Learn Guitar: The Expanded Beginners Guide

1. Intro: This class is designed to give you everything you need to get up and running on the guitar. It is suitable for both electric and acoustic guitar players and you don't need to have any previous musical experience. By the end of this class, the variety of techniques, songs, skills, and songwriting exercises we cover will make you a confident and creative guitar player. Hi, everyone. I hope you're doing good. A big welcome to this beginner guitar class. My name is Marc. I'm a full-time musician, an instructor. I have 20 years teaching experience and I also co-run a multi-award winning music charity that's main aim is to make music inclusive and accessible for everyone. I've found that some approaches to teaching an instrument can take a long time to reach the point of where you're getting something back from your plan. You're not rewarded with the skills you want as quickly as you might like to be. I want to ensure that you have all the correct information in place first, but also that you're quickly able to practice and play along to the music that you love. I find this helps grab people's attention early on and can inspire them to continue along their learning journey and musical development. Learning an instrument from scratch can seem like a daunting prospect, but it really shouldn't be looked at that way. With the right guidance, gradual and easy to follow steps plus a focus on discovering your own creative abilities should make this process far more enjoyable and achievable. My aim is to make this class that kind of experience for you. We'll start with the basics of the instrument's anatomy and then we'll learn how to tune and read chord boxes and tab, but we will quickly get you to the point of playing with some simple exercises and some great guitar riffs. After this, we will move for a range of chords and apply them in a variety of well known songs. We'll develop an understanding of scales and then we'll look at these techniques and see how you can start to create your own guitar riffs and lead guitar ideas from these. I've tried to pick songs and riffs from different areas and different styles so that we cover the classics to the modern day hits and hopefully that way there's a little bit of something for everyone. You will also have plenty of knowledge quite early on so that you can go off and research some of your favorite songs and be able to play along to them as well. We're going to discuss timing and introduction to music theory, songwriting, composing your own music, and how you can start to discover your own unique creative expression. By the end of this class, you will be able to come away with a completely self composed piece of music. I loved that bit and the results they can create for students. I have multiple guitar classes available, so your journey doesn't need to stop after this one. There will be plenty more content for you to check out and I'm regularly making fresh classes and expand in that catalog. I hope you're excited about learning an instrument. It's a journey that can last a lifetime if you want it to. There's always something new and exciting to be explored with the guitar. Thank you for watching and I hope to see you in the class. Take care. 2. Class Project: The class project, this is a great opportunity to monitor your progress and get a bit more insight into your development, and hopefully it'll just be fun to take part in as well. I'd like you to record any riff, song, exercise, technique that's covered in this class, and then if you feel comfortable too, share that with the rest of us under this class so we can all learn and be inspired by each other. You could upload this to SoundCloud or YouTube and then share the links with us below. You could also post it on the socials, the hashtags are coming up that you'd need to use. You could also tag me if you want to when you're posting that to make sure it gets picked up. If you prefer to be a bit more private about it, you are more than welcome to contact me on the email address that's coming up now. I'm always keen to hear from students, always willing to give feedback and I love hearing what you're all creating. I do hope you're up for sharing what you create underneath this class because that really does help create that community vibe that we're after. Again, it just helps us be inspired by each other. Please feel free to get in touch in any of those ways, and hopefully you're feeling confident enough to take part in this class project. Catch you in the next video. 3. Anatomy: Let's start by getting familiar with all the different parts of the guitar, so we know what the different things we're referring to as we work through this class. First one we're going to look at is the bridge found down here. Sometimes you will see strings work through the back of the guitar and come up through holes along the bridge. Sometimes the holes will be down here. The way these guitars set up, the strings just come across and they sit in these little slits that work their way along the bridge. The job of the bridge is to keep those strings separated. It's also an area that's helping transmit the vibrations of the strings. We then walk across the body and we have our six strings. We're going to learn more about those later, the different notes and the numbers for them and a good way to memorize them. Underneath those strings, you will have pickups on your electric guitar. The job of these is to literally pick up the vibrations from the strings and then turn them into electrical signals. Now if you've got an acoustic guitar, you'll probably see a big sound hole. That depth for that sound hole in the wood that's making up the guitar is what's taking those vibrations of the strings and then amplifying the sound of what you're playing. You also get electroacoustic. They might have pickups attached, which are fervor going to amplify the sound. You will have a little jack socket and a jack lead coming out to go into an amplifier or recording software, whatever you're using at the time. Now because we're using an electric guitar, you'll also see these different dials and switches and knobs that are existing on the body. They are all affecting the tone of our guitar. This one is affecting the volume. We've got another one here. Let's say that's going to affect the time, the brightness or darkness of what we're creating. In these switches and these dials are ways of setting combinations of how the vibrations are picked up from the body. It will dictate the tone that's being captured across the body. You'll have a more brighter, thinner tone towards the bridge and then a warmer tone as we come towards the neck, each electric guitar that you see will have various combinations of how these dials and these switches are presented, but they've all got similar roles, just different tones being captured. We then work onto the neck of our guitar and we have these metal strips to exist all the way along. They're known as frets. That is where we're going to place our fingers behind, tucked nice and closely to create order lovely called notes, rifts, and songs we're going to learn throughout this class, but we'll worry more about the technique for them later on. The neck, also known as the fretboard, that houses all these different frets. We then work up to the nut, which is found at the end of the neck or the beginning, whichever way you want to look it, some Some will say this is the end of your note creations. Some people will say that's the start. Generally the nut is another area where the strings are going to be separated from each other, but also raised slightly off of the neck so that they're not catching those frets and creating what's known as fret bars. We move past the nut and we come on to the headstock. This is where our tuning pegs are, where we're going to be able to tune the strings. We have these little devices that are again, keeping the strings nice and tight, ready for us to adjust them in whatever way we need to. There we go. That's a quick run through of all the parts on the guitar. Hopefully you're feeling a bit more familiar with it now, stick with me through these first few lessons, I promise we're going to get going with some real plans soon. We just need to cover all these essential bits of information first, so you're getting familiar and comfortable with the instrument. You will then be able to understand all the terminology that's used. Hopefully it will give you a smoother and more enjoyable learning experience. We'll just jump into the next video. 4. Playing Technique: Let's make sure we're getting the right playing techniques and things like posture in place early on so we're not forming any bad habits at the beginning of our guitar learning journey. Hopefully your guitar has got a nice curve at the bottom so you can just rest it comfortably on your knee. You get some pretty odd shaped guitars that will make that a bit trickier. I'm sure you'll be able to find a way of it sitting comfortably for you. Generally, you want to be nice and relaxed, not too tensed. Try not to be hunched over the guitar. Be like if you were playing sports you want to be nice and limber, free-flowing before you enter anything like that. The guitar is very similar. Try not to have your shoulders really tensed. Like I said, try not to be pulled over that guitar because it can really restrict our movement. We want to be sitting upright w want to be nice and loose so that we can approach our guitar in a really relaxed manner and then get more aggressive with it if we need to further down the line. We also need to look at our guitar pick. Hopefully you've got one of these. Don't panic if you haven't, people do use their fingers, you'll see some people just put their thumb and first finger together and strum through the guitar. That is a technique you can develop, but I'd recommend to have more of a definitive playing style, to be able to pick out the notes. To be more of a beginner friendly technique, I would suggest getting a guitar pick. The one I've got here is a 60 millimeter thickness. That's a general standard size, average size that people would use. You'll get a lot lighter picks as well, which have a much breezier sound when you're strumming for the strings, and you'd get a lot thicker picks as well, which can be really good for your shredding. If you're picking out loads of lead riffs, it adds that thicker tone to it. It can help dig out the string is a bit more. But generally to run down the middle, 60 millimeters is a good place to start. To hold our pick if you curve your first finger, rest the pick over the top and then bring your thumb down, and we want about this much just pointing away from our thumb and first finger. That's a nice technique to develop with our pick, which is not too little showing which would make it harder to make contact with the strings. It's not too much, which means it'll be harder to have control over the pick. We want about that much showing and that'll help us give a really good definitive control to what we're playing. There's going to be times when we want to rest our hand on the bridge maybe when we're picking out certain notes from a chord. When you're doing this, make sure you don't come too far over the strings because we'll get that muted sound, which is going to be useful later on, but not for us at the beginning. If you come too far over, you'll just lose the notes from the strings altogether. We want to be just enough back so that we can hear those strings nice and clear. Don't worry too much about these strumming and picking techniques, we are going to work a lot more on these layer, but this is just a bit of a general overview. When you are strumming your wrist wants to be nice and loose like we spoke about our shoulders not too tensed so we can glide over those strings. Then if we want to get a bit more intense with it, we can and we can adjust our arm, our hand, and our attacking motions accordingly. When you are resting on the bridge and we're picking out one string at a time, I want to mention early on, we're going to try and create an idea of a down, up, an alternating pattern going on with our strings. We don't want to be down all the time. There's going to be rifts and there's going to be techniques where that's useful when we want to use that, but generally to build our speed when we're playing things like this early on, we want to be able to go down, up with our guitar strings. It's a much easier way of being able to develop speed in our technique. We're sitting comfortably. We know a bit about technique. Let's get our guitar tuned. 5. Tuning: We need to learn how to tune our guitar, and the different notes that each of these strings are. In regards to the different notes that each of them play, don't worry, there's a couple of really handy and easy rhymes that we can utilize to memorize them. You will sometimes see your strings numbered. That will be from the thinnest up to the thickest, is one, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, finished to thick. The notes of each of these strings, are e, B, G, D, A, and E. That is a lovely rhyme that's used more for the younger years generation to help us remember the strings. That is elephants and donkeys grow big ears, very nice. Now my guitar tutor taught me something very different. He went from the thinnest to the thickest. Every bad guitarist deserves an execution. Harsh. Has that for pressure in your first lesson. But, it does stick in your head, I guarantee that. Elephants and donkeys grow big ears or every bad guitarist deserves an execution. You will get different string thicknesses for each of the strings known as the gauge of the string, but we will cover that a bit more later on when we learn how to restring our guitar. Sorry for interrupting, but I realized that I didn't say much about this device that we're about to use, a headstock tuner. I'll put some links below so you can check these out. Very reasonable price, very handy to have, I highly recommend getting one. They're basically attached to the end of your guitar, the headstock, the end of the neck where we have our headstock, we can clip these guitar tuners on, and once they're turned on, you pluck the string and it will tell you what notes you are playing. Obviously, very handy to have. There are two things we're going to need to be aware of when we are tuning, a sharp and flat. If you are tuning up, if you are tightening a string, you are making it sharper. If you are loosening a string, if we are coming down, then we're flattening it. If we were trying to get to the note E and we went too far past it and it become an F, that means we've gotten too sharp. If it was at the note D, that means we'd still be too flat and we would need to sharpen it more until we get to the note E. Hopefully that makes a bit of sense, let's get tuning that guitar. I want to give you a quick example of how to use these headstock tuners. I've purposely put a few other strings out of tune. We're looking for the green light to come on, which will mean everything is sounding nice and in tune. Let's start with our thickest A. Looking good, slightly sharp, or come down ever so slightly. Then there we go, we're in. A string. You can see from the arrows and maybe you can hear as well that that's a bit sharp. I like to come down quite far and then work our way back up again. We can see the arrows mean we need to sharpen it a little bit more and there we go, we're in. Maybe change them once more slides, but you will get some strings and some tuners that can be very fiddly and very picky, so be patient with them. The D string. Looking good. The G, hopefully, you could hear after that D. The G string did sound a bit flat and you can see from the arrows and no green light. It is flat. Ever so slightly small movements, were in. The B string, looking good. And the E string, the finished E, slightly sharp. Very slightly, bring that down