with the more creative fun and enjoyment you get from practicing an instrument, there's nothing worse than struggling to fret a chord shape and then having to keep practice that along to a piece of music that you can't stand. You won't be able to play along to all of your favorite songs straight away, but I guarantee that usually there'll be something that you can adjust and adapt to where you're at with your playing at the time. I've had people who adore pieces of music that haven't even got a guitar in. It might just be the piano. We transpose that to the guitar, or we take the baseline and we expand that to the guitar, at least this way the pupil is still playing along to something that they enjoy. Again, to practice their timing and their technique. Now you've play other people's songs, why not spend some time thinking about how you could create your own? Try to remove too much full on how that particular artist you like structured their song, the order of the chords are in, and start to think about how you could work that in your own way. Change the timing, the tempo, the strumming pattern. Start to see how you can experiment with this and create something unique to you. We're going to touch on a bit of that at the end of this class. This is but a guideline for how we're going to approach this set of lessons, but it can be applied to your practice in general, regardless of what level you're at currently or what areas of the guitar you're focusing on at the time. This hopefully just provides a guideline for balance. It's all about balance, you want to level out those things you have to work a bit harder for, that can be challenging, but they're really going to improve your ability as a guitar player and then bringing in all that more exciting and fun, create your things that guitar is full of. We're now going to have a quick look at how to read chord boxes and tab. This might be something you're already familiar with. If so, please feel free to skip that lesson. If you need a bit of a refresher or it's something you're not familiar with, then jump in and join me in the next lesson. After that, we're going to get on with some playing. 3. Reading Chord Boxes & Tabs: We're now going to have a look at how to read and understand chord boxes and tab. Let's start with chord boxes. A good way to think of these as if your guitar were standing up. First, we see the nut, we walk down from there and we have the frets, and then coming across the bottom here, you're going to have the strings. Inside these boxes, little circles would appear with numbers in them, those numbers demonstrate what fingers you need to use on what frets, and on what strings. The chord that you're seeing being constructed in the chord box now is the G Major in a bar chord shape, G Major bar chord. We're going to work on that code quite a lot later on. You will also sometimes see an X or a circle. The X stands for don't play. This means that we just don't catch that string or we use a finger to mute it. The circle stands for open, which means we're not going to have any fingers placed on that string and when we pluck or strum that string it's just going to be ringing open. The code that you're seeing to demonstrate this is an E minor bar chord, but there's a slight adjustment so that there's an open string being played and an X on the lowest E string. The highest E string is open, the lowest E string has an x, which means we don't play. Now let's have a look at tab. A way to think of tab is as if your guitar was lying down. So your thinnest E would be furthest away from you. You could work back to the top and you'd have the thickest, the low E string here. We now know that the left-hand side is representing the string names and coming across from there, we're going to see numbers written on these lines or strings. If you were to see an O, a circle on the E string, that means we just play that E string open. If we were to see a number two on the D string, that means we play the second fret of the D string once. If we were to see two number fours on the B string, that means we play that B string on the four fret twice. Also with tab, you will sometimes find that the code is just written above the string so you need to play C major, for example, it will just say that there or the chord will be constructed down the left-hand side. It will show all the frets that you need to play on what string. Then find out what fingers you need to use for that code. If you needed to check, you would just refer to that chord's chord books. There we go. Hopefully you're feeling confident with reading and understanding chord boxes and tab. We're now going to get involved in some playing. 4. Stretching & Warm Up Exercises: We're now going to look at some playing exercises that are really good for strengthening and stretching your fingers, which are such important things when you're shaping and playing power and bar chords. But really, these are going to help develop your overall playing technique as well. They've stood to me from more of a classical perspective. The guy that I worked with had a huge classical background, Virtuoso Violin, played in terms of orchestras, would teach so many different instruments. He would take a lot of what he had learned from the violin, and apply that to other instruments. Obviously with something like a violin, being able to stretch and have that strength and independence in your fingers, is really important, much like the guitar. The first one we're going to look at is really good for building the strength in your first finger, which is highly important, especially once you come to playing the bar chords that we're going to work on later on. What I'd like you to do, is get your first finger tucked nice and close behind the fifth fret. We're going to start on the finessed E-string. We play that E-string, then we move the finger up slightly to the B, keeping it nice and straight, then up to the G, also it's worth for now this point in our thumb is sitting nice and in the middle of the neck. It's not too bunched up like this because that will hinder us from being out to stretch, and it's not too far down pushing the wrist out. It's around the center, the back of the neck. We are allowing our finger to remain nice and straight. We creep up from the G to the D, then to the A, and then to the lowest E. Once you gets to that lowest E, we want our finger to be nice and straight. We don't want too much of our index finger over the top of that lowest E, and we should then be able to apply all six strings. See that? We've crept up, played all six strings one at a time, then our first finger can play them altogether. You can then move that back to the full fret, and the third fret. Try that up and down the neck of your guitar and you'll really build the strength from that first finger. Next one we're going to look at is really good for stretching and independence. We're going to start on the first fret at the finessed E string. We tack just nicely behind that first fret, play over our first finger. Then our second finger plays the second fret. Third finger, the third fret, fourth finger, forth fret. All the time remaining on the tips of your fingers, nice curve in the knuckle, and that thumb behind. Again, we're not creeping too far over the neck. We don't want to be bunched up like this. We want to be sitting nice and down in the middle. We play that altogether, 1, 2, 3, 4. We can then reverse that, 4, 3, 2, 1, then we can go up to the next string. Play the same pattern and back on every string. All the time remaining on the tips of those fingers. You can start to mind cram all the patterns. You don't have to go back and forth every time. I'd also say, when you're playing those, keep the other fingers nice and close to the fretboard so they're not moving too far away when they're not being used. They remain nice and close to the fretboard. You're getting your fingers prepared and ready to always be in place for when you need them. The further they go way, the further they have to come back. The longer it takes to get to that next line, and it won't sound as smooth. Once each one's down, once you've played that forefinger, make sure you keep these down as well. Again, stretching, strength, and independence, all get worked on in this technique. One more, similar principles to the one before. We make it a little bit more intricate. We're going to play the fifth fret of the first string, and finessed E. Once you've played