Learn Guitar: The Complete Beginners Guide

1. Intro: This class is going to cover everything you need to get up and running on the guitar. It is suitable for both electric and acoustic guitar players and in a very short space of time, you're going to be feeling confident and creative on your instrument. Hey everyone, I hope you're doing good. Welcome to my beginner's guitar class. My name is Marc and I'm going to be guiding you through your learning journey. We're going to start really simple by breaking down the anatomy of the guitar, then how to tune, then how to read chord boxes tab and other common signs and symbols. We'll then quickly move towards covering riffs, chords, scales, and a mix of songs and styles for us to learn. I've been playing guitar for over 20 years and teaching for 15. I'm a full-time musician and I also run a successful music service and charity. I'm used to assisting people of all ages and abilities, with getting involved in making music, learning instruments, and generally expressing themselves in a creative way. I'm continually adapting my teaching style to suit the individual's needs and I take great enjoyment from seeing people engage and develop as a musician. I find that a lot of early guitar lessons don't quite empower you with the ability to get something back from your plan as quickly as you might like to. I want you to have all the basics covered on the guitar, but also have an armory of codes in your locker nice and early so you can start to tackle and play along to some of your favorite pieces of music. I believe that this approach really helps grab people's attention early on and inspires them to continue their musical development. Creating your own music will be another focus of this class. Once you've learned a collection of chords, we'll then start to see how you can put these in your own order, implement the scales we've learned over the top to form your own lead guitar ideas and then come away of a completely self composed piece of music that will showcase your own musical output. So don't let electric guitar put you off, if you're holding acoustic guitar right now then this class is for you too. Thanks for watching. I hope you join me in the class. Take care. 2. Class Project: Big thank you for joining me in the next video. I just want to quickly tell you about the class project, the setup for this class. In the later lessons, we will learn two skills, then we'll start to play over a selection of chords that we've already covered. You will have the freedom to place these chords into your own order and add the skills we have learned so that you are creating your own music and actually writing your own song. I provide a backing track for you to jam over, and also direct you towards some recording software and tips that are really going to help with this. Once you've worked through those lessons and had a play over the backing track, I'll encourage you but not pressure you to record what you've created and share it in the class' projects and resources section so you can celebrate what you've made. If you wish, get some feedback. You can also share it online with the hashtags SKILLSHARE and GUITARWITHMARC, which will be picked up by myself and the Skillshare team. But we've got loads of great things to work through first, so I'll see you in the next video when we get going. Cheers. 3. Anatomy: Thank you so much for joining me on this Skillshare course. We're going to start by going through the anatomy of the guitar. We're just going to learn the different parts of the instrument so we'll just make it a little bit easier as we're working through the lessons when I start to refer to different parts of the guitar. We'll start with the tuning pegs. These are all going to tune the strings, they're on our guitar. Now, we'll go through the different string names in the next lesson, but just to be aware, this is where we are going to be tuning. We then have the nut of the guitar. This is effectively the start of what is our fretboard. When I say fretboard, I'm referring to this section of the guitar. These strips that you see along the guitar are the different frets. If he was referring to having this placed on the second fret, we'd be placing them behind this strip, just here. As you move down the guitar, we have the pickups. These are literally picking up the sound and are in control of what tone the guitar is going to be creating. These can also be adjusted by switches that are scattered over the guitar. We then come down to the bridge. This is going to be a commonplace where you'll be resting your hands if you're doing picking exercises. Not always, but sometimes it gives us a little bit more stability. You might be on an acoustic guitar that is less than, which is fine as well. That'll probably mean you won't have as many of these little switches and diodes scattered around the body of your instrument. For the purposes of what we're doing with this guitar, this is going to control the volume when I'm plugged in and this is going to have another control over the tone of my guitar. We don't need to worry too much about these yet, we're not going to get too into detail. We're going to focus more on the playing and developing our techniques. Next, we're going to look at how we hold our guitar. It's really important when we're playing, that we are not too tense. We want to make sure that we're sitting up nice and straight without you hunched over, it's really going to effect and hinder applying ability. We want our shoulders to be nice and loose. We also want to make sure that our guitar is sitting nice and comfortably on our legs. Now, you can get some guitars with some pretty funny shapes that can be awkward to hold. But hopefully, yours has got a nice little curve down here so we can just slop over whatever leg you are resting it. Then we're looking at where we are going to be strumming the strings of the guitar. Now, if you have an acoustic guitar, then you have this big hole in the middle, which is your sound hub. That's a nice little target to aim for, you want to be working down the middle of that. Well, I'm using an electric guitar or for anyone else that's using electric guitar, we want to be looking, again, down the middle of this guitar, we have got that hole to aim for, but we've got pickups. You might have different placed pickups than me, but then we're still trying to aim down the middle of the guitar. For both the acoustic and the electric, when you move closer towards the bridge, you should get that really toppy-thing sound, which if you're looking for that effect in a particular song or track you're playing, then that's cool. But for what we're doing, we want to remain in the middle. You also will get a bit of a warmer tone as you come here, then the sound will start to fin out as you go further up. We're going to be used in a guitar pick or a plectrum. Hopefully, you've seen one of these or you've got one of these. We want to learn how we're going to hold that. We're going to take our index finger, we're going to make a bend in the knuckle, we're going to place the plectrum over the top, and we're going to leave the point East side, pointing away from our hand. We want to leave around about that much so we still have a bit of flexibility in the movement of the pick. If we go too far up, we're not going to have enough of it to be able to strum the strings. If we go too far away, we're not going to have as much control as we'd like over it. That's worth mentioning with picks as well, you get a lot of different thicknesses. The thicker the pick, you're going to get a kind of warmer tone and you're going to dig into the strings a lot harder. A lot picks, they're quite flimsy, but you get this all scratchy sound which people might be after. It's harder to really cut into the strings and get the definition you want, especially if you're playing lead guitar. But for kind of strummy codes, scratchy peak would work quite well. I'm using, just so you're aware, a 0.60 millimeters, which would be around about a medium-sized. I'd recommend that's quite a good place to start. I would recommend that your finger now is a quite short as well. I've had this a lot when I go into lessons with people for the first time, they might have very long fingernails, which when you come to then pressing your fingers on the fretboard, you can't actually get the pad of your finger there, because then I was pushing their way. So I'm afraid on wherever your fretting hand is, you need to keep your nails pretty short. You'll see this a lot in classical music. Classical guitarist will grow their nails on there right or left-hand, and use that to pluck and strum the strings. Some beginners with guitar will wish to use their firm fingers straight away. I think it's a very good technique to develop and work towards, especially when you're doing an all sorts of different picking stuff, it's very nice to have that in your locker and be able to use your fingers and firm as well as a guitar pick, the fittest beginners code. We're going to be focusing on how to create the whole spectrum and use it for our guitar. It's something that you're going to see quite a lot throughout the lesson and when you're looking at other guitars as well, is this device here, which is called a capo or sometimes referred to as a capo. This effectively changes the starting point of our guitar. Without the capo on, let's say, I was to play a chord in the first position, nice and open sound in a major code, we'll get to that in a bit. If I then placed my capo on to say the second fret, played the same shape, you can hear how that's gone up in pitch. Now, this is handy for when musicians are wanting to change the key of music or they might want to suit it along to the singer that they're working with and they want to sing at a higher pitch, then a capo would be used to move up and down the guitar. That's just a quick run through all the different parts of the guitar. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to tune a guitar, and then we're going to go into some real playing. 4. Tuning: Next, we're going to talk about tuning the guitar. Now, this can be quite tricky thing, especially if it's the first time you've done it but don't worry there's some good little tips that we can learn to make it a bit of an easier process. The first thing you're going to want to do is try and get hold of a guitar tuner. With the way the world is nowadays, you can get some pretty cool apps on your phone that you can download. There's one called Fender Tune, which is quite good and that's free, so that's worth looking into. Just have a search on your App Store for guitar tuners and something should come up. If you're using any music software like GarageBand or Logic, there tuners that are built into these programs that you can use. But something that I really recommend that you get is one of these, a headstock tuner. That literally just clips on to the end of your guitar and when you turn that on, we're going to be able to see what notes we're playing on our guitar. Let's look at those string names. They are as follows, E, A, D, G, B, and E. You will also see those numbers sometimes. They are from the thickest to the thinnest, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Now, I don't expect you to remember those string names straight away. There's a couple of little rhymes that we can learn to help us. One is elephants and donkeys grown big ear. That might be more relevant to a younger audience or if that works for you, then take that one. Now, in my first lesson, I was taught something very different. My tutor worked from the thinnest string up to the thickest. He told me, every bad guitarist deserves an execution. How's that for pressure in your first lesson? For me, that second one always stuck in my head, but you can use either of those or come up with your own one that will help you remember the string names. Another thing that's worth mentioning for why we're learning about tuning and something that's generally going to appear throughout learning guitar and music is the symbols for sharp and flat. These are relevant in tuning because if something is too sharp, that means we've gone too far up, we've gone too far past the note that we want our string to be. If something is flat, then we haven't gone far enough or we've come too far down, depending which way you're turning. We are now going to tune our guitar. I've made it so that a couple of these strings are out tune. One's a bit sharp, one's a bit flat. The others should be pretty much in. But it's just so you can see the visual of what the headstock tuner will look like when you're tuning your guitar. We'll start with E, we're going to work from the thickest to the thinnest. You can see that's nice and in tune. Now A, you can probably hear there, didn't sound like a nice note to come after that E. We're going to slowly twist this tuning peg away from us so that we are sharpening the note, we're making the string tighter. Eventually, that will sit nicely in the middle. That string is at D. That was a tiny bit flat. It wasn't quite where we wanted it to be, so we came up a little, we tightened it a little. Next is at G. That's sitting nicely in the middle. Then we come to at B. You can probably hear that didn't sound too pleasant. We need to come down with that. I'm turning back towards myself. I'm coming down. I want to get rid of all those little red lines until our B sits nicely in the middle. The last string is another E. That's sitting nicely in the middle. We now have a lovely tuned guitar. There's one little technique that I think is worth mentioning, but we're not going to put too much pressure on being able to do that now. But there's ways to tune if you don't have a headstock tuner or something on your phone or tablet, you can tune a guitar to itself by using the fifth fret. I'm going to quickly demonstrate how that would work. So I would play the fifth fret of the sixth string, the lowest string at E. I've tapped just behind the fifth fret there. I would then play the string underneath, but I would play open. Hopefully, you can hear how they sound the same. I would want this string below to sound the same as the one above. So let's say that A string was too flat, and I did the open technique, you can hear the difference there. I'm going to bring that A up, I'm going to sharpen it a little. Seems like it's close. I'm going to sharpen it a little bit more. There we go. We now have two strings sounding the same. We've tuned that string to the one above. You can repeat that process for the next two strings, the A and the D. You then do the same for the D and the G, making sure that the G sounds the same as the string above. The next string, you place your finger on the fourth fret of the G and you play the open string underneath the B, making sure they both sound the same. If the B isn't right, then you change it to sharpen it or flatten it whichever way you need to go, and then we come back on to the fifth fret for the last string. Fifth fret the B and the open E underneath. Just a quick fly through. That's it everything for tuning. We're now going to take a look at chordboxes and tablature, which is something you are going to very commonly see throughout the process of learning guitar. 