to small movements and see what that green light stays on. There we go, everything nice and in tune. If you don't have a headstock tuner, we can utilize whatever the guitar is currently tuned to to make sure all of the strings are in tune with each other. If that don't make sense, let's break that down a little bit more. We can tune the rest of our guitar to whatever the low E is. If we don't have a headstock tuner to reference it, to make sure it is an E, we can make sure wherever note it is playing, the rest of the guitar will become in tune to that note, it still sounds lovely and harmonious and works together when we do all our different chord shapes. This is how we do that. Note, we haven't put our fingers behind fresh yet. But feel free to follow along if you want to. We're going to put our second finger behind the 5th fret of the lowest E string. We want the open string underneath to sound the same. Those two strings, those two notes should be exactly the same. It's a way of referencing so that wherever our lowest E is playing, the string underneath the A string is the same. That fifth fret is an A note. The fifth fret of the E string is playing an A note, the open string underneath is an A note. You heard A sound the same. If we were to then move that down to the next string still on the 5th fret, we want the A and the D string to sound the same. Now if that D string was a bit flat, here that doesn't sound nice together so we know that that string isn't in tune with the A string. We need to sharpen that, we don't have our headstock tuner to use. We go up a little bit. Still down, turn quite right. We go up a little bit more. There we go. That is now in tune of each other. We're playing a D note on the 5th fret of the A, and the open string below is a D note. Moving on, we do the same thing. We're still on the 5th fret. D and G, sounding lovely. If we got to that B, and it was too sharp, we can hear that really unpleasant sound, it clashes. We're on the 4th fret this time. We've done the 5th fret on the E, A, and D. When we get to the G string, we go to the full fret of the G, and we play the open B underneath. I haven't got my headstock tuner to reference. Pretend that's not there. I should have taken that off. But we know our B string is sounding not right rhyme. Get used to that sharp sound, get used to hearing that that isn't sitting right. We need to bring that B string down. Now generally when you're tuning down, my tutor always said to me, it's quite good to go past the point of where you need to be and then tune back up again. That's always worked quite well for me. Some people will just come down a little bit until it sounds in tune. I like to go back quite far, and then work my way back up again. It doesn't sound right. There we go, we're in. That base now sounds the same as the full fret of the G. Then we go back to the 5th fret for the last one, the B and the E string. There we go. A little way for you to tune your guitar. If you haven't got a headstock tuner, I definitely recommend getting one of the headstock tuners though. I've put the links in the description for you to get a nice little cheap one that will do the job. We've also now learned a good ear training exercise, which is great to implement early on. One more lesson and then we're going to get going with some proper plan. 6. Reading Chord Boxes & Tab: As promised, we're nearly there with a proper plan, but once you've got through all this initial bit of information, you hopefully won't need it again, and each time you pick up your guitar, you can just get going straight away with all the fun creative parts. If you do need to dip back into this information as a bit of a refresher, you can. We're going to need to be able to read and understand the music, the chords, the riffs that are presented to us. Now you can use sheet score music which is used a lot in the classical world. Great technique, great knowledge to have, but it can be quite hard to digest and get up and running with quickly. A much more easier, beginner, friendly and accessible way is to learn chord boxes and tab. First up, are chord boxes. You will see the nut at the top. Coming down from there are lines that represent the frets that we're going to need to play, and then coming across those lines are the six strings that we're going to be playing. Within those lines, and in those boxes, you're going to see little circles appear that shows what frets we need to play and what strings we're going to be on. Then hopefully, sometimes, not always, you will get little numbers that appear in those to show what fingers we're going to need to use. Now you will also sometimes see an X which represents don't play. That means we don't catch that string, or if we do catch that string, we're muting it to make sure the note doesn't sound. You also see circles sometimes, which means we're going to play that string open, so no fingers on any frets. We just catch that string open. Sorry, jumping in once more for an extra added bit of clarity for that chord box just in case it didn't make sense. All the numbers, all the visuals, and the dots that you saw there, we would be playing and constructing a C major chord. As we can see, the lowest E had the X above, so that wouldn't be played. We would have our first, second, and third fingers covering the first three frets, and they would be on the B string, the D string, and A string. Our G, and our highest E string would be open. There's no frets on them at all, and we would just make sure that when we strum through, we have the A down to the E sounding in the lowest E. If we do catch it, it's going to be muted by a thumb or our third finger because we have that X over the top, you will find that a lot more about that chord and how to construct and play it properly later on. But I just wanted to demonstrate that in a little bit more detail for anyone that might have struggled with those chord boxes, with those visuals, because it can be quite a daunting and overwhelming thing to digest and take on bold straight away. Hopefully that helps a little bit. Let's jump back into that lesson. Next, you will also see Tab. This is where just six lines will be represented and all the information will be contained on them. You will see the thickest string at the bottom and the thinnest at the top. It's a bit like if you imagine having a bit of paper in front of you with this information on and your guitar was laying flat, the thinnest string would be furthest away from you, and the thickest would be at the bottom, closest to you. Now, coming across from that line to the furthest left, which again will represent our nut, we will see information on those lines. If you saw a circle, an O on the D string, that means that we just play that D string once. If you was to see a number 2 on the A string, that means we play the second fret of the A string once. If you were to see five number threes on the G string, that means we play the third fret of the G string five times. Other information, you will sometimes see the chords written above the tab lines to say that you need to pass C major or a D major, and then hopefully if more information is given, you will see numbers appear down those strings that represent what frets you need to play to build that C major, that D major, whatever chords being presented to you. If you then need to know what fingers to use for those chords, you can refer back to the chord boxes. Now that's done, let's get playing this instrument. 7. First Exercise: This first exercise we're going to learn is great for building the foundations of our playing. I use it a lot with beginners because it's really good for stretching our fingers and implementing the right techniques. It's really good for getting our fingers warmed up and ready and also build good strength in our hands nice and early on. It's a chromatic exercise, which means it's one note after the other, so it's not going to sound really harmonious or pretty, but we're not using it for that. We're using it to implement those really good foundations, the right technique early on in our playing. The first thing we're going to need to do is rest our hand on the bridge. Remember we spoke earlier about not coming too far over the strings because we'll start to lose the note that we want and it will mute. We bring it back enough just so we can hear that note coming through nice and clear. Every guitar model's bridge will be a little bit different, but just find the right place for you, which means that you're not cutting that string out. When you have that clear tone, we're going to start to put our fingers beyond our frets now. Our first finger is going to tuck nicely behind the first fret of our lowest E string. We want to be on the tip of our finger, not too far over the neck of the guitar, we lose that control and that definition that we're after. Make sure tip of the finger, tucked nice and closely behind that fret. If you're right on the fret, you get a bit of buzz, a horrible sound, we're not after that. We want to go just back so we have that nice, clear tone coming through. Looking at the rest of our hands, you notice that we don't want to be too cramped up because that will restrict our stretching abilities and our movement in our hand. We want to keep our wrist nice and low. You can just see how that allows our fingers to fan out a lot more and also we want our thumb to be around the middle of the neck, at the back of the guitar. Not too low, not too high, restricting that movement, again around the middle, so that again, it allows our fingers to fan out nicely. Our thumb is also really important in this instance because it is that squeeze between, say, the thumb and the first finger if you're playing the first note with this exercise that helps bring that note out. It's that little squeeze that helps everything come through nice and clear. Don't apply a ton of grip. We're not looking to crush the guitar neck. We just want to add a healthy little bit of squeeze from that thumb to help everything come through nice and clearly. We've got our finger beyond that first fret, we got a hand on the bridge. Remember earlier I mentioned about alternating the picking patterns so we're not just going down the whole time. We want to play down up. Just get that coming through nice and clear first. Once we've got that first fret sounding lovely, bring your second finger down to the second fret, but keep that first finger where it is. We've gone 1, 2. Again, the second finger, stretching over to that second fret, not on it, not too far back. Get a bit of a buzz again if we're too far back, tucked nice and closely to the fret, 1, 2. Play, one on each now. Make sure that second fret is sounding clear and then start to alternate between the two, and remember that down-up picking pattern at all times. Down on the 1, up on the 2. We didn't bring our third finger down to the third fret. See how we're using one finger per fret in this exercise, it's great for stretching those hands out, keeping that wrist low, keeping that thumb around the center, allowing our hands to fan out nicely. Play all them together, 1, 2, 3. Looking for a clear tone every time. Pause this at any point, take your time with it. It's important to get the notes right rather than rushing through. This information is here for you to work with at your own speed. Then we bring our little finger down to the full fret. Down, up, down, up 1, 2, 3, 4. Then that little finger is probably the hardest one to use. It shares a muscle with our third. You'll notice that stretch probably creates a bit more tension, persevere with that. The little finger is probably going to be the hardest one to train, especially for getting on the tips of the finger with that curve in the first knuckle, but work on it, persevere with that. Because it doesn't come straight away, but I promise you it will come together eventually. It can look like a simple thing at times when you put something like that together. But it is a hard technique to implement, but it's a really important one to get early on. If you have no previous play and experience, your fingers are going to be alien to this, so they're going to need training. Take your time with it, it will click. Once you've played it on that lowest E string, let's move down to the A. Same thing. Once you're comfortable on that string, go into the D string. You'll notice where the different thicknesses is. It does something slightly different to your fingers. You're probably starting to get these lines across your fingers as well. Once you've built the calluses in the tips of your fingers, they'll become a lot stronger and you won't get that pain that you might be experiencing now. The more you play this, the more those fingers will strengthen up and it won't hurt as much. Then we try on the G, B, E. Use this technique and others that we're going to work on as a way of warming your fingers up, getting ready for the more exciting plan. You don't need to spend 10, 20 minutes on these. A few minutes at the beginning of your guitar playing will just get your fingers ready for everything else that's going to come and a couple of really cool riffs from massive bands that we're going to learn after this are really going to utilize this stretching technique and that one finger per fret. You're already doing some really good groundwork for what's about to come. Now, once you've played that just in that first position, those first four frets, think about sliding that up. You will get something else from your playing by doing this. The frets aren't the same distance apart. The tension will feel a little bit different. Your strings will have moved a little bit further away from the neck of the guitar so you'll have to apply a little bit more pressure, it's again, adding something else to your fingers' abilities. Let's use the A string to mix things up a little bit. We've played those first four. Once you've played that fourth finger on the fourth fret, slide your first finger up to the fifth and try to maintain that finger per fret distance. They're ready, they're anticipating that they're going to come down. The further your fingers are away, the further they have to come back to the neck of the guitar. Have them there waiting, and we just go 5, 6, 7, 8. Once you've played those four, 9, 10, 11, 12 and as far as your guitar will allow, you can even throw that little odd one in if you've got that and we work our way back. Looking for a clean tone every time. Now obviously, that's not the most pretty thing you're ever going to play on the guitar, but I promise you it's a really good way to get started. You're sending everything in the right direction. You're training your hands in a really productive way. Each time you start your practice, mix that up, try it on a different string, don't do the same string every time, try it in different positions, different fore frets, up and down. You could start on the 12th if you wanted to. Just getting your fingers used to fanning out, building their stretching abilities, their strength and their independence. Practice that at your own pace and when you're ready, let's get stuck into a couple of riffs. 