that, a second finger plays the sixth fret of the B. But as that happens, our first fingers crept up. Our third finger then plays the seventh fret of the G. Our first and second finger have crept up. Our fourth finger comes across to the eighth fret of the D. We've now got our first, second and third finger all creeping up with that fourth. We then go back, we play the seventh fret on the D string, we then play the sixth fret on the A string, notice how our first finger is still creeping up, then we play the fifth fret of the lowest A. You can end with that first finger strengthening exercise again. Then we can work our way back down. Six for the A, first finger starts to go, seven for the D, eight for the D, seven for the J, six for the B, fifth for the A. Make sure you alternate your picking as well with your right hand as you're doing that. We want down, and up strokes. We said that first finger is working out the whole time, keeping up with the movement of all the others. There we go, just a few little tips on how we can really develop the strength and independence in our fingers. This is really going to benefit what we're working on in this class, but also your overall plan. 5. Power Chords - Shape & Technique: Constructing the power chord. That means we're so close to being able to play all those amazing songs that use this type of chord. I can promise you a huge amount of music utilizes these. It's going to put you in really good state for the rest of you guitar playing. Start by looking at our index finger. We're going to go up to the 5th fret again. We're going to go this time to the 5th fret at the lowest E string and we're going to tuck our first finger just behind that frame. Now, you'll notice that we've got a bit of a curve in the first finger here. We're not lying completely flat yet. The exercise we did before in the previous lesson, is going to put some really good shape to play our bar chords later on. For now, we haven't got to worry about complete pressure here. We're going to have a little bit of a curve. The pressure we want is going to be in the tip of the finger. Our first finger is now going to stretch across to the 7th fret of the A string and little finger then goes underneath that on the 7th fret of the D string. Now our second finger is left in no-man's land for a minute, but later on we're going to be able to use that a lot to shape different chords and make different sounds. But for now, we're just going to rest that second finger on our first finger. Hopefully, we should have a lowest D and a D coming through nice and clear. Now remember the x's we spoke about in the chord boxes, well, that's relevant here because our first finger, where it's got that little bit of a curve and not too flat, not applying too much pressure, it's muting the G, the B, and the E, so that when I strum all six strings, we only hear the top fret that are fretted. You can start to hear why it's called a power chord. Good things to bear in mind with these chords is we don't want our wrist to be pushing out too far. We don't want this bang going on, because that's going to make it harder for our first finger to mute the strings, and it'll be hard to get the pressure that we need. Likewise, we don't want to risk coming up too far so that our thumb goes over the top. What that does is really hinders our stretching abilities. So hard to do that, so we let our thumb drop, and our thumb drops to sit behind the neck like so. That allows our fingers to fan out, stretch where we need them to and apply the right amount of pressure and get that right curve so that G, B, and E string are not coming through. At the moment, our second finger is resting on that first finger, but don't worry if that comes across a little bit and protrudes in the middle, like so. You will see that very often, especially as you start to move those chords around. Second finger doesn't have to be resting flat on that first finger the whole time. Also, if you're a big fan of Nirvana, you will see that Kurt Cobain plays these chords in a slightly different way very often. Here we use this third finger to lie flat across that A and D string rather than using this little finger. Now I just want to mention as well, as we're on the 5th fret, we're applying an I note. There our first finger is playing the note I. If we use that chromatic scale, which is mentioned in the scale section of my first of the Learn Guitar series, if you want to check that, we can work up chromatically, open E, F, then F sharp, then G, then G sharp, then I. We've worked up to the 5th fret, we're playing the note I. Whatever our first finger is playing, that is going to be what this power chord is referred to. This would be an I5. The five exists because we are applying the 5th of that note scale as well, and that 5th exists here with our third finger. It's an E note. We've got our first, which is the I, and then the 5th note on that scale is E. Then our little finger is playing the octave of I. It's the same as the first finger, it's just an octave up, it's a higher version of that note. We have a 1st, a 5th, and an octave of the first. We have I5. Now this is where these chords can be used chromatically even more. If we slide that up one, we are in I sharp. We slide it again, we are in B, once more C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E and so on, back and forth. You've learned I, you've now learned all of those chords in that shape, chromatically. Fantastic. Also, if you wanted to take that third finger off so you've just got the octaves, that's a pretty cool chord to use as well. There is some we're going to do in the next lesson that uses these octave chords. Brilliant. We've got A5, and we got that shape wherever you want it to be, same with the octave. What a good way to learn your fret board as well. When people say you need to learn you fret board, they have to jam with other to no one knows you're playing when you're in certain positions on the fret board. Well, you learn that note as I, you've already learned that woody amount of notes, because you know that's I as well. If that's I sharp, so is that. If that's F, so is that. Really cool way of learning your fret board. We've got that shape, let's move all those fingers down one string. From there, our first finger goes down to the I, third finger goes down to the D, little finger goes to the G. Second finger now rests on top of that A. Doesn't press down too hard. We don't want that one note coming through, we want nice muted lowered string. Our other fingers are in place. Our first finger's still got that curve. It's helping mute the high A and the B. We have another power chord. With this time, we've got D5, lowest E string, our B and our E are being muted, and just our A, D and G are coming through. We used our chromatic scale to work out that root note, if we want to. Open A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D. Whatever our first finger's playing, that's the chord. That's the root note that we're creating. D5, D sharp, A5, F5, F sharp 5, G5, and so on. If you're doing the one with the third finger, you just need to make sure you have that nice curve so that it's not pressing down on the E and the B. We're still mute in the E, the low E. We're using the tip of our first finger to do so just like that. You still get that nice power chord sound. The octave is still applied to this as well. First finger's playing the D, so is the little finger, they are both D. Certainly, we know that's A, and so is that. We know that's D, and we know that's D as well. See how quick you can start to learn your fret board? It's great. Now we've mastered that, let's get playing some songs. 