5. Chord Boxes and Tab: Welcome to the next lesson. This one's pretty short, but it's essential for understanding how lot of our guitar talk, and such is going to be put across. This is the last lesson before we really get into some playing. Hang in there, you're doing really well taking all on board, we'll just get this little bit of essential information in, and then we're going to start to playing a few things. Now when we're learning new chords and new songs, you're going to start to see chord boxes appear a lot. Now these are written in a way that could be described like your guitar is being stood up. So when you view these boxes, it's like the guitar is on this angle. You will see they're not listed at the top, they're on the first line that we're looking at, that comes away from the nut is going to be the frets. Those little bars, those strips that go along, they are going to signify the frets that exist within this particular chord. Then that line across the bottom is going to represent the strings on the guitar. You will then see circles appear within these boxes that have been created. Those circles are going to signify what fingers you need to use and what fret and string they are going to be on. So the chord you're going to see in the image that appears now is C major. We can see from looking at this chord box that we are using are first, second, and third fingers, they are going to be placed on the first, second, and third frets, and we are strumming or playing from the A string up to the first string, the high A. The other symbols that you will see appear around the chord box is from time to time, an X and a circle. The X stands for don't play. Now this could be either by missing the string when we strung or we can use a thumb or one of our fingers to mute that string that we don't want to play. So that when we still make contact with all of the strings, that particular one that we don't want to sound, that low E doesn't come forward but we can still apply a force strumming pattern to the body of the guitar. The circle stands for open. We can see within the C major chord that, that happens twice, on the G and the A. This purely means we don't have to worry about putting any of our fingers on a fret to sound that string, it would just ring, resonate, open. So tab, similar to the chord boxes, but it's good to differentiate and learn what the numbers on these particular lines are representing. You will see that on the left-hand side that the string names are listed. Those lines are in an order that's probably best represented as if you were lying your guitar flat on your lap. First string, the thinnest e is furthest away from you, and then it builds closest towards you, and then on the sixth string, the loud A. Coming across from the letters of each string and the lines that run adjacent to them, you will see numbers appear on those lines. If you used to see open written on the A string, that means we're just playing that A string open. If you then saw a number 2 on the D, that means we're fretting, applying the second fret. If you didn't saw two number 4's on the B string, that means we're playing that B string on the fourth fret twice. This will become easier to read as you go on, you get more and more used to it. When reading tab, if there's chords that you're required to play, you will see them written above the lines, the strings. If it was C major that we needed to play, C major will be written above those lines or you will have the numbers of the frets that you need to play down across each string, like so. We then know what frets we've got to use to play that chord. You can always refer back to the chord boxes to work out what fingers you need apply on those frets. I hope that will make sense as we start working through some different briefs that we're going to learn. We'll be referring to the tab for all songs, so that will just get easier and easier to understand as the lessons progress. We're now going to move on to applying our first, it was stretching exercise to get warmed up, and learn a couple of riffs on the guitar. 6. Picking Exercise and First Riff: Right. Now, we can start getting into some proper playing on the guitar. We're just going to learn a little stretching exercise that gets our hands warmed up, nice and loose and gets us used to moving up and down the fret board. It's a good way to get used to where we're going to need to put our fingers when we're playing the frets. It's a good way to start to get our hand nice and prepared for the chord shapes and the picking pieces that we're going to be learning throughout the rest of the lessons. With these exercises that we're about to play, it's going to be really important to place your hand on the bridge that we mentioned in one of the earlier lessons. Now, we don't want to come too far over from the bridge because we'll mute the strings. There'll be a time in your playing when that's a preference and you want that muted sound. But for now, we're going to slide our hand back slightly, just so we're resting on that [inaudible] part of bridge, and I'm still getting a nice, clear tone to my guitar. I can hear every string nice and clear. Let's start by looking at where we actually want to place our finger when we start to fret the guitar. That's really important that we place our finger just behind the fret that we need to use so we get a nice, clear sound. If I go too far back, we start to get this not very pleasant buzzing sound. If I go to far onto the frets, so I'm covering it. We get that dead sound. We don't like that either. So we just slide it back a little bit. We just place it just behind the fret, we get that nice, clear tone. So just practice that for me. Just get your first finger tucked behind that first fret of the first string, and just make sure you've got a nice, clear tone. You can practice taking that on and off. So you make sure your finger lands just behind the fret each time, keeping that consistent, clear tone. What we can do after that is we can add our second finger to the second fret. Again, place nicely just behind the fret, tucked in there, giving us that clear tone. We've now got open 1, 2. We then going to add our third finger. We now going to add our fourth finger. This is what's called a chromatic exercise. We're playing one note after the other and we're working on getting our fingers nice and stretched out, which will put some really good state for when we're building our chords and playing out picking pieces. So let's try that once more. Take your time in this as well. Don't rush anything. It's okay to be taking this really slowly. I'd rather you get a really nice, clean tone than be able to play this fast and there's a lot of dead and buzzy notes in there. I just want it to be pleasant and you'll become productive. So we got open 1, 2, 3, 4. Get that nice stretch in the hand. We don't want to be too far up when we're doing this with our wrists. We can drop our thumb back a little bit. We can let our wrist hang low again. Remember, always nice and loose with your shoulders as well or not too tense and hunched over. Once we've played that full finger, we can slide this shape to the fifth fret, and our first finger is going to be the starting point of that. Slide up to the fifth, and when you make that slide, don't worry about bringing your hand away from the guitar to leap to this fifth fret. The further we got away, the further we have to come back, and all that does is just removes any fluency from our playing. So we have played our full fret. We can then take our second, third, and fourth fingers away slightly, and slide our first finger up to the fifth fret of the E. Then we can play that pan again, one finger after the other, covering the next fret, 5, 6, 7, 8. Let's try that again, 5, 6, 7, 8. This shape can then go once more to bring us up to the 12th fret, 9, 10, 11, 12. Once you're here, we can reverse that, which can be quite tricky, 12, 11, 10, 9. Again, remember not to bring our fingers really far away from the guitar. We want to keep that nice, close presence. Once we've done that, we can then slide this shape back but this time our little finger is going to be leading the way being the first note that we play. Keeping those fingers nice and close, slide back once more, and will end on an open. Now eventually, this would build to be nice and fluid and it gets you used to bouncing up and down the guitar. Now, not the most pleasant sounding thing in the world, but it's a really good exercise to get you up and running with your playing. Getting used to placing your fingers behind the frets and starting to slide and really utilize different parts of the neck. Now that we've put that picking exercise in there, we're going to learn our first little piece of music. Now for you, it'd be good to do a melody that is familiar with everyone. We've all had Happy Birthday song, and that's such a memorable melody, I'm hoping that's going to help you pick up this piece as we go along. The first thing I'll do is actually play Happy Birthday, so you can see and hear how the whole piece is performed. Excellent. So you can see from that, that we start by putting our first finger on the fifth fret of the G. So remember, we want to make sure our finger is tucked nicely behind that fret. Don't want to go over too much. We don't want to be too far back. We just want to be tucked nicely behind that fifth fret on the G. We start by playing that note twice. Nice, easy stuff. Now, we want to utilize our stretch here that we've been working on with our stretching exercise. Because next we're going to bring our third finger over to the seventh fret of the G. It's going come down just behind that seventh fret. Then once it's played that, it's going to go back to our fifth fret. So let's just try that. Two on the five, one on the seven, one back on the fifth fret. Do that once more. Excellent. Now, we're going to bring in the use of the sixth fret of the B string. We're going to bring our second finger, down on to that sixth fret of the B. That is going to come off. We're going to play the fifth fret of the B, and we noticed our first finger is already across that string because it's rested on the fifth fret from where it was playing the G. If we put a bit more pressure and flatten that finger, we can bring through the fifth fret of the B as well, so that's going to be six and five on the B string. Let's add that to what we already had, 1, 2, 3, 4. That's six and five on the bass string. Then we play that first section of the G again, it repeats but this time, we use our little finger to get a big stretch over to the eighth fret of the B. We play eighth fret, sixth fret. So you see how again, how we utilize in that stretching exercise we've been working on because we're now stretching across four frets. So after that first section, this time we stretch out to the eighth, 8, 6. Brilliant. So now, it's time for an even bigger stretch. We're going to go to the eighth fret again but we've got to get to the highest E string. We start by going back to our fifth fret, the G, up to the eighth fret of the E. Then fifth fret of the E. Let's try that again. Then we bring our bass string back into play with a five and six, seventh fret at the G. Let's try all that section altogether, fifth fret of G, big stretch to the highest E string, 8, 5, then B, six and five. Seventh fret of the G. Last section now, we going to play the sixth fret of the highest E string twice. Back to the fifth fret. Back up to the sixth fret at the B, eighth fret at the B and on the sixth fret of the B. It's quite tricky, that last double section. So let's play for all once more, nice and slow. So that's your first riff you learn. Hopefully, there's a little birthday around the corner and you can show off for that one. Next, we're going to work on to a couple of other great little riffs. One is being used a hell of a lot over the last few years, another is by a band called the Banner. If they're not you're thing, don't worry, you can skip through that one. But it will be a good way of having another two riffs in your locker, one is just using one string, another uses two strings. So we're picking up from where we left off with Happy Birthday, but bringing a bit more of a proper guitar based music into the mix. I'll see you then. 7. 2 More Riffs: We're now going to move on to learning a couple of really cold riffs. It's worth just reminding you that all of these songs that we're learning are going to be included in the documents that you can download for this lesson, detail and demonstrate all a cool boxes that we've gone through and we'll have the tab for each of these songs and little riffs that we're going to learn. So If you're struggling at any point, you can pause this video where we're going through any section and you can refer to those documents to help you along. The first riff we're going to do in this lesson is Seven Nation Army by the band White Stripes. This melody has been sung in terms of different environments. If you're into [inaudible] you have heard this a few stadiums over the last few years, some political rallies may be, and obviously by the band themselves. Let's hear that riff. The first thing we're doing there is pulling our first finger behind the seventh fret of the A string. It tucked nicely behind that seventh fret. Again, thinking back to our stretching exercises, this is where that's really going to come in handy because after we've played this note, we're going to bring in our little finger. So we play this first one twice, but with a little pause after the first time we play it, so we get something like this. Our little finger comes down on to the 10th fret. You see, now we've got that big stretch, each finger is covering the fret. Even though I'm not having to play these two, they're not sounding. It's helping me apply the necessary pressure that I need to make the string sound nice and clear. Let's try that again. I'm now going to go back to my first note that I played, that's our first four hits of the song. 1, 2, 3, 4, this is where we slide back down the guitar. We're going to go to the fifth fret. After you've played this note, on the seventh, we go back to the fifth. We're nearly there. After we've played the fifth, we play the third, and then we play the second. I'm going to link that altogether. See how those first two notes have that little gap in between? If you don't have that gap, really changes the vibe of it. It's a very different beginning if we don't leave that little pause in-betweens, it's really important when you do that. Reference the track so you can really hear how that melody is played. Some time, everything is included in this description and I'll put a link to YouTube as well. There's a slight variation that happens in the course of this track when it kicks up. I'm just going to put that in there as well in case you want to do it. That's that normal bit and the variation, three, five, three, two. Frozen that little fifth fret again on the A string just to mix the appetite. Let's try that, both of those lines together. Fantastic. That's just a nice little riff to have available to you, it works again on your stretching with your fingers, building that strength, building that independence and is just something cool [inaudible] too, a lot of people will know it. The good thing with riff is you could expand on it as well. As you progress with your plan, you start to see that that single note could be played with its octave, which means it's the higher version of that note alongside it. You get that really full tyranny of guitar sound. You can feel towards that. The other riff we're going to look at in this lesson is Come As You Are by the band Nirvana. Like I said, if you're not a huge fan them, don't worry. If you're not going to want to listen to that track over and over again, it's fine. You can just practice along to what I'm demonstrating here and it's just another little technique to have available to you. Let's have a listen to that riff first. So it's probably along to the original of this track, you're going to need to detune your lowest E string down so that it becomes a D. You're also going to need to detune your A string down so that it becomes a GA. But for the purpose of our playing, we are just going to play this in the normal tune, keeping our lowest E and A strings as they were. I just wanted to show you quick data, if you wanted to play along to the original track, you will need to detune the A down to a D, and the I down to a G. So very handly, this song starts with two open hits of the sixth string. The low A. Nice, easy way to start. Remembering hand resting on the bridge and that alternating of the down up strums if we can when we're playing this as well. It's a good habit to get into. I'm just going to play through the first little part of this riff. Open, open, and then one, two on our lowest A string. Open, open, one, two. Nice and straightforward, very similar to achromatic exercise at the beginning as well. Now this is where we need to start to learn to really create that bend in our knuckle that allows the string underneath to sound because we're going to want to play the open A after we played the second [inaudible]. I'm just going to demonstrate that. If I don't have that bend in the knuckle, I get that dead sound which we don't want. Altogether, nice and clear. We then repeat that little pattern. Open, two, open two. I'm just going to show you that. That's a straightforward, it's a few open strings in here. As much as that might sound easier, it's challenging this in a different respect because we need to make sure we have this correct curve in the finger that doesn't mute the string underneath. The next section of that song just runs back down the second and the first fret on the low E string. I'm just going to put that in the end of what we've done so far. Now, this is where we need to fret the A string on the second fret with our second finger. It's reversed the responsibility of having a string