8. First Riff: The White Stripes: Seven Nation Army by the band The White Stripes. A great beginner-friendly riff to learn. Probably one of the biggest anthems of the last 20 years in terms of riffs that have been released, I've heard it everywhere from a political rally to in the football stadium, is iconic, so you've got a great anthem in your lockout once you've learned this. So that exercise that we just learned is a really good buildup for this riff because we are going to be covering four frets with four fingers. I'm going to show you two versions, one higher up the fretboard one in the first position. Let's start with that higher one that utilizes the exercise we just worked on, so I'd like you to tuck your first finger behind the seventh fret of the A string, keeping that firm nice and low so we can find our fingers out, stretch them nice and wide. Our wrist is resting down on the bridge and we are going to be plucking the A string once. Nice, clear tone, and we leave a good gap between when we play that, now, again, if we plan too close together, it sounds very different. After we've played that now the second time, we bring our little finger across to the 10th fret of the A string, but we can bring that second and third finger down as well just for some more stability in our plane. Now, it's just before I play that second note on the seventh fret, I relax my first finger so it cuts it dead, you get a little bit more of a stab and a pulse to what we're planning. It's a bit more definitive. I just relaxed that first finger ever so slightly. That's our first three nodes. Again, take your time with this pause at any point, work at your own pace. We go back to that seventh fret for our fourth note, altogether. After this, we slide back to our fifth, a third, and our second. Notice every time I move between those threats, a very slightly loosen the pressure of my first finger, so it allows me to slide back to the fret that I need to play, altogether nice and slow. Especially here. Relax that finger. Again, it makes that note dead for a second, makes it more definitive. Lovely, you have the main riff that makes up that song. Hopefully, that's recognizable. If you don't like this tune, that's a shame, but just take it for the technique that is giving you this class is going to be like that, I'm going to cover lots of different songs from different bands, different areas, different styles. You're probably not going to like every song, it's hard to cater for everyone, but always take the technique from it, the development, and then apply that to all the music you love, that's going to be the theme throughout all of this. In the chorus, it very slightly changes. When it goes to the three, it goes 3, 5, 3, 2. It alternates the order of them, starts with the first one we did. Then the alternation froze quickly or open A, at the end of it. Then if you want to play that buildup that comes out of that chorus, there's another two chords that are in there, we're not going to get to those four chords yet that will come later, you can just play the third fret of the A, the open A, and then open A, and that whole chorus would be. So if that's a bit tricky and it's taken a while to get going, but you're really keen to play the riff. We can learn a version in the first position which doesn't involve as much stretching. For this, we're going to put our first finger behind the second fret of the day. We play that twice, like in the other version. Then we play an open G string underneath it, and then back to that second fret. First finger, tap, nice and close, two hits. Open G, back to that D. Now if we don't want that open G string to resonate across the rest of the riff, we can angle our first finger slightly so it cuts it out. I'm just relaxing that first finger ever so slightly, so when that G is playing, it just comes down and mutes it. It's only got a catchy ever so slightly , and it will cut that note out. To play the rest of the riff, we play an open D, and then we go to our third of the A and seconds, that we did in the other version. If you wanted to play that chorus bit where it alternates. We go three, open D again, then 3, 2, and flow in that open A like we did in the first version, and then we'd resolve it in the same way that we did in the first version as well, and an open A. Lovely. Look for those opportunities where you can mute the open strings underneath, if you don't want them resonating through the rest of the riff, much like in that chorus where we alternate that second half, we can use our first or our second finger angled slightly to mute that open D. Notice how we bring that first finger down, so we get more definition in what we're playing. Lovely first riff. Now the hope is all going good for you when you're ready let's jump into the next one. 9. Nirvana - Come As You Are: Nirvana's Come As You Are, another brilliant riff for us to be learning early in our guitar-playing journey. There are calls to exist throughout this song. We're going to take that main riff that occurs throughout the track. It's a very common song and in particular, a very common riff. We're going to learn it so that our development is improved, and it's just another good fun riff to have in your locker. If you want to play along to the original recording of this song, you're going to have to change the tuning of your guitar strings. Think back to that tuning lesson that we did. You would have to take each string down what's known as a whole step or a whole tone. As an example, that low E would go down and become a D. On your headstock tuner, instead of this being an E, you'd want to see D on your tuner, so you keep bringing that down. The A string, because we're only using the first two strings for this riff, would come down to a G. Because we're not doing the rest of the course in this lesson, I wouldn't worry about tuning all the other strings. You just bring the E and the A string down to the D and a G string. But for the sake of this lesson, and because not everyone's going to have a headstock tuner, I'm going to play in the normal tuning. It works like that. We can play that exact riff. But if we then listened to Nirvana's, Come As You Are, the original recording, we would sound out of tune even though we're playing the right pattern. Something to bear in mind. Hopefully, it doesn't sound too confusing. I'll put that in the PDFs as well as a reminder so you can see nice and clearly what to do. This get playing that riff then. The first thing we're going to do, again, rest their hand down on the bridge. Very handy for us. This riff starts with two open notes on the lowest E string, but have your first and second finger ready to come down onto the first and second frets of the lowest E string. We just go open-open. On tonight in that pattern down, up. Then we go 1, 2. Open open, 1, 2. Lovely, I first four notes played. What a second thing is down. We're going to bring in the open A string, and we're going to go open on the A string, 2, on the E string and we're going to do that twice. From the top, keeping that second finger down. Once we've done that, we work our way down with a 2, 1, open. We've played open, 2, open, 2. Then on the lowest E string, we do 2,1, open. Keeping on those tips of the fingers what we spoke about earlier, the bends in the knuckles, our forearms come up a little bit higher because we are playing over those first and second frets. We're not having to have our risk as low and spread out, but make sure it still hasn't come too far over because that will restrict our movement and stretching ability. From the top open, open 1, 2. Start with the open A string now, work our way down. Then we bring in the second fret of the A string. We played at once, and we end with two open notes. From the top. That's where the riff ends. But when it loops for the next time round, it starts with our second finger on the second fret of the A string. It's already in position, is already in place. When you play in those last two open notes. Don't move that second finger from where it is. Instead of there being two open notes at the beginning, you've got that second fret of the A, and then it should open one, 2 and you're back to that sign pattern that occurred in the first half. Let's play that from the top, remembering to keep our second finger down at the end on the A string. Second finger. See how each turn that bar ends. We start next time with our second finger. I am going to a little bit fast, and as it sounds a bit more like the original. Excellent, another riff. We'd keep that first and second finger covering those first and second frets. Remember not to bring your fingers too far away from the fretboard when they're not being used. Again, the further I go away, the further they have to come back. It removes that consistency and that smoothness that we're after, and racing down on the bridge, not muting the strings, nice clear tone. You will absolutely nail it. Enjoy. 10. Chord Introduction: In these next few lessons we're going to start to look at forming chords. So far we've just been playing single note riffs, one note after the other. Now when we start to construct chords, that means we are playing at least three or more notes together at the same time. We strum through those three or more notes and we are creating a chord. Now I'm going to quickly throw a little bit of information at you here, don't worry about it, it doesn't need to be fully understood. It's just a hopefully little bit start to stick so that when we tackle chords further down the line these things will start to make sense and it'll all piece together. Most commonly you will hear of major and minor chords. An easy way to look at these or think of them is, major sound happy, minor sound sad. Those three notes, we said earlier that we need to bring together to create a chord. You would take the first, the third, and the fifth note of a key's scale to create a major chord. If you wanted to create the minor version of that, you would flatten that third note so it becomes a minor chord. Don't worry about that yet, don't overanalyze it, just know that basic principle of the difference between major and minor. You'll also start to hear the difference in their sound as we work through a few chord options in the next couple of lessons. The chords we're going to cover are known as open chords and they're played in the first position, which means they cover the first three frets. They're incredibly common and they are used in pretty much every style of music you could think of. Let's get going with them. 11. First Chord - E Minor: I mentioned briefly earlier that you might be starting to see these lines appear across the tips of your fingers, and you probably getting a few aches and pains. Persevere, I promise this does get easier. The more you play, your fingers build strength, calluses start to develop in your fingertips and that will become far more durable. But you can break your practice up into smaller segments if you're really struggling with that, but your daily practice, your regular routines will eventually build that strength. Our first chord then, we're going to look at the chord E minor. We just need two fingers, across two strings, behind one fret. That's what makes this a lovely, beginner, friendly chord for us to tackle. We are going to put our first finger behind the second fret of the A string. Now remembering all those little tips we've been working on, keeping our risk low, not bringing it up too high, restricting the stretch and the movement our fingers, that all applies here. The tips of the fingers are what we want to play the note with, and we want to have that curve, that lovely bend in our first knuckle. Once your first finger is behind that second fret of the A, you are then going to want to put your second finger underneath it onto the second fret of the D. Make sure that thumb's not creeping too far over the top and affecting what we're doing on the fretboard. Keep that good posture. Remember we want to be nice and relaxed, not too hunched over. Now, this curve in the fingers, really important, because we don't want to affect the other strings that are around the ones that we're fretting. At the moment, only two strings are being played, but we want to strum through all six strings. First of all, make sure that A string, and that D string, are coming through nice and clear. If you're too far back, you get some horrible buzzy sounds. If you're too far over the fret, you start to create the wrong notes and also get a bit of a dead muted sound that we don't want. So tucked nicely behind, your first finger will obviously slide back a little bit to accommodate the second finger underneath it, the second thing we will be closer to the fret, and that nice curve will make sure that the G underneath is open. If I relax that second finger too much, it'll mute that open G string. I want to be right on the tips, so it comes through clear as well as all the other strings. So try that out for me. Now remember, we spoke a little bit about keeping our wrist nice and loose when we strum, bring your pick on to the lowest E string, and just glide through all six strings. Few times for me, just catching every string. We're not looking to dig too far into the strings, we don't want to get caught up and make it all jittery and rigid. We're just looking to glide, and our wrist is a big way of dictating how we do that. We're not looking to move the shoulder, we don't really even need to move our elbow because a lot of it is in that wrist. Small movements with the other lower part of the arm, and so much of that control is with the wrist. We'll add some lovely strumming patterns to our chords later on, but for now just focus on getting that down strum. To increase our muscle memory, move that shape away from the body of the guitar and then bring it back. You don't even have to worry about strumming every time here, we're just getting used to our fingers falling back into that position. Don't incorporate this habit into your riff playing earlier, because it's so important to keep our fingers close to the fretboard when we're playing a piece of music, to keep everything nice and smooth, and consistent. But just while we're sitting here practicing that chord, relax your fingers and bring them back to that shape a few times, so that your muscles get familiar with that movement and that shape. A thumb is really important for helping squeeze these notes. We add little bit of pressure, not too much. We don't want to be really tense and hurt hands in any way, but just that little squeeze will help us fret the strings. There we go, you have your first guitar chord. Nice one. 12. E Major: The difference between major and minor. We briefly mentioned this a few lessons ago, but we're now going to hear it in practice. We're going to learn a major chord. We've just done a minor. We're now going to learn a major. I'm not going to break the theory side of things down in a lot of detail now. We are going to cover that later on in this class. I think it can be quite overwhelming if you tackle too much theory early on. It can be hard to understand. I believe if you haven't developed much practice and play and ability with the guitar, the more you understand your fretboard, the more you feel familiar and comfortable with shapes and different riffs, and the knowledge you've gained from them. You start to slowly piece it all together. So that when more theory is introduced, you can put it into practice and I believe it then clicks a bit easier. This build the major version of E then. We've done our E minor, we were using our first and second fingers. To play this E major shape, we're going to switch that first and second finger into second and third fingers. So your first comes off. A second goes where our first was, and our third goes underneath. We're still playing that E minor chord at the moment, just with different fingers. The major element comes in with our first finger. It goes onto the first fret of the G to just show you that nice and clearly there. Our first finger is on the first fret of the G string. Second and third, second fret of the A and D. Make sure we got each one sounding clearly. Then strum for all six strings. Can you hear the major element in that? Can you hear how is added that happier brightness to everything? A minor sound. Pretty dao, gloomy, beautiful but sad sounding. Major. Just one note difference. Now you might be thinking why didn't we just use our second and third finger for the minor because it'd be easier to make it a major. Well, that E minor shape played that way links really well to a lot of other chords. You'll start to notice as you develop through your guitar playing that there's so