6. Power Chord Songs: Now we've got those power chords in our locker, they supply it to a few songs. I've tried to pick a mix of music here, so hopefully it caters for a wide audience. I've also attached a load more songs to the PDFs for this class, so you can delve even further there and really experience a different mix of music that's going to help you plan in a lot of ways. First one we're going to look at is You Really Got Me by The Kinks. Now, I'm pretty sure you've probably heard this song at some point. It's a really common one when learning power chords. It's a great way to apply the power of these chords, and the technique of just moving up the fretboard and keeping the pattern going is a great way of developing your rhythm. Again, I'm used to playing these chords in different areas of the guitar. We start by fretting our first finger, this time we're going to be on the first fret of the lower E. Our third finger then stretches across to the third fret of the A, our little finger goes underneath, unless you've decided to play the power chord like that, obviously. We're going to do it by this. Curve in the first finger so that we mute the G, B, and E. We have our power chord. Now, what this does is slides the power chord shape from the first fret up to the third, always keeping our free fret distance between each finger. That's the pattern. We apply one strum on the first fret. We then slide the shape up. We don't want to loosen it too much. We want that continuity, that smoothness just a slide up to the third fret, and we do two strums there. So we get 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. Then it goes 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We're counting five, 1, 2, 3 on the third fret, and one more strum back at the first, and one more strum at the third again. Here, by not taking my fingers away and loosening the grip too much, if I did that, I'd get. We don't want that, it's a bit more rigid. It takes away that fluency. We want that nice slide. Start playing this without the music on. Get yourself comfortable in that position, confident with the slide, making sure everything's smooth. There's nothing wrong with starting really slow, it's the best thing you can do. As you gain confidence, you notice I have that little pause at the end where we just relax all three fingers so it cuts the notes off. All that's doing is, the last strum, the fifth hit, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, just after I've hit that fifth strum, I relax those fingers. If I didn't, it sounds cool, but it's not what's in the song. It then moves that same pattern up to the third and the fifth fret. After that, we move to the eighth and the 10th. When the note rings out, you here the song. We're just on the eighth fret, power chord shape. We're planning a C there, C5. Third and fifth, eighth and 10th, cool. I've put the full tap of that in the PDF so you can see how many times each of those parts are played. I want to fit a few different things into this lesson, so I'm going to move on to another song now. The idea being that once you've learned these shapes, you can apply them to a lot of different songs, lot of different styles very easily. In my first class of this series, we worked on The White Stripes, Seven Nation Army. That riff, very common, I reckon you've probably heard that before as well. Now, you can play that as the octave chord that we mentioned earlier on by just taking our first finger and our little finger on the seventh and ninth fret of the A and G string. If we was playing our E5 there it be, our power chord shape, we would take our third finger away, our first finger now. That little curve that's under there is muting the D string, so that's not coming through, and we can play the Seven Nation Army riff, which is, if we follow from where our first finger is, we use that as our root. We're playing the seventh fret, 10th, back to the seventh, keeping that curves so we don't hear the D, fifth, third, and second. Let me play that riff nice and slowly for you. 7, 7, 10, 7, 5, 3, 2. Cool. If you know the single-note riff, you can then utilize the octave chords for the kick-up. There's a slight variation, which is 3, 5, 3, 2. The variation. Now we can use the power chords on the low E for the next beat which comes out of the chorus, up to the fifth fret, and then we play an E5, which is. Now here, because we've run out of frets for our first finger to play, if you imagine this power chord shape going back, our third and little finger would be there and our first finger would be around here. But obviously, after one, we got to open. We can play this with our first finger instead of our third and fourth. Our first finger just lays flat over the A and the D, and it's far enough down so that our lower you can still ring through. You have E five. We have that curve in the first finger so that G, B, and E are muted and not coming through. There's a few other songs in the PDFs that are really easy to pick out, one in particular is Molly's Lips by Nirvana, so definitely have a go with that. It's just the G5 power chord, third fret, down, down up, then it goes to the third fret, the A, and play C5. Down, up, down, up. Really cool one to get you moving between those chords quickly and working on that first finger making sure the curves there to mute those strings that we don't want. Another cool one is Molly's Chambers by Kings of Leon, one of their earlier tunes. They play the main riff of the verse on the second fret. We play our power chord on the second fret of the lowest D, and we're going to bring our first finger on and off that low string. It goes on for quite a while, really cool. It's a good way, again, a being solid with that shape, practicing holding that in the right position. We just bring that first finger on and off that low string. See how we do that? As we come off, we can do an up strum. Down, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up. As we strum up, the finger comes off, as we're ready to strum down again, our first finger comes back down. Once you've played around that verse riff with the F-sharp, second fret, they then utilize B5 and an A5 for the chorus. Cool. Well, I put all that in the PDFs as well. So if you want to play along to the full song, you can. There's also a Foo Fighters tune in there that was really big over the last few years, and for any of you that have got more of a pop ear, there's a One Direction song that was really huge. Sorry if you're not a fan of those. Another cool one, but it's pretty fast, is American Idiot by Green Day. This seemed to be a really popular song a few years back with a lot of my students. It gets quite fast. I've put it all in the PDF, but just we can quickly cover it, your power chord shape is starting on the full fret, lowest E. We then move that shape down, still on the full fret, but the [inaudible] is on the E. Second fret, back to the fourth, back to the lower E on the fourth, back to the second. Just so you can see that quickly. The track's more like. But because it's just around that full fret, it goes down, up to the second, then back on that fourth, back to the second. It's a pretty cool pattern to learn. Again, just start it really slow without the music on. It'll do wonders for your playing and improving how fast you can move between these chord. But like I say, it's quite a bit of pressure to put on yourselves early on. But if you're feeling a bit more advanced, you're smashing this, it's going well, why not. Have a crack. We're are now going to look at some different strumming patterns and something called percussive strums, and how we can utilize these in some more songs. 7. Strumming: I thought it would be cool if I provided you with some strumming pattern suggestions to work on, so that you are developing technique in your right hand as well as your left. Obviously, when you're learning a mix of songs, there's going to be a variety of strumming patterns applied and it's really good to have an awareness of how diverse they can be and the right things you want to be doing so you're not picking up any bad habits. First of all, make sure your wrist is nice and loose. You don't want to be too tense when you're playing like this. It can take away some of the fear that you have thereafter. There's times when especially more lines sort of punk or aggressive approach to the way of playing your guitar. That more tenseness does come in, but really you want to have the experience of being able to keep them nice and loose, even when you are playing some more fast aggressive stuff. If you got that looseness in the wrist, you're really going to be able to pick up that pace and that skip that you're after. The same with your right arm or your left, depending what you're strumming arm is, you don't want to be tense all the way up. Try and keep those shoulders nice and loose. Try and keep this arm moving flippantly. We don't want to feel like we've got to have our whole arm moving when we're playing those strumming patterns. We can be more controlled if we're applying more of the movement to the wrist and the lower arm. Obviously, I'm not saying don't go on stage and throw your guitar around. You do wherever you want, man. Where music [inaudible] , I