open, as well as one being played with a finger down on a fret. This time with fret in the A string, that the low E needs to be open. Let's add that to the end of the riff. If you notice there at the end, we have two open hits of the low E. Then the riff starts all over again, but instead of star in the reef with two open notes in the low E, we start by playing that second fret of the A string. Then the lower E, and the riff starts again. Instead of, you would now get the second on the A, open on the E string one, two. Let me show you how that would happen after the riff finishes. Start again. Start with that second fret of the A. Second fret of the A. When we very first start the riff, know we've got two of those opens. But once that riff is finished, it starts again with second fret of the A, open one, two on the E. As with Seven Nation Army and everything else that we've done, play that nice and slow. There's a little trick if you go onto YouTube or certain music software like Ableton or Logic where you can slow down the track. YouTube doesn't do it as well, it can sound a little bit funny, but it's worth having a go if the track that you're listening to is too fast to play along to, you can apply that. So it slows down a tad and makes it a bit easier to jam along with. But you can start just playing in the air to yourself with a nice, slow pace. Reference the track when you feel ready. Sometimes if you put the track on and it does feel a bit too fast, but you haven't got the capabilities to slow it down or the YouTube sound is freaking out a bit, don't be worried about just playing those first couple of notes. You think you're just doing that, and then you're pausing and you're waiting for that riff to finish and it comes back to the beginning again. At least you're getting that bit of practicing, you start to get a feel for the track. That's really important. Remembering that we've got our hand resting down on the bridge as well. The term riff is going to appear quite a lot when you're learning guitar, you hear people say, "I've learned a new guitar riff, I've wrote a new guitar riff. I really liked the riff in that song." What that's doing is referring to the section of music that generally repeats somewhere throughout that song. It could be a really distinctive melody from the keyboard or a guitar that will have a beginning and an end. These two songs are really good references of that, they really stand out in the track and you can hear where they loop. Where it begins and where it ends. You would call that section from the start to the end, your riff. We're now going to start looking at building and playing chords. 8. Chord Introduction: In the next few lessons of this course, we're going to be learning four different chords. They are all placed in what's called the first position, up here on the guitar covering the first three frets. They are all open chords. At the end of learning these four chords, we are going to be able to play two songs that utilize these chords in slightly different ways. I think it's really important when you're learning chords that quite quickly, you can integrate them into your overall plan and start playing along to familiar tracks. Once you've got these four chords, there are so many songs that utilize them. I'm going to pick two really well-known ones. One from quite a long time ago and one modern day huge pop song. If you're not a big fan of [inaudible] band, again, a bit love with the band as you are with just use this as a chance to really improve your playing. Then with some Google searches of these chords, you'll be able to find other tracks within the bands and others that you like that you'll be able to play along to. Also, I'm going to include some extra documents in this course that reference songs that use these chords that might be more your style of music. 9. 1st Chord - E Minor: You've probably noticed that you're starting to get these lines going across the tips of your fingers from where you've been pressing down on the strings and they're probably hurting quite a bit. But I promise you that does get easier. You start to build calluses on the tips of your fingers, which allows you to apply more pressure and play for longer and that pain will start to reduce. It's just something you have to push through. But little and often practice will really help with that. Now we've made progress with those stretching exercises and picking pieces. We're going to start to look at chords on the guitar. It's good to remind ourselves at this point that we still want to be loose, that's loose shoulders, not too hunched over. When we're fretting these chords, we're going to still concentrate on having our fingers tucked nice and closely to the frets. When you've got two or more notes being played at the same time, that's when we are starting to form a chord. Think back to the chord boxes we looked at earlier and have a little bit of a refresh if you need to. They're also going to appear on the screen while we're talking through that chord. So you've got a diagram visual reference as well as me placing my fingers on the guitar and demonstrating that chord. The first one we're going to look at is E minor. You're going to hear major and minor mentioned quite a lot throughout these chord lessons and we'll go into the difference between them a little bit later on. Generally speaking, the minor chords have a bit of a sadder sound to them. The major codes are a lot happier. This first one, E minor, has a lot of open strings being played. That's why it's a nice introductory code to get us up and running. We only need to use two fingers, our index and the second finger, and they are going to be placed both on the second fret. The first finger goes on to the second fret of the A string, and your second finger goes onto the second fret of the D string, like so. As you can see, they're placed nice and closely up to the second fret. Our first finger has to go a little bit further back, but that's okay because it's still close enough to get that clear sound. Any further back and we start to get a horrible buzz. If that second finger went any further up, we'd get that horrible dead sound as well, which we don't want. With both those fingers in place, we just check that that sounded nice and clear. Cool. Then we want to check that that open string above is nice and clear. Sometimes if your first finger is pressed too far up away from the A string, it will catch that E string and that's when you're going to get again that scratchy, horrible, buzzy sound, which we don't want. We want to make sure that we're really using the tips of our fingers to press down on the strings. Remember that kind of arch that we spoke about, the bend in the knuckle, we want to make sure that's in place as well, so that we've got that nice twist. It takes us away from being too flat across the strings below, which will cause that dead sound, or being nice and pronounced on the tips of our fingers, we allow the string around the notes that are fretted to still ring, nice and clear. Lets go from the lowest string, work our way through and make sure that every string is sounding nice and clear. Lovely. Now, if my second finger was laying too flat, didn't have enough bend in the knuckle, we'd end up with something like this. You don't want that dead sound. I just have to bring my second finger up slightly, reintroduce that bend and the G is able to come through nice and clear and so are the the B and the A. Once you've checked each of those strings individually, everything's ringing nice and clear, we then want to strum all of the strings together. We get that lovely full E minor chord. It's quite a haunting chord, quite a bit of intrigue to it. I like that. Make sure when you're strumming that chord as well, remember what we spoke about really early on with the pick. We're not showing too much of the pick because we'd lose the control and we're not showing too little, because then we'd struggle to get the strings. We're showing just enough so that it comes out from the index finger, thumb over the top and we strum through that middle of the guitar. Try to make sure here, now that we're working more on the strumming, that the wrist of whatever hand you're using to strum of your left or right-handed is nice and loose as well, much like we spoke with the shoulders, not too tense, our bodies not too tight, the wrist is the same. We want to make sure that that is nice and loose. As we start to introduce strumming patterns, we're not too rigid, really digging into the guitar. We've got a nice, gentle strum, a nice loose feel to what we're playing. There's your E minor chord. A bit like with the stretching exercise we did a little while ago, where we was taking our finger off and putting it back on the guitar to get used to that position behind the thread. Try that with your chords as well. Completely relax your hand, and then get yourself back into that position. So you have to form that E minor. It's a really good way of getting that muscle memory going on. That repetition, great way to learn. Also be conscious of where your thumb is placed. Again, you don't want to be too tight and bunched up and crunched around that guitar. It removes that flexibility and prevents us from hearing those open strings that we need in this chord. That thumb can come down away from that E string and start to slide down the back of the neck. Can just see there how I come down and I've got this nice gap here from my wrist up to my thumb and first and second finger. I'm not too tight, not too close, we let that hang nice and loose and we can strum from that chord. That is your first chord, nice and straightforward to get us up and running. Let's move on to the next one. 10. G Major Chord: The next code we're going to look at is G major. When we did the minor we only had to use two of our fingers. We're now going to up our game and use four fingers for this one. We're still only covering two frets, but we are going to be including four strings that are going to be fretted rather than two with the previous code, quite handily. The first note we're going to play is with our first finger on the second fret of the eye, which was exactly the same as what we did for the E minor chord. Once that is on there, sounding nice when played. We're going to bring our second finger over to the third fret of the E string, the lowest E string, that's sixth string. Now remember again about the bends in the knuckle. If that second finger goes flat, I'm going to mute the A string underneath it. So I need to make sure that bend is there and everything comes through nice and clear. The next two strings as you'll see in our code diagram. I've got the circle, the O next to them to open. That means that B and G are just going to be played open. So far we have our E, A, B, G. We're now going to bring our third finger into play and that is going to go on the third fret of the B string. Again, tuck in, nice and close to that third fret. Nice, clear sound. Finally, we're going to put a little finger below that third finger onto the third fret of the E string. Now this will mean that our third finger goes back slightly just to accommodate the little finger underneath, but that's okay. A bit low with the E minor. As long as this third finger isn't pushed too far back, then you start to get a buzzing and it stays close up to the third fret than the second, you will get a nice, clear sound and then we also want to make sure that that little finger is still nice and close to the third fret of the A. Altogether. Or resting our hand on the bridge. Remember to alternate that picking pattern. Down up, down up, down up. We've got every string coming through nice and clear. Now with the bend of the knuckles, if that first finger hasn't got the bend that we require, then you're going to hear the D string will be muted. I'll just show you how that would sound. It's really important that we have that bend. Keeping that nice arch in these first two fingers. Keeping the third and the fourth right on the fingertips in a good position. You have a nice full G major chord. Remember how we said that E minor had a bit of a sadder sound. When you play the G major alongside that you can really hear the difference that makes it that happier, sounding chord. Maybe hear the brightness, the uplifting vibe too. So there we go, that's two chord stem. 11. C Major and D Major Chord: This time we're going to look at two chord in this lesson, I felt like it was good for the first couple of chord based lessons to make sure we focus just on one, so we would getting used to the signs and symbols we're looking out for and what our fingers were doing to make sure that the right strings were sound in and the ones that we needed to be ringing open, we're ringing open and the ones that we weren't meant to play, we weren't playing. Now we're going to put C major and D major in this lesson together. Afterward, we're going to look a little bit at how we can strum these, talk a tiny bit about buzz and rhythm, and then start to play some tracks that include these four songs. Let's get going with C major. This is a big stretch, this one. We're using three fingers this time, but we're stretching across three frets. Whereas with the previous two chords, we were just going across one or two frets. But let's start by building from the first fret of the B string and we're going to place our first finger on that fret. As always, tuck in nice and close beyond the fret, making sure we have that nice, clear sound. Again, the bend in the knuckles, make sure we have that arc, so that the open string underneath can ring through. Together we should have a nice B and E-string coming through nice and clear. The next string working our way up, G is open, so we haven't got to worry about putting anything on that. Then we get to the D string. We're placing the second finger on the second fret of that D-string. Playing all four strings that are in use now, nice and clear. Then we make these big stretch across to the third fret of the A string, and we're using our third finger together. Now, this might feel really hard to do. Going back to the stretching exercise we did really early on, that's why I think things like that are really important because before you know it, you're doing chords that require you to stretch across furry frets, so it's handy to have that in the bank already. Now, you're probably going to have to work on your pressure a little bit for this, we're going to have those lines coming across their fingers again until we build those [inaudible] and we build that strength. But I would recommend building it from that first finger, introducing the second and then the third. You might find that you're a bit bunched up at first, but the more you work on that, you will find that your fingers start to form that stretch. Also, this is why when we spoke before about our thumb coming over the top and our wrist being too close to the guitar that hinders our stretching ability so we can drop our wrist down. Let our thumb slides around the back more and that gives us more expanse, more of a stretch in our hand. If I'm like this, I'm never going to get that amount of stretch. If I bring the wrist down, let the thumb fall down a bit, shoulders nice and loose, I can get that stretch and more if I really needed to. But for this, we're not going to be too fancy. We just need to cover these three frets, so there we go. Now I'm going to build it from the A string this time, I've got my third finger down. Let's say if I didn't have those bends in the knuckles to light the first and the second finger. Here we got a bit of that buzz, so I need to bend that second finger. Bring it up. That clears that up. I haven't bent my first finger enough. I can't hit the A. I put the bend back in. Everyone coming through. Next, we want to make sure that we don't play that low E string, if possible we've muted it. Now you can't just strum from the A string, to make sure we don't catch this [inaudible] but a little trick that we can utilize is to use the top of the pad of our third finger to mute it. This means that we can strum all the strings with confidence, knowing that that low E isn't going to ring through. If I slightly move my third finger down, you hear that low E now, doesn't necessarily sound bad. It just means that a low E would now dominate the chord and take away from how clean the chord sounded. If it's in there then I'm just going to utilize that third finger to bring the chord up a little bit to remove that low E. That's C note, which this is, is a dominant note for that C Major code. Once your fingers bear that stretching, you