much importance on what fingers you choose to use. It will be dependent upon what you're playing, different songs. You might start to formulate those chords slightly different with slightly different fingerings because it means it will link to the next chord in a much smoother and transitional way. You'll notice my farmers crept up a bit for this shape. That's okay. We're a little bit more confined in this area or anyway, when we're tucked into that first and second fret, we're not looking to be spread out. We're not looking to prepare ourselves to these other chords that might involve as being a little bit more lower placed on the neck. A firm can creep up, bring everything a little bit closer, a little bit tighter, but still make sure it doesn't come over and interfere with that open E string because then it will start to mute it. Then another thing to be mindful of curbing the first finger so that we don't catch that open B string underneath. We want that to be nice and clear. First fret of the G, open B. One more thing, if we are a lot closer like we are in this position, make sure that your first finger doesn't go too close to that high E string if you're too bunched up, unlike the pad of your finger here, comes over and catches that higher E. It will take out the game and we'll lose the node that we want to hear. Just make sure it's away from the neck. You've got this nice curve, a nice little gap for the open string to come through nice and clear. Everyone's hand shape is slightly different. You're going to have to make small nuances, small adjustments to make sure that you play this chord properly. You will see some guitarists with their thumb a lot lower down than I am there. They might be playing the next song and their thumb will be higher up because they're going to be moving to a chord afterwards that requires their thumb to come over and mute that low E string. Just out of habit and years of playing and practice, they can anticipate what they're going to need to do next. All these little movements are in place, ready to go. Don't overanalyze what other people are doing. Look to them, learn from them definitely, but be aware of your own hand size and shape is going to require you to make small little adjustments that are unique to your positioning. There are general rules of thumb, which is probably a really bad pun there isn't it? But just be aware of the little changes that you're going to need to make to them. We've now got A minor. We were planning with the first and second, but here we've done it with the second and third. Then you've added that first fret of the G to make your major chord. You've now got two chords, so way let's added a few more. 13. Chord Development: Now that you're hopefully comfortable with a major and a minor chord, we're going to throw four more chords into the mix. Three of these in particular are going to be used a lot later on in this class when we start to work on songwriting and implementing our own lead guitar ideas over chord progressions that we've written together. These chords will appear a lot then. I thought it'd be nice to get them involved in the class early on, so you're going to be feeling really comfortable and confident with them by the time all that songwriting stuff comes about. First one we're going to look at is C major. A bit of a trickier stretch for us, it's going to be a cross free frets, but once you've got this is going to unlock loads of doors. Let's start by putting our first finger on the first fret of the B string. We want to have that nice curve in the knuckle again, really important here because as well as bringing that note out first fret of the B string, we want to make sure that it's curved enough, so the open high E string comes through as well. Should be able to hear both of those nice and clear. After that, we've got an open G. Really dependent upon that position of the first finger again, if the first finger comes too far up, it's going to mute that G, we want that G to be open. Tips of the finger to first and those free string should be sounding nice and clear. A second finger then stretches across to the second fret of the D string. Still really on that tip, keeping that nice curve, second fret of the D string. Then our third finger needs to stretch all the way across to the A string. We have our C major chord. It's a tricky one, but it's so good for your development. First finger, first fret of B, second finger, second fret of the D, third finger, third fret of the A. See how we've actually got that one finger per fret stretch going on like we was doing with our first stretching exercise that we worked on earlier, this is obviously a bit of a step up because it's now spread across different strings as well as different frets. You have your C major chord. The last bit we want to add to that chord before it's totally finished, is making sure that we mute the low E string. Now, we can bring our thumb up to do this and it's so it just comes slightly over the neck of the guitar and it just touches down onto that low E so it takes the note, is completely dead. Our thumb is just doing that job to mute the low E string. You will see some people just use the top of their third finger to mute that. That might be a bit tricky depending on your hand size, shape, the stretch that you've got going on at the moment so your thumb can come over and do the job as well. That way, when you strum for all six strings, which I'd like you to do now. If you catch that low E, it doesn't matter because it's not there. Even if it does come through, it doesn't sound bad because if you think about when we learned our notes earlier, we know that this is an open E and we know that that's an open E as well. They are the same note, just a different octave. This one's lower than the high E, so it doesn't sound like it clashes, it just makes it a different chord and it sounds a lot boomier, a bit muddier. If we take that E out, take it out, just cleans everything up a little bit. So that C major chord, thumb over the top, new in that low E. We're ready now to change into our A minor chord. We've done the hard work. We've got this chord that stretches across free frets, we're now just going to move one finger, which is our third finger, underneath the second fret of the D string, onto the second fret of the A string. We strum from the open A. You can see now why it's handy to have that thumb over the top, because we don't want to hear this lower E in this code as well. We're just going to strum from our A. Our second and our first finger were already in the position that we needed them to be from that C major, we just come back third finger underneath the second finger, strum from the A, we have A minor. We can link those chords beautifully. Again, you can strum all six strings if that low E is muted by the thumb. No nightmare if it comes through, you've noticed high E is open so low E would be the same note, again, it just cleans it up. Play that. Really nice. Such a lovely chord to play that one. I really like A minor. From here, we're going to move into our F major chord and there's some linking going on again, which is really nice for us. Our first finger is going to stay where it is. Our second finger is going to go down to where the third finger was. Our second finger is now behind the second fret of the G. Our third finger is doing that free fret stretch again, but instead of in the same major as being on the A string, this time it's going to be on the D string. We have got first finger, first fret of the B, second finger, second fret of the G, third finger, third fret of the D. We're going to use our first finger. We're going to relax it slightly to cut out the high E string. It goes back ever so slightly and it means that high E does not ring through. We've just got the strings from the D, G, B, and now high E. Now that is one version of F you can learn. You've noticed how about to bring my thumb right over now to mute the low E and the I. I can strum all six strings, and three of them are being muted with our fingers. Well, one with a finger, two, the low E and I, with our thumb. There are other versions of F that you will see very commonly throughout guitar playing. It makes a slight difference to what the code is, but we are going to learn it now, because I think is a really important thing for you to know. We're going to now change what we just did. Our first finger is going to come back up. We're bringing in that E note that high E. We've now technically made it an F major 7. Don't worry too much about that yet. We're going to bring our third finger up to the third fret of the A string again, where it was for our C major and we're now going to put our little finger underneath that third finger. Our little finger is now doing what our third finger was doing a minute ago. Very common F shape that you will see. Just so you know, we've got that high E note in there, which made it an F major 7. We've just put the third fret of the A, which is actually our C note. Remember from our C major chord, that is our home note of that. So that's now a part of the F major chord. C exists here and here so this would be known as F major 7 over C. I've thrown out little bits of information there, I don't expect all of it to stick, but I think it will help when we start to tackle and break down more chord construction and theory later on. Really good one for our development now, so I'm glad we got a couple of different versions. The normal F major shape, just using free strings and then we've expanded that and added another note by progressing to this one. The F major 7. One more chord then in this lesson using four fingers this time. It doesn't link quite as nicely as the other three, but I thought I'd challenge you a little bit. We're building our G major chord here. First finger onto the second fret of the A string. Our second finger, then comes across to the third fret of the A string. Make sure they're coming through nice and clear. We then want to make sure our D and G string are open. No fingers are interfering with them, we've got a nice curve in the first finger, to allow them to come through. Our third finger goes on to the third fret of B string and our little finger goes underneath it onto the third fret of the high E, strumming all six strings. It's a really nice, full bodied called G major, incredibly common in music. All of these chords we've just learned are actually the very common. A song we're going to be tackling in a little while is a very good demonstration of that. G major. Start by strumming these chords individually, make sure they're sounding nice and clear, and then look to link them in the order that we just practiced. You'd start with the C major. When you're ready, you'd make that movement to A minor. Remember that second and first finger don't come off. We'd go to F. We could do our normal major shape. Then we've got the big jump over to G. It's a tricky one. But remember earlier we spoke about muscle memory. If that's the hardest change for you, just keep doing that one, F to G. Try the more full bodied F. Repetition is key with this practice and development. Promise you the more you do it, it'll be sounding really smooth. Back to your C. Add a little count of four in-between. Don't worry about being bang on the money so that you land on the one every time. It's just to start to give ourselves some structure. One, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Four more chords that are available to you and that will open the doors to a lot of songs. We touched on timing a little bit there, let's expand on that a bit more in the next lesson. 14. Timing: We're now going to talk about timing. We can learn all our codes and riffs and become great at these techniques, but to really master an instrument, we're going to need to develop and understand timing. The timing of music is broken down into beats and bars. We break music down into bars so we can separate sections, gain reference points, and develop an awareness of where we are. Music is basically made up of multiple bars. These bars are sometimes referred to as measures, but you'll hear that more in the classical world. Think about when you hear people do a 1, 2, 3, 4 to count someone in. Well, that 1, 2,3, 4 is still existing throughout that whole piece of music, it's the backbone that keeps everyone locked in place. Most bars have four beats in them. Once we have this information, we can create what's called a time signature. The most common time signature is 4/4, four beats to a bar. Others like 3/4 and 7/8 exist, but we don't need to worry about them yet. To help us with our timing and developing our awareness, we can use a metronome. This is basically a piece of kit that creates a syncopated beat. Whatever speed you choose that metronome to run at, it will be perfectly in time, which is obviously, great for our practice. I'm going to be using a Korg metronome. I'll put some links below so you can check this out if you want. You will also get those classic old-fashioned metronomes, they're beautiful to actually have the media that goes from side-to-side, you used to see him sitting on the top of pianos all the time. They are really lovely piece of kit. But obviously, nowadays, you can get an app for your phone and it's completely free. You can make all the necessary adjustments on that you're going to need. That's called Metrotimer, doesn't cost you a penny. I definitely recommend checking that out as well. When I set this metronome, I'm going to have an accent on the first beat. That's quite common, you'll hear that a lot. That basically gives us even more reference of where that counter four is starting. Every first beat will have a different tone to the rest of them. Let's hear a quick example of that. When we're setting our tempo, our speed for our metronome, you will see BPM come after the number. That's beats per minute. At the moment I'm at 60, so 60 beats per minute is the speed or the tempo that we're going to hear this metronome and listen out for the accent on the first beat. [NOISE] We can hear perfectly in time, nice and steady. A good example of music that would have that locked in syncopated timing would be dance music. It makes it very easy for everyone to follow and move along to. You don't want complicated time signatures and structures. You do get dance music like that obviously, but your standard commercial house, techno, dance, electronic music will have this steady beat that everyone can just get familiar with very quickly. The little layers on top might dance around and do different things. But that backbone will have a very constant beat for us to get familiar with nice and quick. Breaking that down a bit further. When you have got a backbone of music that has that steady 4/4 beat, it doesn't mean that every instrument on top, every layer is going to stop and start every1-4 one. You could have a guitar riff that is just going on for eight bars over the top of that music. But you have those smaller segments underneath, they have broken down those sections, so we've always got those regular reference points. Everything that's on top of that drumbeat, that backbone, might be more complicated and more intricate and last longer than just that count of four. Let's break that timing down a little bit more, I'm going to trigger the metronome at 60 BPM, 60 beats per minute. I'm going to let it count four. Then when that first beat comes around again, that first beat, it sounds different remember, to those other threes at higher pitch. I'm going to single-strum out E minor chord. We've become quite familiar with that chord now very beginner friendly. In preparation, get your E minor chord fret, and we're just going to strum through all six strings. Remember being nice and loose with that strumming pattern, and just cover all six strings with a single downstroke. After you've done that strum on the first beat, you will have three beats that are going