tend to come across as someone who say, make sure you're all controlled and composed and your wrist is nice and loose. Obviously, there's parameters and boundaries that just get blown away as you progress when you're playing. But just a general practice to have in mind when you're sitting and learning the song in these early stages, we don't want to pick out too many bad habits or do any damage so we stay nice and loose and relaxed. Because of that, we'll end up further down the line having more control so when we are offering our guitar around and freaking out a lot more, there's actually still a lot of control going on with your playing at the same time. Be dynamic with your strumming as well. There's times when you want every hit to be at the same. But there are some strumming patterns that want you to glide a bit more, catch some of the strings rather than all of them. Play around with the feel of strumming patterns when you're trying to create your own and when you learn in other people's. A little strumming pattern I'd like you to practice. We're going to go to the 5th fret of the A string. We're going to play our A5 power chord. We're going to play down, down, up, up, down, up. Remember playing from the wrist, nice and loose. Curve in the first finger to mute the G, B, and E. Once you're comfortable with that down, down, up, up, down, up, just playing the A, slide back to the 3rd fret. Once you're confident with that, bring in the 5th fret of the A string and the 3rd fret of the A string, D5 and C5. See how that really starts to force you to get to the next chord for your first strum of that bow. Think of your last strum on each chord as the sign that you need to move. Down, down, up, up, down, up. Now it's triggering my fingers to slide back to that 3rd fret so that my next down strum, I'm in position ready. Down, down, up, up, down, up, I'm sliding back up after down and back. The next one, a little bit trickier and a little bit skippier as well. We're going to go down, down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up. That's probably going to be clear up with the arrows on the screen rather than me just repeatedly saying down, down, up. Look at the visuals, listen to what I'm playing, and watch my hand as well. Down, down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up, down. Down, up, down, up, down, down, down, up. Same thing, once you're comfortable in the A, bring in the G, the D, and the C. See. See how that down, up at the end, that's signifying is the point that we need to be ready to move to the next chord. That last up, pushes us into whatever our next chord is going to be. Don't feel like you have to stay with that structure of chords as well. Feel free to change the order up, if any, if actually, I'd encourage you to do so. Pick four other chords on the fretboard and see if you can apply those strumming patterns. Then as always, thinking about that practice schedule at the beginning, applying your own creativity, create your own strumming patterns. One other strumming pattern you'll hear and see quite often is a percussive strum. That means we are relaxing all the fingers that are on the strings, so we get a. If we within that 5th fret again, we're getting familiar this one, so we'll use that. We've played our A5. If we relaxed our first finger, it's already muting the G, B, and E. But if we relax it so it's mute in the lowest D as well, and our 3rd and little finger relaxed, we are now just resting on top of all the strings. We get what's called a percussive strum. Very popular song that uses a percussive strum, and we're going to work on that in the next lesson. Be aware of that. We've got a nice, loose, open strumming patterns, endless varieties of those. Then we've got a percussive strum as well, that we can start to apply maybe to the strumming patterns as we did earlier. See how we can mix them up, and start to apply this little stops, these little percussive strums, suddenly you've created a whole new rhythm. Have a little experiment with those. Start with the ones that I've provided. Get yourselves up and running. Then just get creative and see what you can create. We're now going to look at a couple of other songs in the next lesson that are really good for continuing our power cord development, implementing some different strumming patterns, and utilizing that percussive strum. 8. Songs With Percussive Strums: Let's have a look at one of the most famous alternative anthems of all time, "Smells like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana. This is so common when people are first learning the guitar. It's one of the first things I learned, then I took it out to my mates and I imagine that goes on a hell of a lot. It's really useful because it's a cool little chord progression, not too complicated, and it utilizes those percussive strums we were speaking about in the previous lesson. We'll just have a quick little look at that, then I'll let you go away and perfect everything. We're going to use that power chord shape, you've become very familiar with now, stretching across free frets. We're going to go to the first fret of the lowest E string, just behind, then our third, and our fourth, land on the A, and the D. Our second finger could be resting on the D, resting on that first, or doing this finger in the middle here. So down, up, down, gets us up and running. Then we relax all the fingers like we spoke about earlier, so that now everything is just resting on the strings but not pressing down hard, so we get a, and that comes straight after the down, up, down. We've now moved the same distance of frets but we've gone down a string. We've gone through an A sharp. First finger, third, fourth, with an A sharp. We just do it down, down, then a percussive down, up. Then we slide to the full fret of the lowest A. When making that slide from the first to the full fret, you hear on the record that there's not always a definitive percussive strum. Sometimes open strings occur or he will stay on that first fret a little bit longer so that down, up, catches those strings. Just as a quick example, here we didn't have to percussive strum in there, but we just caught that chord for a little bit longer at the end of that strumming pattern. Nice and slow or there'll be some open strings that occur during that transition from the first to the fourth. Here I've just slightly caught those open strings. On that last up strum, I'm pushing towards the full fret, and I'm ready for my next down strum. Once we get to that full fret, we apply the same pattern that we did to the first, then we move down to the full fret of the A and we apply a same pattern that we did to the first fret. So it's just repeating the pattern from the first up to the fourth. When that refinishes on the full fret and we start again, at the moment we're putting that little percussive strum in there. But the same thing when we went from the first fret of the A up to the full fret of the A, and we filled it with that little open note or we stayed on the chord little bit longer, the same can be done at the end of the riff. We hear through out the record the slight differences when we're making that transition from the first fret of the A up to the full fret of the A, and when the riff finishes on the full fret of the A, back to the first fret of the A. It will vary throughout. But as we're working on the percussive strums in this lesson, I wanted to make sure that when we are at that transition, you can practice pretty much short loop percussive strum in there, but you could also obviously experiment and practice having those open nodes or staying on that chord a little bit longer as you make your transitions. What I'll do is I'll put the rest of that song in the PDF as well, so you can play along to the whole track if you'd like to. There's a really nice simple layed riff in the verse that just plays over that, really driving baseline that sits between everything. One of the song I wanted to quickly cover or suggest you play along to, is Brain Stew by the band Green dye. Much older tune it is, not sure if the younger generation will be into their earlier albums as much as my generation novelist, starting to show my age, but it's definitely a tune that's worth checking out. Now it's worth mentioning as well, if you want to play along to the original, you need to tune each of your strings down a half step. Look at your tuner and come down one step from there. The A would go down to an E flat, the A would go down to an F flat, and so on. You tune each of your strings down equally half-step. But just so I could demonstrate the pattern now, is the first song I ever learned for power chords, and I think it was a great sharp [inaudible] , I'll show you why, the pattern goes like this. So you see, how you just get into shape that chord, you progressively work your way back down the fret-board, fraud a little E 5 at the end, which means you've got to do something a bit different to what you're used to. It's a great way of getting familiar with that pattern and getting comfortable with those shapes. Then it adds, so exactly the same pattern. But you just get to relax your fingers, put all those percussive strums in the middle as you're sliding back to your next chord. Such a cool introductory song I think, for learning power chords. I definitely suggest to give that a go. As always in the PDFs, full version in there, but I just wanted to do quick little demonstration for you now. Let's move on to the next section where we're going to start to put together four bar chords. 