can contradict a little bit earlier what I said about the thumb coming down the wrist coming away, and you can bring your thumb up to close in on the top of that neck. Just take that low E out of the mix, that becomes more relevant as your fingers are bearish stretching across finesse [inaudible] stretch then thumb come down the back of their neck buying time. [inaudible] and that will help you with a little bit [inaudible] that will cover later that you will need your thumb to mute that string. Now, we're going to look at the D Major chord. We're going to be used in two frets this time. It's going to be the second and the third fret. First thing what we want to do is take our first finger and place that on to the G string, second fret, want to tap just behind the fret as normal. It's quite a punched up chord, this one. You're going to have to get used to your fingers being quite close together, finding the right space for your length and size finger currently to just slot in to the gaps that we need. A second finger is going to tuck behind the second fret of the finished E string, string number 1. So far we have. Our third finger is then going to go in between these on the B string. That's going to tuck behind the third fret. Remember to keeping the fingers pronounced that curve and bend in the knuckle, so we're really on the tips of our fingers. Those free fretted strings will sound like. Now you notice that this chord as well, I have brought my thumb up over the neck because we mentioned this a little bit earlier. We are going to utilize that thumb to mute this top string. If we can, the A string as well. We want that dead sound from our E our lowest E and our A. Then you see from the chord box that we have an open D, as the base note at this chord that makes a D major. We're going to strum from that D, that open D down through the D, G, B, and E string. We should have a nice clear sound for each of those strings. Let's try and dissect that a little bit. If our third finger hasn't got that bend in the knuckle, we can unmute the E string underneath will still get a clear B but E string we [inaudible] underneath. That's where just a slight bend raising up. We'll make sure that both of those strings come through nice and clear. If we're not on the tip of our first finger and we've pushed too far near the D string, we might end up new in the open D. We just want to make sure our finger really on the tip. Nice bend. Now both of those strings to come through nice and clear. Looking back at our thumb, we can make sure that our wrist is a little bit higher, and lowing our thumb to curve over the top of the neck of the guitar. Come over and just mute that low E, and A string. Now if you're using an acoustic, you might have a slightly thicker neck and especially if you're a younger person watching this video, you might not acquire the stretch in the dexterity in your hands, the size to reach around. Don't worry if you can't. Get as far as you can, especially if this is the first time you're doing it, this is not natural for your hand. All these new stretches will eventually become a lot more comfortable than they are now, I promise. You should keep doing. Practice that a little bit every day if you can, if you have too much pain leave it a couple of days and then go again. Just see how far you can get. If you can't get up all the way over for now, just try and keep an eye on where your strumming from. Just want to catch that open D. It's not a nightmare if that open A comes in. Doesn't sound discordant, doesn't sound horrible, it just adds a bit more bass to the chord that we might be [inaudible] It's not so bad there. Just cleans everything up a bit. Likewise, with the other chords, practice taking your fingers away, building that muscle memory to get back to that shape nice and quick. Sometimes you don't even have to be strumming the guitar to be practicing. We're just getting that muscle memory used to where it needs to be. That's your D Major code. We're now going to look a little bit at strumming patterns, eight symbols and then we're going to start to put all this together and learn a couple of songs. 12. Strumming Patterns, Timing and Rhythm: So before we get on to playing a couple of songs, we're going to talk a little bit about strumming patterns, beats, and bars. You probably hear beats and bars mentioned quite often when you are looking into learning about music. It's moving into that music theory side of things, but we're not going to go too in depth we're just going to scratch the surface. We can learn a little bit more about rhythm, timing, and understand how we can correctly play along to pieces of music and stay in time. Quite often you'll probably hear musicians count each other in with a one, two, three, four. These just become your reference points throughout music so that us musicians can stay in time with each other. Now, generally speaking, you will get four beats to a bar. That standard time signature would be called 4/4. Now you do get more complex time signatures of five, four, two, four, seven, eight even but we're not going to go anywhere near any of that. Most of the time or a lot of the time, indie-pop music you have a 4/4 time signature. So that basically means there are four beats to a bar. Each time those four beats have been counted, a bar starts again, one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Now we can use that to really build up our rhythm skills and work on our timing. Generally, the first beat of a bar will have an accent in it so that we know where we are. When referring to bars, you might also hear them called measures. This would be more if you was looking into the site reading side of things in the classical world or if music has been scored on to sheet music, they might refer to it as measures, but for the sake of this lesson and something that you will see quite common we're just going to refer to it as bars. A good tool for keeping ourselves in time and to practice that timing is a metronome. Now, this is something that is a syncopated beat that will keep a steady rhythm that we can practice along to. There are some great apps for this. I use one called Metro Timer. There's a free version of this or you can pay a couple of quid and you get the full version, which allows you to change the time signature and add a few extra settings that are really helpful when you're practicing your timing. Now with the paid version, you can add an accent to the first beat of the bar. Now this is really good for knowing where that bar is starting again. Otherwise, if we just have four beats of the same sound, we can get lost. If we have an accent on the first beat, it's letting us know that that bar is starting again. Dance music is something that's really easy to reference for beats and bars because it tends to have just a steady beat. That's why it becomes very familiar and it's easy to dance to. There's nothing that's too complex or too complicated that's going to throw off and throw in this crazy rhythm. Now obviously rock, pop, alternative music can go off on all different tangents. But generally even if there's like a really complex riff over the top, when you break down the count that's being carried by the drums, the main rhythm, you will see that there's quite often a one, two, three, four that is just existing behind that beat. So we're going to use a metronome now, just to have a little practice of our timing. When you're using your Metronome, you're going to want to set what is called a BPM, that's beats per minute. It's also referred to as tempo. We have already learned E Minor, G, C, and D. I'm going to utilize these chords to practice our rhythm. So with your metronome, you're going to want to choose that BPM or that tempo. I've started with quite a slow one, which is just 70 BPM. I'm going to press play on that metronome and I'm just going to use the G major chord that we learned earlier on and I'm just going to strum on the first beat. You'll hear the accent. You'll hear beep, boom, boom, boom. So that higher sound on the first beat is what we're going to play along to. I'm going to leave a count of four and then I'm going to play on the next count of one. Just getting us used to, where a bar will start and finish. Now when we spoke earlier about riffs of Seven Nation Army for example, there might be more than one bar that fits into that entire riff, but it's so that we can break down sections of the music easier and give ourselves a continuous reference point where somebody can start and finish. So once we are comfortable with playing the G major chord on that first beat, I'd now like to put the chords that we learned altogether so that we can start to change between G, E Minor, C and D. So we're working on chord progression that is then going to be used in the next two songs that we're going to learn. So that's the beauty of the metronome, is putting a slight bit of pressure on your plan because you know that after the count of four, you need to be at your next chord, so it's really good for working on our rhythm and our timing. Just again to recap, we're going to hear a count of four. We're going to play G on the one. We've then got another three beat to get to our E Minor and we're going to strum that on beat one. We're then going to get to our C-major. We're going to strum that on beat one and we're then going to get to our D Major and strum that on beat one. Before we start the exercise with the metronome, just give yourself a minute to have a practice of this chord progression and I'm just going to show you a couple of little tips that makes it a bit smoother. We're going to start with our G Major. Nicely strum. Make sure every string is coming through nice and clear. When we move to our E Minor, our first finger is already on the fret that we need. It just needs to slide back a little bit to accommodate our second finger to make the E Minor that we learned earlier on. Make sure every string is coming through nice and clear. When we now move to our C Major a second finger is already in the position that we need, which is really handy. See how we've done that, we've gone from E Minor, my second finger doesn't need to move. My third finger comes across to the third fret for the E, first finger goes to the first fret of the B. We have all the strings coming through nice and clear. This is a bit of a tricky jump but we go to our D major, which was those bunched up fingers across the second and third fret. We make sure the other finger coming through nice and clear there as well. So just quickly, G, E Minor, you get the first finger down to C, we keep the second finger down to D major, back to G. I'm now going to try that along to the 7E BPM metronome. Count to four and then we start and play on the one. Two, three, four, two, three, four, two, three, four, and again. So you can see that I can really start to benefit at timings. It's great to sit back without something like a metronome and practice those cool changes and you take as long as you're comfortable and as long as you need to get to that next chord. But then as a point of reference and to start to get used to playing along to consistent beats, syncopate your time especially when you get in a room with a drummer and your band or whoever you're jamming with, you might be moving into more dance orientated music and it's really important that you've got that consistent rhythm. Tricks like this are really good for building our timing. Some bands when they take their music live, they want it to be more loose, and have more of that free feel. I'm sure if you've been to gigs, the record is slower than the version they play live. Things tend to be a bit faster live. That's probably a sign that they're not using a metronome. Some bands if they've got samples or they want to make sure they just keep true to that consistent steady beat, they more often than not using the metronome to keep in time. So now I'm just going make that metronome a bit faster, I've gone up to 90 BPM, and you can see how this really challenge the speed that you're able to change between the chords. So you don't need to jump 20 BPM necessarily like I have done here. But a good trick if you're practicing this chord structure just add two BPM to that metronome. It just pushes you ever so slightly. You wont even really notice it at first. But eventually, you would have gone another 20 or 30 BPM up and you're playing a lot faster. So we're going to do that same chord progression, but at 90 BPM this time. Two, three, four. Two, three, four. Two, three, four, brilliant. Just to recap we touched on the strumming a little bit earlier on when we were talking about chords. We want to make sure that our wrist is nice and loose, we're running down the center of the guitar, and we're making contact with all the strings. We don't want to be too tight and having our whole arm moving. It's more like, bending the wrist. Nice loose movement, it's like moving the rest of my arm. But most of the movement is coming from our wrist. So what you can do to progress that as well, is to start to play on each beat of the bar and try and alternate it so you get it down and an up-strum. I'm just going to give you an example of that at 80 BPM. So we've gone back a little bit slower in between where we've been practicing. You can see it's really happened to make me think about my strumming pattern, making a little bit more complex. Working that rhythm a little bit harder and generally just developing my technique. When you play along to that metronome, as much as it is a rigid sound, try not to be too rigid with it. Add to that dynamic. Don't be worried to maybe deep the down strum out a little bit more, add a bit more loudness to it, and the up-strum a bit softer, so that we're not just getting [inaudible] lacks a bit of life if it's like that. We want to add a bit more intrigue and a bit more interest to it. In the up-strum it might mean that you just catch the first few strings. But alternate between practice [inaudible] sometimes you go down all the way and come back up all the way. Other times you go down all the way, you might just catch those first few strings on the way back up, experiment with it. Now I'm just going to add a little bit more of a complex strumming pattern and this will appear up on the screen with the arrows detailing which way I'm going to be going. So I'm going to be doing a down, down, up, up, down, up. This is all good practice for the songs that we're going to learn in a minute. So I'm going to use the 80 BPM again and I'm going to play. I'm going to go between each of the chords that we've learned to do that. Now obviously you can now see in here that I'm playing in between the beats. That bar still exists as four counts, but obviously we've got things going on in between those four counts. So you might hear sometimes when we say, one and, two and, three and, or one and, two and, three and. They're all just a small increments of beats that exist within that main block before. But don't worry too much about that. Try and be nice and loose with it. Use those four main beats as a reference. Particularly that first one to know where we start and then we're going to exist in between it as well as on the beat. Two, three, four. So feel free to practice along with that strumming pattern at that tempo or slow it down. It doesn't matter if you go down to 50, 60 BPM. Start really slow, give yourselves those small increments on the way back up. Come up with your strumming pattern as well. Now we're going to utilize those core progressions, those strumming patterns, and we're going to learn two songs. 