to happen after. Then we're going to strum on that first beat, that different sounding beat again. Let's give that a go. [NOISE] 3, 4. There we go, nice and slow, but there's no where to hide, even though we've got a long gap in-between those beats, we know we need to be ready to strum again on that Beat 1. Let's make that a little bit more complicated before we develop this further in the next lesson. We're now going to strum on Beat 1 and Beat 3, so you have that higher beep for the first beat, one beat in-between and then on Beat 3, we strum that E minor chord again. Let's give that a go. You'll get four count in again to prepare. [NOISE] 3, 4, there we go. Still very slow, not too complicated. But I wanted to start really simple with this because even the most complicated time signatures and techniques, but we'll start with a simple timings in people's early guitar playing journey. We're going to take that a little bit further in the next lesson and start to link codes together, but also staying perfectly in time. 15. Timing Development: We're going to push that a little bit further now. We're going to stick at 60 bpm so if you've got your MetroTimer app downloaded or you just happen to have a Metronome and you want to do this on your own time, set that to 60 bpm so you can pause this and practice when you want to as well. I also encourage you to follow along with what we're about to do. We're going to start with our E minor again, but this time after we've played on the first beat and we've let those next three beats run so we've heard four beats, the next set of four, we want to be ready to play a C major chord. There's a nice little link going on here. E minor to C major. A second finger stays down, it doesn't need to leave the guitar. See how I've gone from E minor. Nice, healthy, all six strings coming through. Our third finger just comes down onto that A, second finger stays where it is, first finger goes down to that first fret of the B string. We're in our C major. After we've had four beats on there, we need to get ready for the next first beat. That next high-pitched one, we want to be A minor. Again, one finger change. Nice linked code. We just bring that third finger underneath the A minor. Four beats here and then we're going to go to our F major. Now, I'm going to play the full-bodied F-major. I'm going to bring out that high A as well. I think that transition is really nice. I like how they sound together. But if that's tricky for you, you haven't quite got to that stage yet, don't worry. From that A minor if you just want to move to that free note F that we was doing, where your first finger comes down and starts to mute that A underneath and we've just got our third, second, and first down on the D, G, and B string. That's absolutely fine. Still links quite well A minor to F. You notice that our second finger just needs to go down one string. Third finger just needs to come over to that third fret of D and our first finger stays in exactly the same place, so A minor to F. If you want to do the full body, you can. Sixty bpm again and every first beat you want to beat at your next code, and we're going to loop that as well. After E minor, C major, A minor, F, we will go back and do that again, we'll do that twice. You get your four counts to prepare. Get ready. Let's have a go. One, and again, really nice. You see how that starting to hold us to account. Again, there is nowhere to hide. You've got to be ready for that next chord on the first beat and you can totally see it. That's really going to help your development when you're jamming with other musicians when you're playing with bands, when you've got a drama behind you, or when you're just learning another band song. It's so important to have that awareness of time and have something that pushes you. You're not always going to be playing to a Metronome. You might not always have one with you and you don't always need to do that. But the more you do, you'll find that when you just start to jam and play without that solid repetitive backbone, your timing would have just developed and kicked on anyway so you will start to instill that instinctive ability. Let's push that again. Now we're going to keep changing the chords, but instead of waiting four beats, we're going to play first beat A minor, and then Beat 3, we want to be on the C Major. Next Beat 1, we want to be on the A minor. Next Beat 3, we want to be on the F. It's going to be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 and we'll keep that as 60 bpm once more. [NOISE] 1, 2, once more. [NOISE] Pushing our ability again, making sure that we get to that next chord a bit quicker it's improving our transitions, it's making our fingers better at being able to change between chords, really handy techniques to develop. Metronome is great for doing that. Then once that steps away, you'll just notice that your transitions are becoming a lot cleaner. I'm going to boost that a bit more. I encourage you to have a go with me. I'm just going to put it up to 70 bpm so we're jumping 10 bpm here. Sounds like a big old push, but let's give it a go. First-time round, I'm going to play that same chord progression and I'm going to play each chord on Beat 1. Then after I've done that once, I'm going to play each chord on Beat 1 and then 3,1, and 3 like we just did. Watch first if you want, and then have a go yourself. [NOISE] 1, 2. That weren't so bad. Especially when it was just the four count, I don't think you notice it too much. Once it become playing on the one and the three, you do notice how that had kicked up. I encourage you to do this as often as possible. If you've started at 60 bpm and that's feeling comfortable, you've got all the nodes sounding nice and clear, you landed on the right beat, push that just by two bpm every day. It doesn't need to be a huge leap. Two bpm doesn't sound like much. But I swear to you before you know it, you would have noticed how much you've kicked on and how fast you are able to make those changes. I'm going to quickly push that tonight to give you another little insight, [NOISE] 1, 2. You can really start to see how that pushes your ability. Have a little go yourself, experiment at that two bpm every day and you'll be flying before you know it. 16. Strumming: So far in this class, we have worked a lot on our left hand, our fretting hand, and not as much on our strumming hand. I should say actually that your fretting hand might be your right hand, whether you're left or right handed. Wherever your fretting hand is, we've done a lot of work on that. We're now going to develop our strumming a little bit more. When we've been playing the chords previously, we've just been doing a nice down strum. We're going to bring in an up strum, now. We're going to do a strumming pattern that is just down, up, down, up. To change things a little bit, we're going to use our A minor while we practice this first. To build you're A minor chord for me, the chord box will come up. It's a bit of a refresher, and I'll slowly put everything together. First finger, first fret at B, and in second and third finger coming down onto the second fret of the D and G string from over the top to mute that low E. Nice curve in the first finger, so a high E comes through nice and clear. We're going to practice that without the metronome first to keep things nice and loose, and then we'll get a bit more rigid and syncopated. Remember that we want to show just enough of the pick, so we make good contact with the strings. Think back to what we did earlier. Not too little, not too far out because we'll lose control, but just a nice amount showing. We're strumming across the middle of the guitar and we keep our wrists nice and loose and our shoulders not too tense. We strum down and then we come back up. Make sure you keep things nice and loose, when you come back up, you don't want to attack those strings and become too harsh with it. Also, when you're strumming up, don't be looking to catch every string. We're not trying to do that at the moment. That up strum could just catch the E, B, and G strings. It might catch a bit of the D as well. It's got a nice balance to what we're doing. Then if we pull into the strings a bit more and slow it down, we get a more free-flowing feel to it. While we're doing that more free-flowing feel, pause this for a second and try and catch all those strings on the way up. See how it brings out that base note as another tone and depth to what we're doing. The reason I say not to catch all the strings initially and then build towards that is because not every strumming pattern is going to be the same, not every up strum is going to be the same. We're looking for diversity in our playing, intrigue, and interest. There's times when you just going to want to be really rigid and that's great to build towards, but that's not always the case. A lot of the time you have these dynamics in a strumming pattern, this light and shade that makes things sound really interesting, so I want you to think about that when you're playing along. When you come on those up strums, don't think I've got to catch those four or five strings every single time. There's a little bit of flexibility in their that creates this lovely little nuance that makes your guitar playing really interesting. Let's try that down, up, strumming pattern to our 60 BPM metronome that we'd set; down on the first beat, up on the second beat, down on the third, up on the fourth. 1, 2. Lovely. There we go. We've got that rigid metronome running underneath. But we can dance on top of that. We're going to land on every beat we're playing on that syncope beat, but it's what we're doing with our strumming hand that makes everything sound more dynamic. There's more intrigue and interest to everything. Like I said earlier, there's times when we want aggression and energy in our strumming patterns, but be aware of when you want that more dynamic light and shade feel to what you're playing, the power to achieve this is in the strumming pattern and your approach to how you attack and interact with the strings. Let's now try that down up strum with a chord progression that we used in the previous lesson; the E minor, C major, A minor, and F major. Be very mindful of the last up strum that you do on each chord, that is telling us that we need to get to the next chord in the progression. For example, from the E minor. Soon as I play the up strum, I'm pushing my other fingers into that C major shape, and move, and move so you're ready for the next down strum. Let's give that a go.1, 2. Hopefully, you could hear that there were slight changes in the up strums there, not always catching all the strings or just a few of the high strings. There's a difference as we work through it. Hopefully, you can add and expand on that as well. Be really mindful of that dynamic. Like we've been saying, you don't always have to attack all the strings. Sometimes even your down strum might only catch some of the lower strings. My up strum is in the middle and then I'm going to start to bring out those higher notes, and then bring everything down again. Light and shade. Just be wary of that. It's a really fun thing to do. You've got so much control and ability with your strumming hand to really add some complexity and interest to the chords that you're playing. Once you're feeling comfortable with that tempo, 60 BPM, much like we spoke about earlier, start to increase that speed. Push yourself. Don't get too much in the safe zone. Don't be too comfortable for too long. It's healthy to get everything sounding right, you want all those clear tones coming through, but just incrementally creep that up by two BPM, and you start to see how that pushes that strumming pattern. It makes it very different as well. You'll hear the difference in the vibe. You'll feel that's. It's a really important thing to do, so I encourage you to give that a go when you're feeling ready to do so as well. Let's make that strumming pattern a little bit trickier. We've spoke about how we have beats in our bars, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so far we've strummed on the beat. But you can break those bars down into smaller increments and you've got beats that exist in between the 1, 2, 3, 4. You will sometimes hear these counted as one and two and three and four and, or even one or/and two or/and a three or/and a four, and people when they're playing, are landing on those smaller beats to create more complex strumming patterns and timings. We're going to step a little bit in that direction and play it down, down, down, up, down, up. The down, down, land on 1, 2, the next down is on our third beat, but that up lands in between the third and fourth beat. Then the next down lands on the fourth beat and then up lands halfway between the fourth one ending and the next first beat starting. That might sound a bit complicated, but I'm just going to play that as an example now along to our 60 BPM, again, keeping everything very slow and simple and hopefully be a little bit clearer. 1, 2, 3, and 4 and 1, 2, 3, and 4. Make a bit more sense? Hopefully so. Now when I was listing out all those one and two and three and is one or/and the 2 or/and is, it dont mean you have to land on all of those. We can leave gaps. We can land on some of them and that's what, again, expands our strumming patterns, opens up our repertoire and ability that's available to us. Let's try that new strumming pattern on that chord progression we've been working on. If it's a bit tricky at first, just stick on that one chord. Stick on that E minor, C major, A minor, F major. Whatever you want to take from that progression, play it on one chord. Just get confident with it, get free-flowing, enjoying that strumming pattern, and then when you're ready, follow along with us here and we're going to play all four of those chords with that new strumming pattern. 1, 2. Excellent. That's really progressing now. We're going to do one more. We're going to leave a little gap in between, so we've got a pause, breathe a bit, and then come in with the rest of the strumming pattern. Keep in mind for those dynamics, you don't have to pull out every string, every time. Add that lovely bit of diversity to what you're creating. This time we're going to go down, up, down. Those down strums are going to land on one and two. We're going to do nothing for beat three and then we're going to do it down, up when beat four comes in. I'll quickly demonstrate that on one chord. 1, 2. One and two. Four and three and two. I really liked that because it starts getting us used to those pauses and hopefully you can see how the strumming pattern world really starts to open up and there is endless possibilities. Let's try that with all four chords. Again, if it's a bit too fast for you, just play it out on one chord of your choice. Maybe the one that you're more confident with at the moment first is fretted nicely, but then flip to the chord you're struggling the most with and practice this strumming pattern there because then you're developing both techniques. Another four count, that new strumming pattern on all four chords. 