9. Bar Chords - Shape & Technique: We're now going to look at how to correctly put together bar chords. We've been doing a lot of work on power chords, and our first finger has got used to that curve so that we can play the lowest E string, but mute the G, B and A. We now want to use that first finger to really press down on all of those strings. We don't want our first finger to come too far over the top of the fret board, we lose a bit of control then. We want to utilize most of the tip of the finger to play that lowest E, but the difference being now our first finger is really applying some pressure. Remember that first exercise that we did earlier on when we crept up the strings and we was really barring the strings? Well, this is when that really comes into play now. We've done a lot of work around the fifth fret, so we're going to start on the third this time. Our first finger, if you want, you can creep up from that finished E all the way up till we get to that low A. Our first finger is now nice and straight. It's barring all of those strings. We are then going to place our second finger on the full fret of the G, just tucked nicely behind the fret. Our third finger, by the power chords, comes over to the A string. We're on the fifth fret, our little finger tucks underneath. To start with, we'll have our E, A, D and G being sounded by our first, second, third, and fourth. But our first finger now really wants to put pressure on so that we get the B and the E coming through as well. We should have all six strings coming through, nice and clear. Now this is going to create a big ache on your hands if it's the first time you've done it. You're going to find some real tenseness happening in your thumb and your wrist. It's going to cramp up, it's going to be hard to do. But I promise if you keep fretting these chords like we spoke about, muscle memory earlier on, it will start to come together and be a lot easier to form these shapes up and down the fret-board. There's something I mentioned in my first class for these learn guitar series. That, even if you're not strumming the guitar, if you've got your TV on, the laptop, wherever, you're watching something, if you have your guitar on your lap and you're just getting used to fretting these shapes and you just keep putting your hands into that position, it will click. When someone first wrote down the chords to smooth that team spirit for me, I was convinced they had written them down wrong, because there's no way they can have that amount of stretch. My fingers ain't going to click there. I remember the time, and I was watching TV when it happened, and I just kept doing it that and then bang, it just sat there. The more you do it, the easier it will become an and the less it will hurt. Let's pick up that shape again. We've got our first finger resting cross those six strings, our second, third, and fourth are down. We've got a nice third shape. Our thumb is sitting not too low and not too high. If we go too low, it pushes our wrist out which we don't want, if we come too high, it bunches our wrist up and it prevents us from stretching out like we want to. Now let's have a quick chat about what that second finger is doing. By placing that second finger on the fourth fret of the G, I've made this a major chord, a G major bar chord. If I take that second finger off and my first finger now has a bit more work to do, it's got to play the G. It's already lying flat, so that's cool. We just got to apply a bit more pressure. I've now got G minor. G major, take the second finger off, G minor. Remember what we spoke about being chromatic with these shapes? G major, G sharp major, A major, A sharp major, B major. We could have made all those minor. G minor, B sharp minor, A minor, A sharp minor, B minor. Mark around with those, experiment, see what chord progressions you can create. Because now you've unlocked these chords, you've unlocked every note up and down the fret-board, and you can play the major and minor chord for it. It's a really cool thing to have learned. Now, let's apply this shape to the next string, to the A string. We're on the third fret, again, we've played at G major, or our G minor. If we move down, our first finger now plays the A string, third fret. Let's start with a minor. We're going to put our second finger on the fourth fret of the B, we're going to put third finger on the D, our fourth finger on the G. Our first finger is lying flat, so it wants to catch the highest E string. This time, that second finger is making it a minor, not a major. Up here, it makes it a major, down here, it makes it a minor. So that's worth remembering. Also, you can hear the difference how it has that nice major jolly sound, and then this has the nice minor, you have a sadder sound. If we want to make major shapes in this position on this A string, we can use our second, our third and our fourth finger. Here, we are now forming the major. Our little finger is bringing in the note we need to make it a major chord. That's quite a tricky one, quite a tricky stretch. You will see people play it like that and it sounds cool. But we can use the old capo barring technique that we spoke about earlier and our third finger can bring in that major note. Our first finger is still lying flat enough, to play that higher A. Let's have a quick chat about what that major and minor means. If you was taking the first, the third, and the fifth of a note scale, you would create a major chord. In the chord we're using as an example, we have our root note at G, our second finger was playing B, our third finger was playing D. That is our first, our third, and our fifth, our little finger then just played the octave of G, makes it sound nice and full. Our first finger lying flat brings in another D note on the B string, and another G note on the E string. We've doubled up on some of the notes that exist within that chord, G major. To make that a minor, we need to flatten the third note, which was our second finger on the fourth fret of the B. We take it off, it's now B flat. That is G minor. Major, minor. I cover a similar amount of theory in the first-class, that I did but as this series progresses, we're going to do a session that's much more focused on music theory a bit further down the line. Let me know if you've got any questions and if there's things you'd like to learn. If we want to add a seventh note and get some more jazzy, complex, chords that sound pretty cool, we can make a C major seven, our root note's C. We've now introduced a B note, which is our seventh here and we add our major fifth that we had before and our major third. We are now playing C major seven. It's a really, really nice show. Experiment with moving that up and down the fret board. If we want to make that a minor seven, remember when we add our C minus shape third fret, all we're doing is we're taking our little finger off, bringing in the role the first finger again, make it a little bit harder for it and we put in a B flat in there. You notice in the seen seven, we had a B, in the minor seven we got a B flat. A major to minor chord, you flatten the third, a major seven to a minor seven chord you flatten the third, and you flatten the seventh. Minor seven. Move it up and down the fret-board, add the majors and minors together. Cool. If you want to apply those major and minor sevens