13. Song 1 - Stand By Me : Hopefully, you recognize that as Ben E. King's Stand By Me. Now, don't worry, we're not going to fill in all the gaps with that little muting and baseline, that's has been incorporated in to that guitar part. I just wanted to do that as a little visual reference and a reminder of how the rhythm goes. What we're going to do is just focus on a strumming pattern that we can apply to the rhythm of that track, so that we can play along nice and in time, and get to the groove of it all. You see that I've put a capo on for this particular song. Now, we spoke a little bit about this earlier. The link again, is going to be in the inscription of the lessons where I mentioned, so jump on to Amazon and get one for a few quid, they're really handy to have. They're just like a clamp. We can stretch it like so and much like what we do with our fingers, we want to make sure that this is nice and close to the fret board. Another thing about putting a capo on as well, is make sure it's not pulled up or pushed down too much because you will bend the strings and then you'll get this really off key and that [inaudible] sound, which we don't want. We're tacking up nice and close to the fret, just like we would, if we was placing our fingers by them and then we've made pitch of the guitar go up. We can use those exact guitar chord shapes that we've been learning earlier, but just in a new place on the guitar. Just a quick recap, when we spoke about the capo raising the pitch of the guitar, just to remind that this effectively becomes zero. Now, this dotted fret here, what was originally our third fret, now becomes our first fret. We can apply the same distance that we learn in the cord to this new position. For example, if that was our first fret, this now becomes our second, this becomes our third. For a G major, positioned on the second or third fret, would now be positioned on the fourth and the fifth fret. D major that was positioned like this on the second and third, would now be positioned like this on the fourth and the fifth. Same D major shape, we've had shift it up two frets. Now, this is something you can play along to the original track in the same key. If you haven't got a capo on, don't worry, this could all be done in the first position. You just take the capo off and you play these chords like so. I'm going to put this on, just so you can hear it in that harder pitch. Don't worry, if you haven't got this capo. Now that's a nice strumming pattern that we can apply to this song, so that we can play along to Stand By Me. Now, you remember in the previous lesson, we went over the down, down, up, up, down, up strumming pattern. If you did copy that, then brilliant because, you've already done a bit of a legwork, to get moving and playing along to this song, because I'm applying that strumming pattern to this particular piece. We just want to remember that, that down, down, up, up, down, up, strumming pattern, happens twice on the G major, twice on the E minor, once on the C major shape, once on the D major shape, twice again on the G major shape and then that is your refinished and it starts over again. Let's just play that now that I've explained those different amounts. One two three four, and then it starts again. One two three four. Brilliant, if you put on the record and maybe start by just strumming the first beat of that chord, so we could get a one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four, one two three four and then eventually it build up and start to fill the gaps one two three four, one two three four. You can see how quickly you could get yourself playing along to that track. For those of you haven't got a capo, I'm going to play that in the first position, just so we can get a feel for the track, get used to the rhythm, learn the strumming pattern and then if you have got a capo and you want to play along as a original, place it on the second fret and jam along to the track in that way. I'm going to play that through, nice and slowly. One two three four, and then it starts all over again. [inaudible] Brilliant. Now try playing that along to the track, if you have the capo, if not, just get used to starting with these single strums, moving through that chord progression. Start as slow as you like, build the pace and start to introduce those strums, you'll be flying. 14. Song 2 - Perfect: That was Ed Sheeran's huge pop hit, Perfect. Now you've probably noticed from there, the chord progressions that we used, this was a slight variation of them but what I want to do is change it ever so slightly so that the chords we've used will work along to this track and we can still practice and utilize all this knowledge that we've been soaking up throughout these lessons. You see the capo has arrived again on the first fret this time, I wanted to keep that on there just so you could hear the correct pitch of the track, that's where you'd need the capo if you was playing along to the original. You also probably noticed that the chords are slightly different because my third and fourth finger remained on the strings while I was making that G, E minor, C, and D progression. We're not going to worry about that too much yet because that's bringing some other chords into play, these slight variations of the chord that we've learned, but that will come at a later date. All goes well, I plan to do another video so I can expand on that or a little bit of research online. You'll start to find all these different variations. This course is going to give you great preparation for all of that. So we can see here that we started with our G-major, which is great. It's a chord that we've become really familiar with now. You'll also probably notice the timing was a little bit different and I was using my fingers. We're going to carry on with using the plectrum, the pick, that we've been working with throughout this course. The rhythm is going to be a little bit different to what we're used to. We've been playing those nice straight four-four rhythms and this one's slightly different. More a count of three but try not to get too hung up on that for now, just hear and fill the rhythm, rather than trying to be too complex and break down why it's a three. I'm just going to quickly go through the strumming pattern. Can you hear it's like 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3? If you can hear it's not a million miles away from what the actual original he's playing. It just means that we have to be less complicated because we haven't got to worry about the thumb and finger-picking that was going on and we can continue to work along and build that familiarity with the chords that we've been learning, which was that G, E minor, C, D progression. You can see when I was doing that strumming pattern, put an accent onto the first beat and I'm focusing on those lowest strings. That first beat just covers the thicker strings, the E, the A and the D. It's good because it's a different technique to what we're used to previously. We're focusing on the down strummed and we're trying to learn to not catch all strings at once. We're trying to break out, be a bit more creative with that playing. That happens twice at the beginning of the song and then there's a slight variation, which I'm going to show you. Notice how it went back to the G and then it ruined a little bit later on. Let's go through that a bit slower. Normal change, normal change, and now it goes to the G, quicker change, D. Now all of this is written in the tab PDF documents that I've attached to these lessons. But I just wanted to demonstrate visually so you can see where those changes go and hopefully, it makes a bit more sense by I've actually put the chord structure for pretty much all the song in that document. If you choose to, you can play along to the whole piece. Now just so you can hear that without the capo, if you haven't got one, it's totally fine to practice this in the first position. Remembering to accent that first beat, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. So we've gone through Ed Sheeran's Perfect a little bit quicker there because you should be becoming quite familiar with the chords now and appreciate that's quite a lot of repetition with the G, E minor C, D. But what I wanted to demonstrate there is by learning those four-chords, you've learned two songs that were huge hits, so well known, really far apart in time. But it's a good example of how with this four-chords in your locker, you're going to open up a hell of a lot of possibilities with tons of different songs, of different styles as well. I've put a few different additions in the PDF documents, I've examples of other well-known songs that contain these chords in them. Next, we're going to wrap up chords by focusing on the rest of the major and minor chords that exist in the first position. 15. More Major Chords: I hope you're enjoying the course so far and that you're really starting to feel your playing develop. You did really well to have continued working for this video, and hopefully, you feel like you're expanding your skill base a hell of a lot. I want to wrap up with a few more chords in the first position. We spoke briefly about major and minor and how they have the happy or sad sound involve about them. Expand on that a little bit, they're very closely related. It's just one note that's changed between a major and a minor chord. Now, we're going to start by looking at E major in this lesson. If we backtrack a little bit, you will know that we've spoke about E minor quite a lot. We've gone through that in quite a bit of detail. To make that E major, we're just going to be adding one note and that is this note here. First fret of the G. We're going to replace what our first and second fingers were doing with our second and third finger to make our E major. Now, just to briefly touch on that difference there between major and minor, basically, major and minor chords are made up of three notes. First, a third and a fifth note from that key's scale. In E major, first note of that would be our E. Third note of that key would be our G sharp, which is down here. Fifth note of that key would be our B note, which is existing here. If I wanted to make that a minor code, I would take this G sharp and I would flatten it one, I would go back one which means I'll be going down the scale to a G. I just need to take my finger off and I've got G. There's my E minor, there's my E major. Now, that can probably sound quite confusing, throwing in the details about major and minor, but that's a little taste of the knowledge there so hopefully, that plants a seed for understanding how these major and minor chords are built. I'd like to go into music theory at a later date, in another course, so please let me know if you've enjoyed how this course has come along and we can look at this, something like that at 0a later date. Let's just builds that E major chord together. We have an open E, we are placing our second finger on the second fret of the A string, leaving enough room for our third finger to land on the second fret of the D string, and then our first finger coming down on the first fret of the G. Those three together. Got to fret it, the open string above, and then we have an open B and an open E below that. Altogether. Let's take that shape away. That we spoke about earlier, practice, bringing that shape back together, you might want to build it from the first finger. First finger goes on the first fret of the G, second finger onto the second fret of the A, third finger onto the second fret of the D. Open E, open B, open E. Remembering to keep that curve in our fingers if that was to flatten. If this first finger was to go down, I'd need my B. I bring that bend back in, comes back to life. Thumb doesn't have to be too bunched up and over the top of the fretboard, you can afford it to be a bit further back. We have a nice curve down here and the rest, we have this little gap. We got our distance from the neck, keep those shoulders nice and loose. We have a nice full bodied E major chord. Next chord we're going to look at, is A major. Now for this chord, your fingers are bunched in quite closely together. It might be a bit tricky at first. But everyone's hands, everyone's fingers are slightly different, and it's those small nuances that really make a difference as to whether that string is going to come through nice and clear or not. The first thing we're going to do is place our first finger on the second fret of the G, but we're not going to worry about being too close to the second fret at the moment because as you'll see in a second, we need to build the second and the third finger around that first finger. Our second finger comes above the first and lands on the D string, also on the second fret. We now have these two strings fretted, the D and the G. We now need to find room for our third finger to come and sit on that second fret as well on the E string. Now, this can be tucked quite close to the fret, just like the second finger is, and our first finger is finding that little gap to slide in there. Let's try that third finger. If I was to push too far out with the third finger and it lands on the fret, I'd get that dead sound. I move it back slightly, the string comes back to life. Keep that curve, keep this gap under here so that we can hear the open E string. Also, as you can see from the code box, got to have an open E and an X on the sixth string on the E because we don't play them. So if we then strung through one of those, we have a nice, clear sound. Through one at a time. I have that there D. I need to bend that third finger, maybe the wrist comes away slowly, I create that gap, I have a nice, open, clear sound all the way through. Sometimes, you might see people play the A major like this, that's cool, it's the same frets, the same strings being used. I just find it a little bit harder to bunch the fingers together when you first start. If you can get used to this pattern, I think that's a really good one. A quick tip for another chord progression with this is when you've got your A major, you can slide down into the D major pretty easily because if you know that your first finger is already on the string and the fret that we need, second fret of the G, your third finger doesn't actually have to leave the fretboard, you just slide across to the third fret, and then this second finger tucks down on the second fret of the E and you have the D major. We can reverse that and go back into the A major quite easily. I do that once more. If we were to then slide into the E major, which we learnt a minute ago, our first finger doesn't need to leave the fretboard, it just slides back onto the first fret and our second and third fingers creep up. We have E major. If I slide back into the A, our first finger doesn't need to leave the fretboard, it just slides across to the second fret, our second finger goes above it, third finger goes below, we're back in A major. That's quite a chord progression to practice. There's a lot of songs to use the A and E. I'll front a couple in the PDFs. The last major code we're going to look at is F major. Now, this is one way you can do this chord. We place our first finger on the first fret of the B string, our second finger goes on to the second fret of the G string, and our third finger stretches right over to the third fret of the D string. Now, this is a common way that you'll see this cool play. The thing with this is, we really need that firm to do a lot of work to come over and mute the E, the low E, and the A string, or we can use the top of our third finger to mute that A string. It's not necessarily a bad note, it doesn't clash in the chord, it's actually a double-up of the A note already exists here. But again, like with some chords we spoke about earlier, it is muddies to sound a little bit, makes it a bit too boomy and bassy. It means that the A becomes more of a dominant note in the chord when we want it to be our F note, which exists here. Has to be A in, and if I mute it, just cleans the chord up a little in them. What we're going to do is we're going to bring that third finger up to the third fret. This is a very common thing that will happen with this F shape chord. Our third finger goes onto the third fret of the A and our little finger replaces where the third finger was. It now goes on to the third fret of the D string and our little fingers playing that. We can now hear, we have a very full sound in F chord. Let's build it with that in place. We start with our open E, we place our first finger onto the first fret of the B string. Again, keeping that nice bend to start with, starting with the E and the B string from both ring through, second finger onto the second fret of the G, third finger stretches up to the third fret of the A string, nice and close to that fret, and our little finger tucks underneath same fret and on the D string. Let's go through those one at a time. If my first finger wasn't bent enough, I'd have to mute. If I curve that first finger, comes for nice and clear. It's the same principle for each of those fingers, keep that nice curve. A quick little tip about this chord as well and how we can utilize other chords alongside it is it moves to the C major really easily. I feel like you're missing a trick if you don't practice that chord also while you are there. As we're already in this F sharp, all we need to do to get to C major is take our little finger off and then bring our second finger off the G up to the second fret of the D. We're now in C major. If we put our little finger back on the third fret the D and we put our second finger on the second fret of the G again, we're now into F. It's a really cool little change to throw into your practice in. Another way of keeping those fingers nicely stretched, building some independence, and you actually happen to do as much work as you usually do when you move into all those different chord shapes. I put a song in the PDF tab collection that for anyone who has ever watched the British comedy, The Royal Family, or is a fan of Oasis, Noel Gallagher in particular, you'll recognize a song that utilizes these chords heavily. Remember to get these chords into your practice because they're really good ones for stretching across three different frets. While we're talking about the fact that this stretches across three different frets, I just want to briefly mention that that F shape can be utilized up and down the fretboard. Whereas in the first position, we want the curve of our first finger, start at the E rings through, we can move this whole shape up one thread so you're maintaining the free fret spread. This first finger will now relax a little so they actually mutes that high E stream, but we have a chord that still works well. It sounds nice together. We actually have F sharp major there. If we move it again, keeping this high E muted, we've got another form of G major. We've then got a G-sharp, major, and A major. These can be moved up and down the fretboard. Now, there's something called the chromatic scale which will make more sense of why there's no sharps to appear in between some of those letters. But I'm going to go through that in a little bit more detail in the scale course so don't worry too much about that yet. But just know that you can as long as you mute that E string because it doesn't always sound nice with certain ones. You can move up and down the fretboard and you've added a load more chords to your vocabulary. Now, we're going to look at minor chords. 