1, 2. Lovely. Another one in the bag. There's a few there for you to experiment and I would now suggest that listened to some of your favorite songs. If you can get the tab-up forum, learn what the chords are. You may already know some of the chords, you've covered quite a few now, and see if you can recognize what the strumming pattern is. See if you can work out when you're playing along to the song or when you've paused it and you're reflecting on it, what do you think that strumming pattern would be? It's really good awareness and ear training. We've covered a lot of stuff today; done really well That's a bit of a longer lesson. We're now going to tackle our first full song. 17. The Beatles - Let It Be: We have arrived at your first full song that we're about to cover from the perspective of chords. We've had some rifts and some playing exercises, but the chords that you've been learning we're now going to utilize them to play an incredibly well known song. Hopefully, it's one you like. I'm never going to be able to pick everybody's favorite song or band. But we mentioned it briefly earlier, there's a big mix of tunes in this class. We've already covered a grand song, a modern in the anthem. This track is an absolute classic by arguably the biggest band ever. We've got a metal song later. There's tracks covered for people with more of a pop ear. Yeah, there's a good bit of diversity there. I would hammer home again, even if it's not something you love, you will be able to get something from it. Take the chords that we learn and then I guarantee you'll be able to apply them into the styles of music you love and some of the songs that you adore listening to. We're going to take the track, Let It Be by The Beatles. It's got a very common chord progression, and it contains chords that are used a **** of a lot across a broad spectrum of music and including this class. They are chords that you've already been practicing. We're going to need to play C major, G major, A minor, and F major. We're going to start with a level 1 simpler version, and then I'm just going to throw in a quick example of this little run down that occurs in the track that we can do in our level 2. Let me just have a quick strum through that main progression and the strumming pattern that's applied and then we'll break it down in a little bit more detail. Cool. Hopefully, you recognize those chords. You can see from that Level 1, we just let that F major ring out. Level 2, we throw that little, which is a beautiful way to link those chords together really nice, and we'll work on that in a bit more in a little while. C major, we know that chord, and we are applying the same strumming pattern here to every other chord, which is really good for us. Fret your C major to begin with, first three fingers spread across the first free frets, and we're just playing down, down, down, up. Nice. Sounding really smooth, clear, lovely. Get that strumming pattern locked in because we're going to be using it throughout the whole track. From the C major, we then go up to a G major. Same strumming pattern. Let's put them two together, nice and slow. It's a tricky change, that C major to G major. But as always, remember to keep those fingers as close to the fret board as you can. I'm always going to say it, but the further you go away, the further you have to come back. It takes away that fluidity that we're after. Small little changes to get over to that G major. We've played our down, down, down, up on that G major. We then go over to A minor. Again, quite a big shift, but we're keeping close to the fret board. Thumbs over the top already in preparation to mute that low E, and then we go into our F major. If it's still easier for you to play just the free finger version of the F major, that's fine. I'm bringing in that full body. I think it sounds nice with the original and really pads everything out, so I'm going to use that full body. You do whatever is best for you at the moment. Altogether. Then it goes back to our C, J, and then our F, we're just going to ring that out, and then back to C. That second half, sing and strum, and then we're back in. From the top. Let it ring out. That last C there before it all starts again, that comes after the single strum F, you can if you want let that C ring out as well of a single strum until we come back in. You can do a 1, 2, 1, 2. Back in. Whatever feels more comfortable for you. Because if we're not doing that run down just yet, it's definitely healthy to just let that F ring. Then if you want to give yourself a bit of a break and get ready for the progression to come around again, do the same one to C major and get ready to go again. Now before we look at the Level 2 version, the chorus we keep the same strumming pattern, it's the same chords just in a slightly different order. Into that chorus, we go. Then we're back into the verse. That was A minor, G major, F major, C, and then you'll notice this is the same as the second half of the verses. C, G, single strum, and then back into the verse. We keep that down, down, down, up strumming pattern going throughout each of those chords of the chorus until we ring out that F. The A minor to the G is a big change there. But we've already done it the other way round, the G to the A minor. So flip that, but keep the same principles of closeness to the fret board not coming too far away from the strings. The G to the F is quite a tricky change. That's going to take a bit of practice, I think. Maybe you've got it already, and amazing if you have. But don't worry if you haven't, because that's definitely a hard one to know straight away. Create a repetition between those two. Muscle memory, we spoke about this earlier. Just keeps shifting those shapes if you're struggling between the two, the G major to the F major, the G major to the free finger F major, if that's what you feel more comfortable with. Eventually, that will just become locked in. That pattern, that change will be as smooth as anything. Now another thing to bear in mind, when you're making these chord changes, that strumming pattern might be tricky to pick up at first. You can just single strum these chords. It's definitely a good way to get confident and comfortable with any track that you're learning. It might be that you just start with a single strum and then you build towards that strumming pattern. Now, if you're feeling good about those chord changes, let's throw that little rundown in there. Lets single-strum the verses just to get us up to where we need to be. We're on the F. Lovely little transition. Strum your F major chord, I've got it as the full body here. After we've played that strum, a second finger comes up to the second fret of the D and our little finger comes off. We're in our C major shape now. We play that once, we take it off, play open that D string, and then we play the third finger on the third fret of the A, which is our C note. It's already there for a C major shape. I'll play it out with a simpler F shape now. Once more. We're just running down the scale, F, E, D, C. They're the notes that we're playing. The frets are free, 2, open, 3. Or if it was the simpler version. Then I'm throwing a quick down, down, up after that single note on the C. Then the riff starts all over again. Don't worry if you can't get that link in run down yet. It is quite tricky, especially when it's contained within the chord. But it's a great thing to know. I wanted to at least demonstrate it for you so you can see how it's done. Start slowly, build those chords, get them sounding lovely, and then have a little crack at that linking bit. It is great fun to play. But you've got all the chords there. You've got the strumming pattern to see you for the whole song. In the PDFs, I will put the order so that you know where those verse and chorus chords are played and what you can play over the solo that's occurring, so you can tackle the whole song. Well done, that's a big milestone. Let's jump in to the next video. 18. Major Chords: We've got a couple of more major chords that we need to finish off from the first position. We're going to take a little look at those now, the first one is D major. A case. To build our D major chord, we're going to put our first finger on to the second fret of the G. A third finger is then going to go on to the third fret of B. Then our second finger tucks underneath on to the second fret of the A, quite a bunched up chord as you can see, we're covering that second and third fret, really important that we're on the tips of our fingers with this code. Got that nice bend in the knuckle again because we don't want to be interfering with the other nodes around, the one that you're playing with each finger. We have an open D, it sits above those three fingers that are fretting the second and third fret and our thumb is going to arrive at a top and help us mute the low E and I. Now, a be live with someone who coaches you about earlier. It's not a nightmare if that I comes through. It resonates. There's actually another I note being played with your first finger on the second fret of the G. Much like with some other codes, it just cleans everything out when you take that base I note out. If that base I note is in there and you've also got the other I note on the second fret of the G, that I is overpowering that code and it takes it away from just being the D major that we're after. Bring the firm over the top, when that movement happens obviously your wrist is going to come a lot closer to the fret board before we've worked quite a lot in our recipe and lower, a firm being in the center or just coming over the top when it needs to mute the low E. This time it's going to have to move quite a bit more. As you can see I'm coming over a lot more than usual so that I can capture the E and I string with a Patama firm and mute the strings that we don't want. There's a D major chord. Now, that is going to link nicely into the next major chord we're going to look at. A first finger can stay where it is. We're going to go into A major. It just slides back slightly so it's on the same fret. But as it does that, a second finger comes up to the second fret of the D, and a third finger goes on to the second fret of the B. Every finger we're using here, our first, second, and third is tucked onto the second fret which can make it quite tricky to bunch everything in close enough so that we're not getting that fret buzz. Be mindful that your first finger doesn't get pushed back too far because you will get that fret. Sound familiar from the early lessons we were looking at. We don't want any of that. We bring it in nicely around the center so that our second and third can go either side on the D and B. We strum from the open A string, we bring in that open A as well. Form is over-the-top to mute that low E. If we do strum for all the strings there, doesn't matter if we catch that low E because our thumb is muting it. You see the A major played in some other ways. Some people will play it like this. We go from first, second, and third finger down the D, G, and B strings. That's cool. That works, it's really common, it's used a lot. But I really like this shape. It gets us used to have a bunch of fingers close together which is another nice little skill to have. But it also links really well. We saw from the D-major going up to the A major. First finger stayed pretty much where it is, it just at the slide back slightly to accommodate the second and third finger. But if we move to our A major that we did very early on, that first finger just slides back again this time to the first fret and we've got an E major chord. That first finger if we want to go to the A major, just tax over, go to the D major, moves ever so slightly more. It becomes like an anchor for us, a reference point that links those codes together. We spoke about this a lot earlier, looking for those opportunities to link codes is going to do wonders for making the transition and the smoothness in your playing really kick on. To try and as a single-strand exercise, D major, up to I major and up to A major and then back. Feeling bored at a little strumming pattern. I pretty much took the strumming from late for that demonstration to see if you can think of your own. One other code that D major links quite nicely to makes it a little bit easier is up to the G major because we've already got a finger in a position that we don't need to move. Play that D major game for me. We're going to go up to a G major. Our third finger doesn't need to leave the fret board. Our little finger tucks underneath onto that third fret of the A. Then our first and second go up to our second and third fret I and A for a G major code. Third finger doesn't leave the fret. Now, for example of those little opportunities to link and give our hands less work to do. 19. D Minor: We have one more minor chord to look at in the first position, and that's going to be D minor. We just did D major. We're now going to turn that into a D minor chord. Remember we spoke a bit earlier about taking the first, the third, and the fifth note from a particular key's scale. You will create that note's major chord. If you took the first, third, and fifth note from D major, you would make a D major chord. If you flatten that third note, it'd turn into a D minor chord. The third note of D major is an F-sharp. We find that here on the second fret at the highest E string, we flatten that one, a semitone. We go back one semitone, which is one fret and we have our F note, which makes it a D minor. We're going to learn more about that later. I know I say a few times, don't worry too much about that for now. We're going to cover it in more detail later on, which we are going to do. But by giving you all these little snippets of information without even realizing you are starting to build the foundations that are going to really help you understand the slightly more detailed theory and chord construction and scale work that we go in to later on. We're not too far away from that, but just retain that little bit of information there. First, third, and fifth major chord, flatten the third, one semitone or one fret, and we have a minor chord. Let's build that chord. Our first finger is on the first fret of the finished E string. Our second finger goes up to the second fret of the G. Our third finger goes across to the third fret of the B string. Quite a stretch, but those stretching exercises we did earlier on are going to help us with all this. We've got three fingers across three frets. Sounded nice and clear. We want an open D string as our bass note, our root note of the chord and our thumb is still doing the job of muting in the low E and I, we can strum from the D. Or if we catch all six strings is not a problem because our thumb is doing the work of muting those low strings. Lovely. We have a D minor chord. Now much like the D major, this will transition beautifully into the G major chord. Third finger still gets to stay where it is. It's the same note, the same position within the D major, D minor, and the G major. So practice that for formula, another opportunity to link a couple of chords together, which is going to do you wonders for when you start to play more songs. 