to when you're working on the lower E string, I'll show you how we put those together. For the major, we still got our root, the G, but now though, our third finger comes down to the full fret of the G string that's adding our B note, our third. Our second finger, is playing an F-sharp here, that's our seventh note, and our little finger is adding a D. We're now playing G major seven. Really lovely sounding chord. Again, move it up and down the fret-board. To make that a minor seven when we're on this lowest E string, we have our first finger playing the root again, the third, our third finger stretches across to the fifth fret of the A string, and now, our first finger does the rest of the work. It's playing an F note, and it's playing a B flat, and we strum all six strings. Let's have a quick little chat to close about the role of our first finger once more. We spoke a lot about how it's pressing down on all six strings. It's taking a lot of responsibility there. Sometimes to save having to use our first finger as the bar, you will see people use a capo. One of these. If you're not familiar with them, I definitely recommend getting one. I've put a link in the description of this class to check out. They're only a few quid, but they're really handy to have. Our first finger is effectively taking over the role of the capo. Sometimes people to move the open chord shapes that they've played in the first position up the fret-board, they will just use the capo. That frees them up to play these four open chord shapes without the responsibility of the first finger being there. That's effectively what that capo is doing. You think about those shapes. If we play our E major shape, you notice how that just exists within that bar. If that capo wasn't there, that would be my first finger playing the E major shape, but with the second, third, and fourth finger. I'll take my first finger away, the capo is doing that job for me, but it's freed up my first finger, and I can play chords like this G sharp, and I can add a fuller C sharp, and I can start to experiment further up the fret-board. I've got that capo adding a whole another dimension to my playing. Yeah, definitely worth checking them out and getting one if you don't have already. Sweet. That's a really good in-depth look at how we're effectively shaping and utilizing bar chords in all their glory. Now let's learn a couple of songs to put them into practice. 10. Bar Chord Songs: Now we're feeling confident with those bar chords. We're going to play a couple of songs to utilize them. The first we're going to start with is another alternative anthem. It's Creep by the band, Radiohead. I'm just going to quickly play through that chord progression for you. When you listen to the original of that track, you'll hear that the guitarist is doing a lot of picking within the chords, and he varies his pattern as he progresses throughout each verse. For now we're just going to work on our right hand technique so we can develop our strumming. I will show you a bit about the picking just so you can do it, and the PDF will include a bit more information as well. To begin with, we want to put our first finger behind the third fret of the low E string. We then shape our second, third, and fourth fingers to make that E open shape we spoke about before, and our first finger lays flat across that third fret. It's got that nice full bar shape. Now remember with the strumming, we want to be nice and loose with the wrist. I'll put the strumming up on the screen as well. Once we've played on that third fret, we want to slide all the way up to the seventh fret, keeping that same shape. Then you here there's a slight variation that it doesn't always do, but just so we're aware of it, our little finger comes down onto the ninth fret of the G. It goes next to where our second finger is. We've now got a Bsus4. We've added the fourth note of that scale, but don't worry too much about that. We can work on that in another class. On that B it'll be. The little finger then goes back for the last strum to the D string on the ninth fret. See how that goes? You don't have to do that every time, but it's worth practicing just so you're aware, if you hear that slight variation, that's what's going on. Then we slide up one more to the C. Keep that whole shape, just shift it all in a one from the B up to the C, from the seventh fret up to the eighth. Now we go from making this chord a major to a minor, we just take that second finger off, and instead of that major sound, our first finger. Now make sure it's applying enough pressure to sound that G, and we have our C minor. We've gone from C major to C minor, and the same strumming pattern there. Then we start it all over again. Slide up to the seventh. One more. Now make it a minor. Brilliant. There are occasions when the guitarist utilizes his little finger like we have on the seventh fret, he does that on the third with a G, and he does it on the eighth with a C as well, so you'd get something like this. That's just a quick little example of how you could play that picking part. You can bring that little finger into the G chord, so it goes into the fifth fret of the G string. We've worked on yet the seventh, we bring onto the ninth fret of the G. When it shifts up one to the C, we can bring it to the tenth fret of the G, keeping that finger nice and straight, that first finger, and then we just relax it for the minor. But I say you'll hear that he alternates that picking quite a lot, sometimes he might pick some at higher notes, and not worry about that sus4. Just have a look, play around with, and it's something to challenge yourself with in addition to the strumming pattern. What I'd say with Creep is if you are going to practice the sus4 shape, the B is a good place to add it. It seems to happen throughout the track quite often. I figured out that's a good place for you to get practicing and get used to adding that sus4 note. Another song I want to quickly talk about is Otis Redding, (Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay. The good thing with this is it uses pretty much the same chord progression. There's just a fast little chord change that comes at the end of it, but it's good to develop our play even more. To start with, I'll just quickly play through that riff. Cool. You see how we had that slide from the third up to the seventh to the eighth, and then there was a. Let's have a quick look at how that all goes together. For the intro, there's four counts of four with a slower strumming pattern, so one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Then we go into the full strumming pattern, which is on that third fret again. Bit more of a skip to the previous song we was doing. Up to the seventh, up to the eighth, and this is where there's a slide down. C, B, B-flat, A. Really good for developing our bar chord technique, making sure the right hand and the left hand are in sink with each other, and you're able to slide that full shape back down the fret board, keeping that free fret distance at all times. Let's go through that a little bit slower. A little bit faster. Nice one. There's two very different songs, but with very similar chord progressions that you can play along to. Like I say, great for your bar chord technique, but also to work on your right hand, your strumming technique. I won't break those down any further. If you have a look at the PDFs attached to this class, (Sittin' On) The Dock by the Bay has got a lot of other chords that are included in that song, so why not have a crack at that and see if you can master those as well. We're now going to look at another technique commonly used with these chords, which is palm mute. 11. Palm Muting - Songs & Technique: [MUSIC] We're now going to look at a technique called palm muting. This is something that appears so often in guitar, particularly with the chords we're working on, it's something that happens a lot. It might be that a song starts with palm muting, and then the chords open up as it progresses and you start to get more power and clarity in the chords you're playing. Let's have a quick look at what that technique is. We basically want to be resting the palm of our hand down on the bridge of our guitar. We don't want to come too far over the bridge, [MUSIC] because we're going to start to lose clarity in the notes. If I slide my hand back, you start to hear how those notes come through. If I go back even more [MUSIC] the notes are