16. More Minor Chords: In this lesson, we're going to talk about a few more minor chords. Now we touched on this a little bit earlier when we was doing E minor and showing the difference between that and the E major. Just as a little recap, it's worth remembering that when we take the first, the third, and the fifth from wherever key we're referring to as the scale, say it was A, which would be the A, the C sharp and the E, those three notes make a major chord. If we wish to flatten the third note, so in this case, the C sharp, we flatten it a semitone, from C sharp to a C, we've now made a minor. We're now playing the A, the C and the E, rather than the A, C sharp and E, and we get that sadder sounding chord. So let's build that A minor. We want our high to be nice and open and clear. Our first finger comes onto the first fret of the base string, our second finger jumps up to the second fret of the D string, and our third finger goes underneath on the second fret of the G string. As always, keeping this bend in the knuckles, have a little check, and then strum for the chord. If there's any dead notes or any buzz like I have there, you want to dissect that by going through one at a time. We have our open A, we then played the second fret of the D, we then play the second fret of the G, we notice that isn't coming through, I haven't applied enough pressure, so I'll put a little bit more pressure on there, and then I check the first fret, the B string and then the opening. If I haven't bend my knuckle enough on the first finger, it will be dead. The E string, the bend it comes through, keeping the wrist and the shoulders nice and loose. You should have all those strings coming through nice and clear and just quickly while we're on this chord as well, is there's a nice that would jump to the C major again, that's pretty straightforward because all we need to do is change one finger. Our third finger comes off the second fret of the G and it goes over to the third fret, the A string, we're in C major. So it's always good to find these little quick changes that exist throughout your fretboard because it just makes those chords a little less daunting and easier to understand, because you know that now you've learned C major quite a lot throughout this course and you hopefully doing really well with it. We realized that to get to A minor, we just need to take our third finger off third fret of the A and land on the second fret of the G string, we're in A minor. The same if we wanted to go back to C major is just that third finger that stretches across, it means that we can then bunch the second finger up to our second fret, make it a little bit closer. Look back and see, so that's another nice chord change for you to practice when you're doing either of those chords. The next minor chord we're going to look at is D minor. So we've done D major, you've got that playing really well. We want to flatten one of the notes in that chord. So remember, it'll be the third note of that chord, which in this instance is our F sharp, which exists down here, the second fret of the E string. We're going flatten that, so it becomes an F note. This does mean that we have to slightly change the fingers we're using for the D major chord, our third finger can stay where it is, but our second finger and first are swapping strings. They've gone from there to there. So let's build that chord together. We're going to put our first finger on the first fret of the E string. We're going to put our second finger on the second fret of the G string. Make sure then it's going to come through nice and clear. We then going to put our third finger, on the third fret of the B string. We now have the G, the B, and E sounding nice and clear. We also want to open D string in there, and we're going to try and use our thumb to mute the low E and the A so that if we wanted to really strum through that chord, we're not worried about these low strings, making that chord a bit muddier we can just, we can just keep it nice and clear and tidy. As always, it's worth making sure that our fingers have got that nice pronounced bend in the knuckle, we can take our hands away, we can bring it back to the guitar, so we're really getting used to that shape. This has a chord you can link to where you don't have to remove one of the fingers as well, and I'm just going to quickly demonstrate that. It's from the D minor up to G major. It's one nice subtle change, our little finger coming on to the third fret of the E string, our third finger stays exactly where it is, and our first and second jump up to our A and lowest E string, to make a G major, and that's another little change, you can start playing yourself. In those last two lessons, you've just learned another five chords and hopefully with those little demonstrations of how easily some of them link together, you start to feel a lot more confident about your playing, and the guitar neck and the whole range of chords don't seem as daunting as they did when you first started out. Next, we're going to move on to learning a bit about scales. 17. Scales: We're now going to look at scales. Scale is basically an order of notes that come one after the other, either ascending or descending. What notes are used on what's sharpened of flattened, determine what key we're going to be playing in. Now we're not going to focus too much on the theoretical side. You don't need to worry that we are going to be swamped down with loads of theory work in these early stages of learning how to play the guitar. But what we can do, is utilize them for their shapes, which adds more technique to our playing. Also for the last part of this course, we're going to be making our own music. We're going to use the codes that we've learned throughout this process, and we're going to choose our order for them, and then from one of these scales that we learn, we're going to be able to create our own lead music over the top, knowing that every note we play is going to sound in tune with the course that we've chose. Even if we don't understand the complete ins and outs of what's happening theoretically, we wouldn't be able to go on break down and explain every aspect of that theoretical side of things, we know, shapes and areas of the guitar that we can play, the are going to work with the codes that are underneath them and we can make some lovely lead music. The first scale that is worth mentioning is the chromatic scale. You might also hear this referred to as the mother scale. This is basically every note that exists on the guitar. Every note that we use in western music. It's from these notes that we build our codes, that we choose our keys, we make our scales. We can start this on any string. But I'm going to start just to give an example on the A string. This is going to detail every note that exists on this guitar. But we're starting from A. We play. You open A, that's our A note. When we place that on the first fret, that is A sharp. We slide up, it becomes B. Now, most transitions have a sharp in-between them. But B to C and E to F, for the purposes of our understanding now, don't have that sharp, and if we're coming down, they don't have the flat. When I go from B to C, no sharp in between those. The next one would be C sharp and D, and D sharp, and E. Now this is the other place in our chromatic scale, there is no sharp in between this jump. We go straight from E to F. B to C and E to F, have no sharp in between. We then go to F sharp, then G, one more fret is G sharp, and then we get to A again on the 12th fret. We have now traveled what's called an octave. We have gone from a lower version of A up to its next pitch, it's higher version of A, and that's occurred on the 12th fret. When we're working up throughout our chromatic scale, the progression, because we're ascending, is sharp. If I was to work my way back down when I'm descending, we're going to start refer to flats. This 12th fret that is currently an A, when I move backwards, I go down and I descend, that becomes A flat. When I was working my way up, that was G sharp that note. But because we're coming backwards, we now call it A flat. We go back one more, we get to G. We go back one more with G flat. We flatten it again and we've got to F. We flatten it again and there is no flats this time in-between, the same as there was no sharp on the way up. We go straight from F to E. We flatten again, we've got E flat, and D, D flat, C, here is where we don't have that in-between bit, we don't have a sharp or flat, we jump straight to B, and B flat, and then we're back to the open A. We can now utilize the stretching exercise we did earlier and add these notes to the exercise. We're aware of exactly what note we're playing. Earlier we did a stretching exercise on the first string. This time if I did it on the A: A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, back to the A. Now you can start that chromatic scale on any of the strings. If I played it on the D, I'd just start from D in the chromatic scale. I go D, D sharp, E, jump to F, F sharp, G, G sharp, A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D. It's just to start to get an understanding of where our notes are occurring and appearing on the fret board. That covers all the notes that are in existence up and down the neck of the guitar. We're now going to show you how you take certain orders of those notes to create key of music. 18. C Major and G Major Scale: The keys we're going to look at are C major and G major. We're going to start with C. The good thing about C is that it has no sharps or flats within the key. It tends to be a little bit easier to remember, especially for earlier lessons. We're just working our way through C and not having to worry about those other elements. The good thing about this scale as well, is that we can refer to our C major shape that we learned earlier to help us play this particular scale. If you fret that C major call for me again, have a little look at the box pause this. Take a minute if you need to get familiar with it again, we're going to start with [inaudible] note that's frayed the third fret of the A with our third finger. Once we've played that note, we want to play a D note, which we can do by taking our second finger off of the second fret of D and plan and open a second finger then comes back down. Then we put our third finger on the third thread of D, then we play an open G. Then we play the second fret of the G, then we play an open B. Then we play the first fret of the B. Altogether it will be like this. You see by using that shape as a reference point and never had to move too far from the original shape to play the whole scale. Now you know how through some descending in there as well. Let's do that. Once we've worked our way up, C D E F G A D C, we are now going to reverse that. We're going to take the first finger on the first fret of the B, play that. I'm going to take it off to play open. We're going to put a second finger on the second fret of the G. We're going to take you off and play an open G. We're then going to put our third finger on the third fret of the D. We're then going to go back to the second fret of the D. Open D, and third fret of the C. You play that chord at the end, if you're on, that sounds pretty nice to resolve everything. There's lots of different ways that we can play these scales up and down the fret board. We're just going to learn a couple. We've done the C major one that exists within the chord for that just be a nice reference because we're getting familiar with that chord anyway. You can see what seven notes make up this major scale and how you can find them close by to the chord position. Now we're going to take it to a slightly more complicated way, but a really important one to have an [inaudible] We're going to play the third fret of the A string with our second finger. This time, it's again, this is where our stretching is really going to be utilized. It's going to build the independence and flexibility of our hands. We play that note. Little finger then wants to stretch across to the fifth fret of the A keeping it nice and close to the fret. We can also place our other fingers down to help us put pressure on the guitar strings. If they're up here. We haven't got as much stability on the guitar, and we lose a lot of our power. You get a few aches and pains that you don't really want. It's nice if we can utilize these other fingers to help us push down on the strings. Replay that little finger. Our first finger, then goes to the second fret of the D. Our second finger comes to the third fret of the D. We keep our first finger down. Our little finger, then goes to the fifth fret of the D, keeping everyone down one finger per thread. So, far we've gone 3, 5 onto the D string 2, 3, 5. Now we're going to go on to the G string. We're going to start with the second fret of the G. With our first finger. We're going to apply full fret of the G with our third finger. Then we're going to play the fifth fret of the G with our little finger. Let's just play that from the top. Now this how I kept those fingers down. We're now going to reverse that. We start with our little finger. We then take that off to play the fourth fret of the G string with our third finger. Second fret of the G string with our first finger. We then want to move this shape and if we can all have our fingers up until the D string that how we've got that nice in-line pressure going across that D string. Little finger on the fifth fret, second finger on the third fret of the D. First finger on the second fret, we jam backup to our A. Little finger on the fifth fret. Second finger on the third fret. We're back to our beginning. I'm going to play that. Ascending and then descending, nice and slow. I'll tell you the notes as we go. C D E F G A B C and we work it back B A G F E D C. You also know it's is with my right hand that's holding the pick, I'm alternating the pattern. So we're getting used to being able to go back and forth on that string. Good technique to instill because if you're just going down, you're going to be able to go a lot faster if you've implemented that skill set to be able to go down and up, especially the [inaudible] music that's going to come in handy. That's a really important shape to have learned. Now, what we can do a bit like remember when we spoke about the F major chord and we said that that can move up and down the fret board, maintaining the shape and changing the chord that we're playing. We can do the same with this scale shape. We're playing C there. If I move it up one, I'm playing C sharp, if I go again, I'm playing D major and again D sharp. You get the idea. We can follow that principle of the chromatic scale wherever the first note is that we're playing of that