20. Strumming Development: Before we tackle a load more songs, we're going to develop our strumming ability even more. This time, we're going to use a new chord progression and familiar chords, but we're going to mix it up a little bit to what we've been doing before. We're going to play at a faster BPM and we're going to have a different strumming pattern for each chord, very slight small changes throughout. This is all going to really help challenger and keep everything moving forward. The first chord we're going to use, very familiar for us is an E minor, fret that for me, get that sounded nice and clear. After our E minor, we're going to move into an A major. A second finger is already in place, already where it needs to be. Our first finger drops down to the G second fret, third finger onto the second fret of the B, or into our A major shape. From there, we've got a nice little link going on into the D major. Moving fret is bit quick [inaudible] I feel like you'll be at that level. Then from the D major, we go up to the G major. Third finger stays where it is, allows us to link that D to G. See, each chord has one finger that stays on the fret for the previous code, really nice transition going on there. We're going to play 80 BPM and there's going to be little gaps left in the strumming patterns. We're not going to play on every beat, we're going to land on some of that and beats. Remember we spoke before about one and, two and, three and, four and, our strumming pattern is going to land on those throughout this. First one we're going to do is down, down, up, up, down, up. That's on the E minor. Then we go to the A major, we go down, down, down, up. Now, you see we have that little gap there. The length for these gaps are going to make more sense when we put the metronome on. But I'm just going through these strumming patterns now so you can pause each one, have a little practice, try and create that gap and get them sounding nice and flowing before we put that rigid metronome on there. Into the D major, we go down, down, up, leave a little gap, and then we put a down strumming right at the end. Then up to the G major, and we go down, a little gap, down, up, down, up. First strum, little gap, down, up, down up. Now, I'm going to play through each of those. I recommend that you pause what we've just done, have a little practice of each pattern on each code, get that transition working. Even if you just want to start with single strums to begin with, make sure you've got the chords to linking together nicely. That's cool. Then watch what I'm going to do now, I'm going to play for that strumming pattern. You'll hear the beats that we land on, the ones that we miss, and then we'll discuss that a little bit further before I leave it over to you to practice them. 80 BPM, four counts to start, no pressure to follow me now, just see you go on. 1, 2 [NOISE] Let's talk about that in a little bit more detail. Without the metronome, and we'll just count for it, so it hopefully makes it a little bit more sense, we are going 1, 2 and, miss the third, up four and, 1, 2, up, up four and. Then we go down to the A, we go, one, miss the second beat, 3, 4 and.1, 2, 3, 4 and. Into the D, we go 1, 2 and, we miss the three, and then we do a down strum on the fourth beat. 1, 2 and, 4. 1, 2 and, 4. Then on the G major, we strung on the first beat, we miss the second beat entirely and then we go three and, four and, down, up, down, up on the three and, four and. 1, 2, 3 and, 4 and. 1, 2, 3 and, 4 and. I'll count for that nice and slowly from the top, 1, 2, up, up, down, up, 1, 2, 3, 4 and, 1, 2 and, 4. 1, 2, 3 and, 4 and. 1, 2 up, and 4 and,1, 2, 3, 4 and, 1, 2 and 4. 1, 2, 3 and, 4 and. Once more with the metronome as well. 1, 2, 3. A bit tricky, I'm sure you can see and hear and feel if you are playing now, everything is starting to develop a bit of a quicker pace, thrown in some stuff that is a bit more intricate. Probably feels and sounds confusing at first, but really try to sink into that beat, feel that rhythm become linked in what that metronome is. But then try and be loose around it so we're not too rigid, we want that strumming pattern to sound dynamic. Remember we spoke about what those dynamic feels earlier, really making that sing We're not trying to make every strum exactly the same, we're landing on those beats, but it's the way that we interact with the strings that gives us that beautiful presence, that beautiful sound that we're looking for, that lovely strumming technique. If 80 BPM feels a bit fast, you can go a lot slower. Take that down to 70 or 60. If that helps you focus on where those beats exist in between, especially the and ones, I appreciate they could be quite tricky. Those gaps might sound long at first, but they're actually quite short. You've got to be ready for that next strum, it comes around pretty quickly, especially when we're leaving a whole beat, so if it's a 1, 2, 3 and, 4 and, like we do on the G major, that two is gone pretty quick and you've got to be there for the three and, four and. Take that really slowly. Don't worry if you haven't got that straight away. It's a lot to take on. Learning the guitar isn't easy, there's loads of new things being thrown at you. Just be patient with it, reach out to me with any questions if you need any further help with stuff like this, but I'm sure with regular practice and patience, you'll definitely get there. 21. Foo Fighters - Times Like These: Times Like These by the Foo Fighters an absolute in the anthem. Now, I'm aware there's two versions of this, you've got the full band electric version and then the acoustic version that's released. We are mainly going to be referencing that acoustic version. It's a bit more beginner friendly, it's played at a slower pace. It doesn't have as many intricate guitar parts laid over the top, but the chords and the patterns we're going to learn will still be able to be played along to the full band versions. You are learning both. We're going to start with our D major chord. Now, in the full band electric version, once it's done this little section, it goes off into this instrumental part, which has got all these lovely guitar pass over the top. In the acoustic version, the vocal comes straight in with a different strumming pattern. We are going to reference that acoustic version for now, but later on I'll show you how you can do that either run down that occurs in the electric track. Shape your D major chord for me. There's this recurring riff that happens within the D major chord. We're going to call this our main riff for now, happens in the intro, appears throughout. You can hopefully here this movement that occurs. I'm going to demonstrate it just quickly. My first finger is going to come off and on that chord See that movement that was occurring with the first finger starts off, comes down. It happens on the first downstrum, it's not on there. The second upstrum, it's taken back off and then the downstream happens after that. The upstrum happens after that and then the downstream that happens in the last little blocks. Now, I'm not expecting you to remember all that. I'm highlighting them on the screen so that you can start to see where that movement occurs. The strumming pattern will work without you taking your finger off. If this seems a bit confusing at first, a bit tricky to do, don't worry just nail that strumming pattern that we're about to work on and then start to focus on where those movements occur, where your finger comes off and on. This played out really slowly once more and we'll talk it through as well. Without the movement of the finger. Take your time with that. It can be tricky, but it builds the foundations for the rest of the song. That happens three times in the acoustic version and then with the acoustic version, the vocal come straight in and we're going to look at how the strumming pattern works along with that. We stay on our D major, which is nice so we've played that main intro riff and then we go into this strumming pattern. From there we go to our A minor chord, same strumming pattern. Now you might notice that there's a slight shift in the know as well that's being pulled out in that acoustic version and they're adding their little finger to the third fret of the highest E on the first upstrum that appears, that one will be circled as well now to make it a bit clearer. Strumming pattern stays exactly the same, but on that down, up. A little finger comes onto the third fret of the highest D technically makes that an A minor seven. I'd encourage you to build towards that. Start with the strumming pattern just with that normal A minor, D to the A minor and then once you're feeling confident, bring that little finger onto the fretboard on that first upstrum. It's really nice, really brings that call to life, adds a lovely bit of interest to it. From there we move one finger across to our C major. Pretty much cuts the strumming pattern in half here, and yet that little finger does come in again in the same place on the first upstrum. Something for you to work towards. If you're nailing this straight away, brilliant, rum with it, but make sure that strumming pattern is nice and controlled first and then start to add that little finger. We've gone down. Then E minor is our last chord, from the little finger in straight away there, but it's in a slightly different position, same fret but this time we're on the B string and it's the same strumming pattern as we used on the C major. That little finger comes in on the first upstrum, and then we got back to our main riff. Then the progression starts again. Remember you don't have to bring that finger on and off if you don't want so you can just do the same strumming pattern without that movement. I'm going to take you through each part that exists in the track from our cold perspective. Don't worry if you can't take it all in now, it is going to be in the PDF. This is just to give you the building blocks for it. Get every chord right, learn that strumming pattern use this video obviously as a really important, reference for you to learn from, but you've also got that PDF which will lay out the full structure of how long each of these parts are played. Into the chorus after we've linked from our, that happens at the end of the verse, we go into a new chord for us, variation of our C major as a Cadd9. We've got a D major chord, we keep our third finger where it is, little finger comes underneath. First and second finger play that top bit of the C major. Remember when we do a C major our second and third finger are in that position. This time, our first and second finger are there, which frees up our third finger to go into the third fret of the B little finger underneath. Cadd9 and we do a down, down, up, up, down, up. Then we move into an E minor seven variation of the E minor. We've learned our first and second finger are doing what they usually do. They're very close to that position already. First finger just comes up, second finger is underneath, third and fourth finger stay where they are. From the Cadd9, same strumming pattern, and then down to our our D major. It does that progression three times keeps that same strumming pattern on each one. Really lovely movement there, I love how they link together. Cadd9, E minor seven, D major after you've done that three times, it brings our main riff back in. You've got another verse, another chorus again, check the PDFs for the full layout. The only other change is in the bridge where we're going to have a slight variation of what we've been doing. It all drops down, you've got those lovely layer dos and ours that are going on with David Rose vocal and the music becomes quite minimal before it builds back up into that last big course. For that we just single-stranded D-major, we single-strum Cadd9, and then we single-strum a G over B. Similar to the E minor seven shape, our first finger comes back to the second fret of the A, third and fourth stay where they are. Our D string underneath is open. Make sure you've got a nice curve in that first finger. Bring out that A and D string. Now, you might notice there's a weird count in this one, we was talking about earlier about time in four-four this one has got a count of seven. Now, the easiest way to count this out is to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3. That count happens between each chord. Let's have a little look at that. We go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3. It does that a few times on the last one. The last time around that progression, the very last count is a count of eight instead of seven. On that G over B 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and it just goes back into that main riff that we're getting very familiar with. Tricky time in might sound alien at first, but play that without the music to begin with, just so you can get used to that count, then really reference that track and listen out to when the guitar is moving between the chord. Count that seven, that four and three without even playing a guitar, just so you can identify where the movement is and then practice along by single strumming. Then on that last G over B that builds up, you can add a down upstream with a nice bit of fluidity to the movement and add dynamic as well, start low and then build that pressure up so it tells you that we're going towards something, we're building towards that final lift of the track, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Then you've got the chorus chords, which we're familiar with, look at that PDF that will lay everything out. That little rundown we've just done as well, I should say that Cadd9, G over B with a seven count, that is what happens on the electric version. After you've had the intro and the electric version, which is a variation of you get this rundown progression, which is the cause we just did 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The last one we'll have that account as well before it drops down into the first verse in the electric version. Yes, slightly different structure there, but you've got everything you need to be able to play both. Use the acoustic one as a reference at first and then stick that electric one on and say that you're able to play both. 22. Song Montage: This next lesson is a bit of a song montage. I wanted to quickly demonstrate a few different tracks from different eras and slightly different styles that only use four chord. They're good examples of how you don't need to be really complicated with your chord combinations, your chord progressions and structures. We spoke a little bit about this earlier. You just lay the foundations is how you interact and attack the strumming pattern like we also discussed. But it's all those little layers that occur on top. What the vocals are doing, what the lead lines are doing, the energy, the drum or any percussion giving it there's so much you can do some of the most popular and well-known songs have only got a few chords in them. This is also an opportunity for me to show you what a kapo is. Another little tool, I recommend you get your hands-on and a song we're going to use to demonstrate that is That's Entertainment by The Jam. If you haven't got a capo, don't worry, it means you won't be able to play along to the original recordings, but you can still practice these patterns, these cool shapes and progressions. I would recommend getting hold of one of these, a capo. They basically shortening the neck of your guitar. They're changing where the starting point is. For example, this nut, at the moment lab we spoke about very early on is housing those strings, keeping them all in place. After that, now, I start to fret the chords, all those open position ones that we worked on. Let's take that A minor, for example, I've got those open strings that are occurring. If I put my capo on the first fret, that becomes our starting point. That open string is now become the first fret because that capo is running across all six strings. I can still play that same a minor shape, but everything is shifted along one fret, and I can do that because I've shifted the starting point. I've replaced those open strings, those open notes, with the first fret, everything's bunched along one. Sometimes when you're seeing music, if you've started to look at tab websites, there's a really good website called ultimate guitar, which if you're looking for tabs for your favorite songs, definitely check that out, they've pretty much got everything that you're going to need. They might sometimes say capo first fret capo third fret, but it will still say play A minor, C major, G. Now, if you didn't notice that it told you to put a capo on, you'd be thinking what if C major doesn't sound right at all. It's because they're referring to the shape rather than necessarily what note you're playing. That A minor is no longer an A minor because I've shifted everything along one. Every node has changed one, but I'm still playing the A minor shape. I'm actually playing an A sharp minor or a B flat minor, however you want to look at it. I definitely suggest getting one. A lot of music you listen to will include them, especially if you're into your indie bands, people like a Oasis would use capos all the time, so they're definitely handy to have. We're going to shift our capo to the third fret. Treat it like your fingers. Make sure it's tucked nice and close to the fret. We don't want to be over it because