completely open. A lot of guitars are going to have slightly different bridges. Mine is very thin down here on the body of the guitar, you find that some have quite chunky bridges that are raised a bit more, that might be easier for you to get your wrist across. As you can see with mine there, I'm just coming across to where that metal bit is and I rest my hand down. Again, we're not flat [MUSIC], cutting out all the clarity of the note. We're just over enough. [MUSIC] If I start with the note open [MUSIC] I come across, [MUSIC] we can hear now, we have what's called [MUSIC] palm muting. I feel like I've mentioned Green Day a few times in this class. But they're a really a good example for the chords we're working with. Anyone in that punk, pop punk, Grand Rock era that we spoke about, these are very commonly used chords. There's a song called Basket Case by Green Day, that is a brilliant example. When you start googling palm muting songs or you look at it again, alternative anthems, this one will pop up a hell of a lot. So I thought I'd quickly talk about it. If you want to play the proper version, how they do it, you need to do that detuning again. You go half a step down. Your E would become an E flat, your A would become an A flat. So you tune every string down half a step. But if you just want to stick to these power chords and not use the little open ones that appear, we can do that in our standard tuning. I'll put the full version in the PDF. But just to quickly show you. [MUSIC] That intro goes on a little bit longer, there's all palm muting until it gets to a little section that goes. [MUSIC] You start to see how it's a great example for starting with palm muting and then building towards open chords. Again, challenge yourself. Have a look at that PDF, have a listen to the track and see how much of it you can learn. Quickly as well, with palm muting, when you're reading TAB, sections that are palm muted will appear with a little PM above. Sometimes they have a little line, but usually you'll be looking out for PM which stands for that section, will be played with palm muting. Another good one is All the Small Things by Blink-182. Lot of those bands around that era, Offspring, Sum 41 Blink, Green Day, they used a lot of this power muting technique. So Blinks big song uses power muting in the verses. I'll just have a quick little play for that intro and go down into the verse, just so you can see an example of that. Just so you know, we're going to play the third fret of the I, third fret at the A, first fret of the A, is a C5, G5, F5. But there's another little note from in there, but don't worry too much about that at the moment. [MUSIC] As you can hear, there was that little percussive strumming there as well, so that's quite handy to work on. I'll put the full version in the PDF again so you can have a little go. If that's a style of music you enjoy playing along to, go for it. If not, lots of metal music uses it. They'll detune to drop D a lot of the times you get a real chuggy sound. [MUSIC] Enter Sandman by the band Metallica, there's a bit in that song that really chugs and uses palm muting, as it's building up to that first kicker. [MUSIC] You can see how palm muting can really be utilized to add light and shade to your music. It's a brilliant tool for dynamics. You might just have one riff, but by applying that palm muting, you can really suck out the volume, [MUSIC] bring something down, massive choir, [MUSIC] and then opening up with a full strumming pattern. Let's have a quick little look at a couple of other tiny things you can do to make the chords you've been working on, a little bit more interesting. 12. Chord Variations: I want to discuss a few tips on how you can add some real diversity to the chords we've been working on. Just because I've been giving you instructions and advice on how to fret and shape bar and power chords, I don't feel like I have to end there. There's so many possibilities we can add to them. Let's just put our first finger on the seventh fret of the A and fret that, E minor, bar shape we worked on earlier. If you were to lift up that first finger, so the curve comes out a little bit. We're not lying completely flat. We've just applied a little bit of a movement. Our open E is going to ring through. Just adds a bit more of brightness to that chord. [inaudible] so we know that high is going to work, but there's other places that work as well. Other places it sounds a little bit haunting, but really lovely. You can also bring in the low E as well just by moving that first finger slightly down. The low and higher E are coming through, we've added a bit more base, a bit more weight. What about your little finger? As well, bring that off. Start to see how you're not just restricted to those shapes we worked on. There's so much you can do with them. You can start to apply a combination of both of what we just discussed. Another one, if we're in that minor shape, let's go to the full fret this time. Nice full bar C sharp minor. Bring your little finger across to the seventh fret of the A string, one of the easiest chord to play, but a great little stretch to work on. What we've done there, instead of sliding from C sharp minor, up to an E major, we've just put our little finger on that E note. We've actually made the major code, but a much more gentler version than that. Then you could start to apply that to some chord progressions. You see how these chords can start turning together in a much more varied way? One other one that we discussed as well, I covered the F shape, open chord in the first position in my first class. You probably come across that before, either like that or like that. We spoke about how they can be moved up and down the fretboard. Basically, what's happened if we was in that F shape. If we wanted that to be barred, we'd have our first finger. What we've done is we've moved our first finger, just to the first fret of the B string, rather than all of the strings on the first fret, and it's the same up and down the fretboard, rather than an A bar and A major bar-shape. We've put our first finger on the B string and we're laying that high earring through as well. But that first finger could also come off, and you've got another nice breezy open chord, it sounds lovely. Maybe that first finger could come back on, but not to the B, but the highest E, same fret. Endless amounts of experimentation. Don't feel like just because you follow the advice and guidance and instructions that I've given you, that you have to be so rigid with those bar on power chord shapes. Obviously, it's great to do. You want to do all of that groundwork to really improve your playing, but to keep expanding, keep improving and opening up your possibilities, experiment with this chords, start to take fingers off and put them on in different places. It's not always going to sound the most pleasant thing in the world. That one for example, with the little finger off and the first finger up. You might be after that vibe at some point, but in other areas, sounds beautiful. Talking about experimentation, we're now going to have a chat in the next lesson, about creating some of your own music or tackling the song that we haven't covered in these lessons. 