scale shape. That's the key that we're in. That's the major key that we'll be playing. A quick little pointer as well, make sure your thumb is not too high and bunched over, because you're going to struggle to stretch that shape out. It's really important to remember, especially as we're moving up and down. Don't be tempted to start bunch in the fingers up and limiting yourself and hindering the amount of stretch that you can have. What we're going to do next is move that shape from the third fret up to the 10th fret. Really start to utilize more this guitar neck and get used applying high rough rather than just in these first positions. The same shape here, the same distance that you're traveling would be the 10th fret of the second finger. Your little finger would then go to the 12th fret. Your first finger would go to the ninth fret, the D. Second finger would go to the 10th fret of the D. Your little finger would jump to the 12 fret of the D. Then we'd go to the ninth fret of the G with our first finger. Eleven fret of the G with our third finger and then little finger placed at 12th fret of the G. We're playing the G major scale. The reason I want you to get comfortable with this shape or this area of the guitar is that in the last couple of lessons when we're talking about making their own music, this G-major scale is what we're going to use to write our own lead guitar over the top of the chord that we've chosen. While we're here as well we're going to take the shape a little bit further if that's okay. So let's get back to where we were then. We're finishing on G but we can go again, we can go another octave, remember, with the same pattern of notes but in a higher pitch, a higher octave. From our little finger, we're going to extend this pattern. We're going to take a little bit further. We're going to put our second finger onto the 10th fret of the B string. We're then going to put our little finger on the 12th fret of the B. We're now going to make a little slide up to the 13th fret of the B. Now we need to utilize our first finger. Play the 10th fret of the E. We're going to put our third finger onto the 12th fret of E. We're then going to do another slide keeping that shape if you can, keeping these three fingers across one fret each. Our third finger lands on the 14th fret of E. Then our little finger plays the 15th fret of the E. We've now played two octaves of the G major scale. It's going to give us a lot of range when we come to writing our own lead bits of guitar. Put in that position there, we have got one finger across each fret, really helping us keep the pressure down on that string. We are going to work backwards from our little finger, which is currently on the fifth fret of the E. Nice and slow. We are now going to take that off and we play the 14th fret E. We are now going to take the third and the second finger off and we're going to leave out first finger to play the E. We make a little slide back with our first finger to the 10th fret. We now utilize that fore finger on four fret stretch to get to the 13th fret of the B. We slide our little finger back, moving that whole shape. We play the 12th fret of the B. 10th fret of the B. Now back into that first octave that we practiced, and that was 12th fret of the G. 11th fret of the G, ninth fret of the G. Then we go to the D string and we play 12th fret, 10th, 9th up to the A string. 12th fret. Then we finish on the 10th fret. That is your G major scale into octaves. First half of that, is the shape that we can move up and down the fret board to experiment with that. Wherever you start, wherever your first note is, that's what major scale you're playing. You can use your chromatic scale to work out what scale that is. Jump to the six fret of the A string 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Using my chromatic scale that would be open E, E sharp to D sharp. I started with my second finger and I play that same shape, keeping the same distance between the frets and using the same fingers. I just played the D sharp major scale. Now that we've learned a couple of scales, we've got really good to octave range going on up here. I want to see if we can go back to the chord we first worked on, the G major, E minor, C major, D major, choose our own order for these, which means that's going to be basically making our own music. Then we're going to use this two-octave G major scale to play some lead guitar over the top, you're going to get creating your own music. 19. Write Your Own Music: This is the section of the course that I was really looking forward to. It's where we can start to get proper creative. Now I think it's important when you're learning an instrument to start to play if you can create some of your own music. I don't want to overwhelm you and swap you with this pressure to feel like you've got to be really creative and compose this masterpiece. But hopefully, by going through the codes in the way that we have, making references of two songs that use the same code structure, but I've come out with a completely different vibe. You can start to see how these small little changes create something completely new. We touched on the fact that there's only 12 notes in Western music and we construct our codes out of those notes. We think about how many different styles of music are out there that you hear on a daily basis, so many of them are using similar if not the same chord progressions. It's just the subtle changes that occur around them and the production styles that go on top that dictate what Jon Rahm style of music, they're going to be. When you're learning these songs from the bands that you love, whatever it's going to be, Metallica to Nirvana, to Ed Sheeran, One Direction, whatever it is you're learning, why not take those codes and experiment with them and reverse them, put them in a different order, change the strumming pattern, see what you can come up with. Add your own unique individual touch to it because everyone has got their own unique artistic output, and I think it's important and exciting to start exploring yours. We worked a lot earlier on the progression of G, E minor, C major, and D major. I've used those codes to work on what I'm now going to call out a jam track, I'm going to play my own order of those codes. I'm going to record that and then I'm going to play it back and I'm going to play some lead guitar over the top using the G major scale that we worked on a bit earlier. But we'll get onto that in a bit more detail in a minute. First of all, let's quickly touch on the recording side of things. At the moment I am going into GarageBand on my MacBook. I'm recording my guitar string into there, and I'm going to have a drum loop loaded up that's going to help us keep the beat and recognize where there's bows, start and finish, and just help keep me in time. I recommend that you check out the GarageBand course that is on Skillshare by my good friend and colleague Mike Bonds, is absolutely smashed it with a complete beginners guide to getting up and running with this really easy, accessible, user-friendly software, so definitely, go and check that out it's really inspiring. Other options that are quite popular are, Pro Tools, Logic Pro X, which is basically a step up from GarageBand. GarageBand is free, by the way. If you haven't got any of these software don't worry, you can just record your guitar pass on your phone. It's really important to hear back what your plan. You're going to have this whole of a reference for how your plan's developing, it really, really helps, so I'd highly recommend that. Obviously, with these cool structure focus, you can pick your codes, record it on whatever device you're using, and then you can play that back and you can start to put some lead guitar over the top. I'm going to quickly show you the codes that I've chose to use, the strumming pattern that I've applied, and how long I'm leaving in-between changing from one code to another. For my verses, I'm going to play D major, E minor, C major, and G major. For the chorus part, I'm going to speed up the change, play E minor, C major, G, D, and I'm going to come out of those choruses with a single strumming on F, G major chord. I'll just give you a quick little taste of what that's going to be like. That's my bass. Now I'm going to play a little chorus a bit. That's four of the chorus, pull front, and then on the G major, 1234, 1234, and I'm going to go back into my verse. What I'm going to do now, is I'm going to play something I've recorded earlier, which is just a simple little percussion beat with those chords alongside it, and then I'm going to use the G major scale to play some lead guitar over the top. That was the scale that we worked on earlier. We had the shape that we started on the third fret. We slit it up to the temp fret. That was the first octave. We then done a slightly more complicated second octave, and we reverse that, and the first octave again. When this backing track that I've recorded is playing, I'm only going to use those notes to make some lead guitar over the top. There's not going to be any of the clashes because I know that I'm playing in the right key. All of those codes we've chose, are within G major, we're playing the G major scale, so everything's going to sound nice. The vibe just depends on what I choose to do. Now, I might double up some of those notes. I might decide to let someone just hang out for a while. I'm might play a couple together at the same time. Now I don't expect you to remember all these shapes and everything straight away. This is just something to build towards. If you're already comfortable with that first octave, you're familiar where those notes are, you feeling confident with it, just make your late music like that. This beat that I'm going to demonstrate now, is just to act as an example of what you can do. I'm not going to play too complicated. I'm not going to throw in all those quick or lead to leaks and get fancy. That's not what this is about. This is about just enjoying the process of creating music, realizing there is not an unattainable thing just because someone's on the radio or your streaming through Spotify, they might have worked out that for years, they might have been playing guitar for six months from where the record is done well. This is something you can do, so just enjoy, just relax, utilize those notes. You aren't going to hit a bad one. Just experiment and see what you come up with. After this, we'll have just me playing the code along to the percussion beat that I have, just in case you haven't got anything to record your codes onto, I'm going to provide you with something in this course, that you can jam along to as many times as you like. Let's give it a go. 20. Lead Guitar Ideas: That's just some little examples of what we can do. Quite simple but effective, utilizing that G-major scale across two octaves, mainly within the first there, but a bit of that higher range. I've thought about those four chords we had, quickly chosen order, put those down on my computer, and then just started to muck around with a couple of simple lead ideas. Now I'm just going to trigger that percussive beat and I'm going to play the chords along without my lead guitar this time. This is for any of you at home that maybe you haven't got any of those capabilities to record, which is absolutely fine. That's the beauty of something like Skillshare, this part of the course and all the other parts of the course are there for you to just jump in and out whenever you want. This part of the course in particular is great because you can just keep coming back, playing this session over and over again. You can just experiment with lead ideas and see what you come up with. Try something new each time. If there's a part you like, keep a hold of that, develop it, add to it, get creative, push the boundaries. No pressure at all, just enjoy it. That's the most important thing. I can't stress that enough. There's no right or wrong here. This is just whatever you feel and the different moods that you're in will probably dictate the different music that you'd create. Like I said, no pressure, press ''Play'', see what you create. 21. Introduction To Backing Track: In this lesson, I'm going to be providing a backing track of the sign percussive B that we used in the previous lesson, and I'm going to be playing the codes that were recorded in that lesson live for you to jam along with. So in that previous lesson, you saw some really simple lead parts that I was playing over the top. There was nothing too complicate, nothing too fancy, but it's just to show that with not too much effort, you could really start to add a bit more interest to the music that you're creating. For those of you that have got recording capabilities, which we discussed a bit earlier on as fantastic, I hope that you've gone through the course that we've learned earlier and you've come up with your own coach structures, you've recorded that and then you can play some lead guitar over the top. Even if you have done that, this next free mini or so lesson is still great because it's going to give you the opportunity to play alongside another musician. I'm going to use that nice steady B. I'm going to play this guitar chords, I'll add a few dynamic changes to it, I might ring some codes out, and just kind of give you a little bit of a journey to fit along to and see how those slightly different parts inspire you to create something a little bit different. Just see you are aware, I'm going to be playing this at 92 BPM, 92 beats per minute. So if you was to take this away and try and play a similar tempo, and you've got the metronome that we spoke about earlier, then you can set that to 92 BPM. So if there's any other lead parts that I was playing previously that you particularly liked, see if you can copy those or tweak it and add your own touch to it. But also throughout this little jam, focus on creating some of your own stuff. Just get creative, have a better fun with it. This video is here for you to play over and over as many times as you like so you can get comfortable, you can get confident, and you can get creative. So I'm going to play those codes now. I hope you have fun jamming along. 22. Backing Track: One, two, three, four. There we go, that's just a few minutes of some really simple, straightforward music views that just have a bit of fun with. Hopefully, you came up with a few parts there that you liked. If not, just crack on, have another go, see what you create. 23. Riff - Enter Sandman: I thought it would be cool if we could throw a couple more riffs into this course just so you've got a few more things at your disposal that you can play. That continue to work on your technique and cover different styles of music which is really good for your overall guitar playing. The first one we're going to look at is Enter Sandman by the metal band, Metallica. Now again, if this isn't your thing, it's your cool. If you really can't add the riff into it, don't worry. But it's a great little riff to have in your locker, pulls your bit further up in the fretboard and continues to develop your playing. I'm just going to play through that intro riff that you hear at the beginning of Enter Sandman. Now that plays over about 16 times, I believe. Then the music starts to kick up, but that riff will still work underneath and eventually when the drums come in full whack, it goes to more of the. But the riff that we're learning would still work underneath. The same thing in principle, same timing. Feel free to jam along to this track continuing that riff. If you want to push your plan further, see if you can pick up the rest of that track. I will cover chords like this, when I do another course. Let's this try and work through that riff. We're going to want to have our first finger, a second finger, and a third finger ready in place on the A string, fifth, sixth, and seventh threads. First note we're going to play is a nice easy opening. We can have our hand rested on our bridge to give us a bit more stability. Looks like that opening. We then, with our third finger tapped nicely beyond the seventh fret, we play the seventh fret of the A. Our first finger is then ready on the fifth fret, for the fifth fret of the day. It just drops down a little bit from its position. It's already way in in the area that we need. We now need to release our second finger and bring it up to the sixth fret of the A. It then goes back one to the fifth fret. Nicely, around there, let's try that. We now need to stretch our third finger back to the seventh fret of the A. Rest it back where it started and then play the opening. Let's try that altogether, nice and slow. That was how we resolve with that seventh fret of the A string and then the opening becomes our starting point again. It's really important with this riff to keep that free finger coverage of those free frets, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh because it's all around that area. We want to be making the most minimal movements that we possibly can. Remember a lot earlier on, we spoke about if our fingers come too far away from the fretboard, they have to travel further back. It's about keeping everything nice and close. Tips of the fingers. Subtle movements. That first thing you can creep over the strings above it, so when it needs to get to that fifth fret of the A. Notice that everything is just small adjustments. No big leaps, putting our hands far away, having to come back again. Try and maintain that general shape and this riff will become nice and fluent for you to play. 24. Riff - Oh, Pretty Woman: The next riff we're going to look at is Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison. Very different to the last riff that we learned, but equally as valuable to your guitar plan. I'm just going to have a quick play through that riff so you could hear it, and then we're going to break it down and learn it together. As you might have noticed, with this riff is another one that stretches across free frets, we're utilizing the frets to the second through to the fourth. Earlier we used that from the fifth to the seventh. Now west from the second to the fourth, you might notice that the stretch is a little bit further here because the threads ever so slightly further apart from each other. But that's okay because that's improving our technique and giving us that little bit of extra stretch and flexibility in our hands. Nice, easy start with this one. We begin with the open E string, and we play that twice. We've got our fingers stretched across the second, third, and fourth fret. Our third finger is now going to come down onto that fourth fret on the E string. We go, our first finger should now be waiting to come down on to the second fret of the A string, so let's play those first few notes together. Nice and slow. An important point to pick up on here when we play that second fret of the A string, really try and land on the tip of your finger because after this note we're going to want to play an open D. If we're bent down or too crunched up, we might get that dead sounds that we don't like. Nice curve in the finger really opens up the hand and allows that note to come through nice and clear. Let's play that from the top. This first little riff happens twice at the beginning of track. After that, it starts to fill the gap that exists in between the end of the note and the beginning of the next bar, so that's at that last little bit, we'll get up to where we was previously. Once we play that open note, we can release our first finger, so that our third finger can come down to the fourth fret of the D string, and our first finger can now be waiting on the second fret of the D string. You might as well have these second finger down as well, just to give you that real consistency and firmness across the strings. I jump down and we run backwards to the second and then open, so that run down is fourth fret of D, second fret of D, open D. Let's play that from the top nice and slow. Open four, two, open, and then we go back to the top. The riff starts again. Excellent. That's played four times. The first riff that has the pause at the end. That happens twice, and then the fourth riff happens four times. Remembering to keep that firm, not too far over the top. It sits back. It's on that neck, gives us a nice clump of the guitar. We can get a nice bit firmness, the strength that we require, but we're not hindering the flexibility of our hand by bringing our thumb over the top. Excellent. There you go. You've got another two riffs that you can use. Hopefully, there's some styles of music in the songs we've learned that you like. If not, again, I can't stress how important it is to just get these riffs in your locker because it's important to take on board all different styles, especially when you're learning the instrument because it really broaden and improve your technique. 25. How To Restring Your Guitar: Something I'd like to talk about now is re-stringing a guitar. I think this is something that doesn't get covered often enough. I remember after my first lesson, about two days after, I snapped a string on my guitar and just panicked because I had no idea how to fix it and I didn't even own a spare string. I had a panic phone call with my tutor at the time, who just invited me around, and showed me how to do it. You might have already snapped a string during this course. I hope you haven't obviously, but if you have, then this quick little video will just show you how to do that correctly. Now, just briefly, on strings, you're going to get what's called different gauges. The higher the gauge basically means the thicker the string. I'm using a pack of Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom. I've already partially opened in preparation. I've taken a string off of this guitar, and I'm going to be putting in a new one on, which is my D string. Now, the lowest number in your pack of strings will be the thinnest string, the E string. With this, mine is a ten, that will be my highest E string down here. We're going to be putting a number 30, which is our D string. When you get your package strings, they'll be in order numerically. You'll be able to count from the lowest number, knowing that that's your thinnest one, up to the highest number, knowing that that's your thickest one, and all the ones in between. Just quickly, you've probably noticed that I've changed guitar. That's because the guitar I've been using for this video was a new one, and I just couldn't bear taking the new strings that have been put on by the shop when it got out because it's just been sounds lovely. But this guitar has been with me since I was 17, which is a long time ago, and I love it. It's got all the little war wounds of gigs that it's played, it's covered in scars, it's very different to what guitarist use nowadays, but it's beautiful. First thing that I'm going to do is unravel that string. Down by the bridge, you will have a hole where your string is going to slot through. Now usually, we just go through that way and then work our way up. With the SGs, that's what this is, Gibson SG, a slightly better tension, and it's meant to help prevent strings snapping often, we come in from the other way and just loop back. But for the purposes of what you're going to be doing at home, I'm just going to go for the normal way. You just slot through your hole like that, hold the string all the way through. This little loop at the end is connected to the bridge, and you can't pull it through any further. We then go up to the other end of the guitar. I want to make sure that my string slot into the nut. The nuts have this little groove in them that our string sits in so they can't move from side to side. It's in there, nice and tidy. It's worth mentioning as well, as much as we make sure the string goes through the nut out there, make sure it's sitting nice and level, and tucked into the groove that you see on your bridge here. I then coil that to make sure that the little hole in the corresponding tuning peg is on an angle towards us, diagonally facing back towards our body. I then do half a loop with the string, around the back of the tuning peg that we're using, so that when we get back to the front, we can push the string through, and it comes over the top of the loop that we've created. We now have this little circle here. I then pull that string further. It gets nice and tight, that loop shortens and starts to go close to the tuning peg. From the other end of the guitar, I then want to pull that string back, it's nice and tight around this loop here. Good thing when you're stringing a guitar is to keep tension because guitar strings tuning will start to slip when it's a new string, it'll take a while to wear in. But if we re-string using a bit of tension, it reduces how much that string is going to slip out at you once we're playing. You don't want to leave your guitar string slack and start to tune like that. The loop here will come away, it's going to take a lot longer to tighten it. It doesn't build in that initial tension that we're after, so it's good to put pressure on the string, pull away from the fretboard. You can use some fingers to rest on the fretboard, and your index finger to pull away. Then I'm tightening the string, and pushing away from me. I'm going anticlockwise. Now, we want to bring this string a lot closer to the fretboard. As we're turning around, we can see that that tension is getting a lot tighter. You can feel it pulling on your finger, when I'm a couple of inches away, and let that loose. My string is not where I want it to be, it's a lot closer than it was. Now that we've got a bit of tension, I can relax this finger and do the last little bit. See over here that it's reasonably tight. Then I can pull in the help of my Headstock tuner. This is the D string, I just reference my tuner. I can see that's currently on I. Remember in achromatic scale if I want a sharp at the moment, and now I need to go up to get to D. We're in B through C, we're going to have C sharp, and then we'll be in to D, and when you to get that nice, and in the middle, mine shows like a nice light blue when it's in there whatever your Headstock tuner shows, where you're at, whatever you are using, make sure that's in the middle. That's not going to be it. That string is going to slip a bit because it's completely new. Once we've got that on, it's worth giving it another stretch. Really trying to hold that tension. That's going to slip when we're playing. Check it again. I've gone down to C sharp, bring it back up slightly, I'm in D. Maybe give your strings a little bend, up and down the fretboard because you're going to be doing all at playing all around. One more stretch up and down. Sometimes, I like to put my finger on the 12th fret, give it stretch there because we're shortening the length. Check again, only slightly flat. That should now hold nice and tight. We haven't got to worry about slipping out while we're focusing on our practice and put playing. That principle and that process will apply to each of the strings as you work up and down the guitar. I would just say that make sure, when you are stringing, you go the same direction, round the nut of the tuning peg, so that you can sharpen and flatten the same direction for each tuning peg. It gets a bit confusing if one is way on this way, and one is on the other way. You have to go a different way for each one that can get a bit much. Obviously, my guitar has got three at the top, three at the bottom. I've just made sure that I've wound it the same direction for each one. If your guitar has six tuning pegs across the top, just make sure they come in from the same direction, each go the same way. There we go, you can re-string and tune your guitar. 26. Conclusion: That brings us to the end of the course. Thank you so much for joining me. It really does mean a lot. I hope you feel like you've learned a lot throughout this process. You've got some really good tools there to go away and build on your guitar plan. In order to give you all those basic principles and techniques of the guitar, to really put you in a strong position to take your plan forward. I hope you feel inspired, I hope you've been creative throughout this process. On that note about creativity, I'd like to turn this into bit of class project, where I hear the tracks that you've written from the chords that we spoke about earlier. We discussed about formulating your own chord progressions and then putting those lead guitar parts over the top. If you've manage to record it, I would honestly love to hear what you've done, it'll be brilliant. Please feel free to send them over. If you want any feedback, then I'd be more than happy to do that, and I just love hearing new music, and hearing what people are up to, so please feel free to post that in this course as a class project. Just as a recap with everything, make sure you are patient, this is a marathon is not a spring. You want to take your time with this, you don't want to cut any corners, you're only going to suffer because of that later. You want to get all the right things in place early on, so you've done all that correct groundwork to really help you develop as a musician as you go along your learning journey. You're probably getting some pain in your fingers from where we've been playing, that's okay. That's natural, don't overdo it. You've got to persevere and push through certain barriers, but you don't want to leave yourself in agony. If your fingers are bleeding put the guitar down, take a couple of days off. But if not, if you can get through it, I recommend you try and pick up the guitar every day if you can, even if it's little and often. I remember my guitar [inaudible] even if you're just sitting watching the TV, if you've got your guitar in your lap, and you're just frighten those cold shapes and you're not worrying about strumming, making louder noise. You're not disrupting anyone, but you're still getting some valuable practice building that muscle memory. Remember to get those stretching exercises in nice and early. You're starting to give your hand as much flexibility as possible. When you're playing for your chords remember what we spoke about that dissecting them and making sure each note is coming through nice and clear. You have those bends in the knuckles. If you play one string at a time, you can hear what's right and what's wrong. I think it's good to balance your practicing with mix of technique and general creativity and fun. Make sure you get those scales in, get those stretching exercises done, work on your chord shape, but always put time aside to learn some of your favorite songs and think about how you could write some your own songs. These course is here for you to jump in and out of if you want to. There's something I didn't sink in the first time, feel free to go back and take as long as you need to make sure that information really soaks scene. I recommend you get a capo because that's going to be really useful for so many songs. Don't forget the headstock tuner as well. Very handy for tuning your guitar. We spoke a bit about recording. Remember the checkout that GarageBand of course its own scale shared by Mike Bans, really cool, definitely worth looking at. This is a reminder, you've got programs like Ableton. They're going to be able to slow down the tracks you're practicing to, it'll make it a little bit easier for you to grasp what's being played. YouTube does it, doesn't sound as good. But if you haven't got any of that music software, it's worth going onto YouTube settings on the video you're watching and just slow that down. It might make it a bit easier for you to play along too. There's lots of PDFs attached to this course. Go check them out where we might have only focused on one part of the song. I've made sure that I've put more of the track on that. You can really test your skills and knowledge that you're developing with reading tab and cold boxes and see how much of that song you can learn. Ed Sheeran's Perfect is an example of that. There's more of the song on there and we spoke about, and I've also thrown in a couple of other little tracks by different bands, just in case there's something in there that you'd like to learn. Get hold of the ultimate guitar tab app is going to be really cool for checking out any of your favorite songs. Again, really pushing it your ability and your technique. Please feel free to send over any questions you have about guitar. I'd love to help out where I can. If you want to stick and feedback in and reviews for the course, that would also be really helpful. I'd love to see how this is all being received because I'd really like to take this fave up. There's so much you can learn with guitar, you never stop learning. I'd like to think that we could make this a semi-regular thing and do more in-depth courses. We can touch on more of theory side of things further down the line and generally just keep taking their guitar plan to the next level. Thanks again everyone. I've really enjoyed putting this course together. Please send over the music that you're writing, I'd love to hear it. Send any questions, comments, feedback my way. Have a lovely day. I will catch you very soon.