13. Class Project : I thought it would be great that as well as having these set of lessons to work through, if there was a class project you could focus on, a nice little extra task for you to undertake completely independently. Now we spoke a lot about formulae in chords. We've learned tons of different shapes, and we've covered a wide range of music that hopefully demonstrate how many different ways these can be utilized to create a variety of styles. Now, if you want to take that away and start to think about how you could put these chords into your own order, start to create your own music. Whenever I'm working with people, if its for the music service that I run or if it's working one-to-one with people on a guitar basis, I'm always encouraging students to start to think about how they want to express themselves with the guitar. There's nothing wrong with just learning other people's songs. Obviously that's brilliant. You're undertaking so much personal development. But I do also firmly believe that everyone has a creative voice that's unique to them, so it's good to start to tap into that. Now, one of the great things with Skillshare is that you could upload what you've created. That's there as an option for you. If you want to take part, start to think about these chord shapes and you can formulate them into your own chord structures, apply some palm newton, some percussive strum. Maybe a variety of strumming patterns, some lightened shades, some different dynamics. Go loud, go quiet, add some variety to your progression. Throw in some sevenths, some majors and some minors. Even if you don't want to upload, that's fine, but it will be a great way for you to learn how so many of these chords compliment each other. Some of them don't work as well alongside each other, but that's the beauty of discovery. I think the more you experiment with the order of these and those little times when you bend the first finger, apply some open notes, bring the little finger across. We've got a nice jangly chord rather than the power chord. Then go to that power chord later on if you want to mix things up a bit. It's a really exciting and educational journey that you'll go on. That's one idea as a class project. Another would be to think of a song that we haven't covered in this class. The idea with classes like these are to give you effective tools that you can now start to think, what are my favorite tunes? What music do you love listening to? Remember, we spoke really early on about if it's not flooded with guitar, this particular track, find out the chords that the piano players playing or what the bass guitar is doing and start to see how you could apply that to the guitar. If there's just a baseline, following a nice simple pattern, bring the power chord in for that. Don't worry about adding the major or the minor bar, just stick to the roots maybe, the octave or at the fifth, and see if that works with what the bass player's doing. There's tons of chord resources online. Ultimate Guitars is a really good one for finding a ton of different tab options. Chances are if there's a song you like, someone would have created the tab for it online and you'll be able to get the bare-bones of the track and start to transpose any instruments over to guitar, or just learn the actual guitar riff itself. But yeah, think of a song that you love and see if you can learn that on the guitar. Aside from all the things we've covered, now once you've done that and you're feeling ready, go and tackle something completely know. Please, if you feel comfortable to do so, upload it. If you've created yourself or any songs that you've gone and learned on your own, there's a great tool on Skillshare where you can upload and share your projects and creations, so please get involved in that if you feel comfortable too. If not, you can send stuff to me privately, that'd be great. My email is attached to this class. I'm always available for any questions. There's also going to be a hashtag, accompanying this class as well and I'll put that in the description. If you do upload any of your material, stick that hashtag in and Skillshare will be able to pick it out and promote it a little bit more. In the next lesson, I'm going to demonstrate a quick chord progression that I've put together that hopefully shows how you can start to link some of the majors and minors, the seventh, the different strumming patterns that we've worked on. It's just there to maybe help us a little bit of inspiration to get you up and running if you do want to create your own material. But again, no pressure. Feel free to have a little look and see if it gives you some inspiration. 14. Project Example: Backing Track: There we go. That was just a quick example of how we can use the mix of codes that we've learned throughout this class, and start to compose our own pieces of music. There was some light and shade with dynamics, there was a bear palm muting, I put a seventh code in there, obviously some power and some bar codes that I had the F shape of the open notes in between, all just to add a bit of variety to what we're creating. I didn't want to put anything too fast and complicated as an example. I just went for a nice, easy, middle of the road, medium paced piece of music, just so you can easily follow the codes that I was playing. I wanted it to be easy for you to digest, so hopefully act as a platform to inspire you to then go on and create something yourself, but don't be scared to do that as well. If you're into your more faster paced alternative tuned, I would go with that. I would go with trying to create your own version of that. We're now going to wrap things up with a little conclusion. 15. Conclusion: Thank you so much for working through the entire of this class on Skillshare. It really does mean a lot. I hope you've enjoyed it. This is a series of guitar classes, so there's plenty more coming your way. So please keep an eye out for things in the future. Just as a recap of everything we've gone through, make sure you get those stretching and warm-up exercises implemented in your playing, they really are going to do wonders for your overall ability and put you in really good stead for the future. If you're someone who's progressed to scales, I recommend you get them in nice and early, and then you can move on to the more exciting and creative stuff. Be mindful of the correct positions when you're shaping those codes. The curves in the knuckles, the strengthen in the first finger, the wrist hanging in the right position, not too far forward, not too far back. All good habits you want to get in place early on. Remember, it's all about the experimentation too so don't feel like you're restricted to just sit in within these particular shapes we've been learning. There's so much diversity you can apply by bringing in the open notes, taking certain fingers on and off. They're really good adding in different fields of the code and expanding your awareness and knowledge of what exists on the guitar and what you can get out of it. The capo is a really good thing to get hold of, we mentioned that earlier in the class, again, the link is in the description, so I recommend checking one on of them up. There's also the tab resource, ultimate guitar. I've put a couple of other things in there as well, like a free tune-in app from Fender and a really cool metronome you can get on your phone that is a massive help for time, and that's from a company called Metro Timer. I'll link that in as well. Remember to get involved in the class project, even at home, making your own creation or learning a song that we haven't covered in this class, and if you feel comfortable too, I really hope you do. Please upload that and I'm more than happy to give feedback on it, and generally just hear what you're creating. I love to discover new music. Banged on about that a lot in the first class. It's such an exciting thing when you hear what someone else has created because it is going to be unique to you. Please feel free to send that over if you want to. Hashtag that you need to use to engage in the class project is in the description and it's coming up on the screen now. Please let me know what you think of this class and the series of classes that we're building. You can leave reviews on Skillshare that would honestly be such a huge help. It would mean a lot to me to gauge how the course is being received. It really helps other students discover the course as well. Thank you very much in advance for that, and please feel free to get in touch with me anytime. There's a discussion box you can use for this class, where you can post any questions. My email address will be included in my profile as well, and by becoming a student of this class, you will be kept up-to-date with all the other classes that are coming your way. You can give us a follow as well on Skillshare if you go to my profile and I will make sure I email all the students and the followers when a new class is coming. This is going to be an ongoing project. Now what we're going to look at lots of different areas of the guitar and condense them into specific classes, and I really hope you'll join me as we continue to build this collection. Last mention our first class is in the series, you'll see the link, it's learn guitar the complete beginner's guide, so much covered in there. Feel free to jump in. There's also a really cool, creative bit about songwriting. It's a really good way for you to get up and running with creating your own lead pieces of music. Feel free to check that. Best of luck in your creative journey. Keep me updated. Ask me any questions. I look forward to seeing you again soon. Take care.