we'll lose the notes. We don't be too far back because it'll bounce. We want to clamp nicely across all six strings. We're getting a smooth, clear sound like we would if we were to putting our fingers in the correct place. Okay, we're on the third fret. Capo third fret. There's going to be a link for one of these as well below, so you can check them out. The chords we're going to use are G major, E minor, A Minor. I'm playing that more full bodied F major seven shape. Remember you can still do that one if you need to. That's all the chords. I'm not going to break them down in too much detail. You got the chord boxes here. You're starting to work a little bit more independently with those I don't need as much analyzing and you've got the PDF and obviously this lesson for you to reference as much as you want to. Loads of energy to that. A is like acoustic punk is brilliant. All that energy is coming from the wider, he is attacking those strings with that down upstream is that repetition that are down that gives us that energy. Is also that really quick skip that happens throughout the track. It pops up in a few different places, so I won't say exactly where, but you can definitely hear it stands out. It starts at the beginning of a chord or links to transition. We've got it on that G, and then sometimes from the E minor down to the A minor. Really good fun to play. Don't worry about playing it as fast as the original recording is, but use this as an opportunity to go back to when we spoke about those down ups drums and not everyone is the same. We're pulling out certain strings, so we're adding a real bit of variety to the strumming pattern. Pulling out all these different lights and shades. Really adds a nice bit of movement. Don't worry about throne at skipping straight away. Just work on those down, up, down, up, down, up. Okay. Another one that just uses four chords, that was a huge hit as well, more modern I think. But when I checked that out because I was going to say more modern, I realized it was 2003, man, where does that time go? Is, Hey Ya, by Outcasts. It was a huge hit. The acoustic is very prominent in the makespan. It's all those lovely little layers. What the vocal does, the percussion that makes you distract from, well, not even bother thinking about the fact that it is just four chords, for root notes that hold the whole thing together. But man, that tune is huge. It shows you what four chords can do as a platform to let your creativity go wild on top. For that one, all you're going to need is G major, C major we're back in this position obviously, D major, and E major. Remember that D, E and A and I link quite well. Our first finger doesn't need to leave the fretboard if we're cutting out the A major because it's not in this progression, we can just go D major, E major. First finger slides back from the second fret of the first, second and third finger come up to the second fret I and D, we are in our E major. Cool. It stays on the C major for longer than the others, and a D major happens quite quickly. Strumming pattern coming up on the screen. Let's have a little look here. Lots of down, down, up, up, down, up. A pattern that we're familiar with we worked on earlier on. On that G major, just happens once. Goes to the C major, happens again. Frozen a little down, down, up on the D major. That up is got to happen really quick because it's telling you you've got push to the E major as soon as that up is finished. Soon as it started really as soon as you're making contact with astrum, you're in to that E major, ready for that next downstream to land in time. Then you're just down, down, up, up, down, up twice on that E major. You can single strand that at times if you want, if you're playing along to the track and you want to move with the dynamics of it and where it all drops down, That's cool. Then you've got that strumming pattern to pick up the energy. Another one, and this is more of a modern hit. It was shotgun by George Ezra, might not be for you. Obviously big pop tune. That's all cool. I'm just trying to cover a wide range of music and show how different styles can incorporate this same idea of just having a few chords to make a hugely popular song. We're on the fifth fret this time. Tuck that capo, nice and close. If you haven't got a capo, don't worry, you can still play these chords, shapes, these progressions. You won't be able to play along to the originals. It will sound out of tune, but at least you can practice the patterns. The beginning of the track just starts with a single-stram. I think we can come with a little upstram as well. On each chord. Pick out those high notes, and we are playing C major down to an F major really nicely. It will change that not much has to go on, especially if you're playing that full bodied F major seven little finger comes below the third, second finger goes down one string. A minor. Again, first thing can stay there, so nice little transition, and then our biggest jump is over to the G major. The intro has got that lovely, almost seaside sound in effect to it, pulls out that little upstream I think. That worked well over the intro. When the rest of the music and the vocal kicks in, you can just single-stram. Four count in-between inch 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4. Then the music starts to lift up a bit. There's a suggestion of a strumming pattern that you can play coming up on the screen now. A bit slower. Then when it gets to those chorus, when the main shotgun line comes in, I feel like you can really attack those codes to pull out the punch and go in line with the vocal melodies. You could try something like this, exactly the same progression. I like opening up that G at the end. It feels like you're resolving that part and then sucks back out for that accent to come back in. That's the only bit of singing you're going to get from me for what are probably obvious reasons now. There we go. Another free songs that you know, I hope you liked at least one of them if you didn't as always, take it for the practice the development, the learning of a new technique, of a new chord progression. Now I encourage you again to start looking. Go to that ultimate guitar website, look for songs that you love, that you love listening to, and I'm sure you will find ones that have got the codes that you have been using. I guarantee it, if not, hit me up with some suggestions of other songs you'd like me to cover, there's plenty more classes coming your way. I've already taken on board suggestions from other students previously, and put them into the classes I create. I'd love to hear from you as well. Let's jump into the next video. 23. Stretching Exercise: As you're working through your guitar learning journey, we want to continually be thinking about how we can improve the flexibility, the stretch, and the strength in our fingers. That's why I implement these little stretching exercises, the one that we did earlier on, and another one that we're going to look at now. We're going to start this exercise on the lowest E string. Put your first finger behind the first fret of the E. Keep our wrist nice and low for this, so we can have a good amount of spread along the fretboard. Our first finger goes 1 and then our second finger comes down into 2. Then we go back to 1 and this time, our second finger stretches to Fret 3. We're on the tip of our finger, thumb at the center of the back, wrist nice and low 1, 2, 1, 3. We're really looking to improve and increase how much our fingers can stretch along our fretboard; 1, 2, 1, 3 back to 1, 2. One, 2, 1, 3, 1, 2. Once you play that last 1, 2, keep your first and second finger down. Here we go 2, 3, 2, 4. You might have notice your fingers go a bit of a wider angle here. They might have to accommodate that stretch. This is not going to be easy to do straightaway, but it's adding all these extra ability to be able to reach further across the fretboard and create independence in our fingers. This technique was taught to me by a violin tutor, who ended up becoming my classical guitar tutor years ago and it really did wonders for how much I could approach the guitar fretboard in different ways. Two, 3, 2, 4, then your third finger stays down. We go 3, 4, your second and first are down as well. Three, 5 a little finger comes across to the fifth. See how much we're able to fan out our fingers. It's surprising how much you can do, not straight away, but this will come with regular practice. From the top, smooth little movements, if you need to, to accommodate that stretch. If you've got a lot of pains going on in your wrist, relax, don't overdo it. Listen to your body. But small amounts of practice, regular, small amounts of practice really helped kick that technique on. Once you've done enough first four positions, come up the fretboard. The frets get a little bit closer together, so it does become a little bit easier as well, which is nice. As long as your doing a four-fret stretch, so there we're 5, 6, 5, 7, and then 6, 7, 6, 8, and the little finger down for 7, 8, 7, 9. You might have been able to get the temp for it in there. But don't overdo it. These stretching exercises are going to put us in a really good position for the codes that are coming next. I'm going to throw one more at you. Also with these, when I talk about regular practice, daily if possible, don't do the same ones all the time. Use that first stretching exercise that we did early on in the class, use the one that we've just done, the one that we're about to do, mix up the regularity, and mix up the order of how you practice these. Like I said before, I don't need to be for crazy long, just a couple of minutes to warm your fingers up and gradually improve that stretch. Playing on different strings, playing on different areas of the fretboard, just mix up that practice is a great thing to do. This last one, we're going to go fifth fret of the highest D, and we play 5, 6. After that, we shift our first finger up. We're laying it flat still, so it goes over the E string as well, but then we go 5, 7. Our second finger comes down as well, so 5, 6, 5, 7. Then that first finger creeps up again and we do 5, 8. You've had 5, 6, 5, 7, 5, 8, four-fret stretch going on with those four fingers. We then reverse it as we work out. We go 5, 7, 5, 6. Last one, big stretch again, 5, 8. When you get to that last one, your first finger should be lying flat across all six strings and then I want you to just bar it, which means you use your thumb to squeeze the neck, you keep that finger flat, and you try to bring out all six strings. It will make sense in a little while. This is really handy because the codes we're going to use include that technique, one finger lying across all six strings. Once you've done that strum across all six, reverse the pattern; 5, 6, 5, 7. First finger is creeping down this time, 5, 8. All the other fingers are still hovering in weight, 5, 7, 5, 6, and 5, 8 to end. All four fingers come down. Then we start that pattern again. Like the earlier exercise, not the most harmonious, not the most pretty sounding, but they really do work wonders for our technique development. I've got another class called guitar practice; improve your finger strength, stretching capabilities, independence, and speed. Think that's the correct order of the title, it's a bit of a long one, but the links going to be below, and you can check that out. I think that's a really handy class to look at wherever you are in your guitar-playing journey. Obviously, I assume you're more of a beginner if you're watching this class, but you can dip into that one at any time and it does take you on a gradual journey. It shows you a variety of those techniques that really helped kick on your development, and we throw a few cool riffs in there as well for you to practice and implement those new skills. 24. Power Chords: We're now going to have a quick look at what are known as power chords. I've got a whole class on this that you can check out, I will link you into everything below. But as this was a beginning class, I thought it'd be nice to throw a little introduction to power chords, what they are, and give you a little something that you can play to get you up and running. Now, they are quite a big progression from what we're used to, we're going to be playing them on a different area of the fretboard. We're used to playing in the first position with our open chords or further up if we've used a capo. We're now going to be able to move up and down the fretboard without the need for a capo, and we're going to use our first finger to mute the strings that we don't want to be sounding. I'm going to ask you to put your first finger on the third fret of the lowest A please, and try and keep this nice curve going on with the first finger. We don't want to be applying too much pressure below, is just laying gently over the rest of the strings, but the tip of the finger, is curved and it's playing that third fret of the A, pulling out that now the rest of the finger relaxes to just mute the strings below. You'll now see where those stretching exercises have come in handy because our third finger, needs to come across to the fifth fret of the IA string. I'm worried about our second finger yet, it can rest on our first finger, so it's not in too much of no man's land. Our little finger, once that third finger is on the fifth fret of the I, your little finger can come underneath onto the fifth fret of the D. We have got a G5 power chord. I'm going to strum all six strings, but the bottom three are going to be muted by that curve in my third finger. Hear the power in that, see where the name comes from. You can really attack the strings, but you're only pulling out those free base notes. My middle finger tends to stick up in the middle like that. Don't take offense, it's just part of the way the chord is played. You will see everyone's hands do something slightly different. Some people will rest it on the first finger. Some people play these power chords. If you're a big Nirvana fan, you'll notice Kurt Cobain would do this. They would play the power chord with the third finger laying over the I and D string, and the second finger just rests on that full fret of D, but it's not coming through, because our third finger is ahead of it. You would still have the curve in the first finger resting lightly on those high strings to cut them out, and there'd be a bend in the third finger as well so it's not playing that G underneath, just have the low E, I, and D coming through. The version I'm teaching here the thumb comes over the top and it forces that first finger to curve a bit, which allows us to have that pressure in the tip of the finger, but the other string is muted below. It can be a hard one to get the power chord. That stretch might not look like much, but you've probably found once you start to try and put your fingers in that position, and not drag your wrist into weird places and B2 bunched up on too much of a weird angle, is a hard thing to do. That's why I put those stretching exercises throughout this class, so hopefully there's a bit of foundation already there, and your fingers are a bit more flexible. I said, there is a whole class dedicated to power and bar codes as well. Just take this as a little bit of an introduction, and then delve a lot deeper when you're ready in that other class. We've played it with our root note on the lower E, and we've played the I and the D string. We can just move this whole shape down one string. Every finger moves one string down. First finger would go to the I, third finger goes to the D, full finger goes to the G. This second finger can now rest lightly on our lower E, itself. Below it comes through, just rest it lightly, and that cuts that out. First finger is still bending again to cut out the B and A. We have the C5 power chord. G5, move everything down, C5. Once you've got comfortable with that shape, I want to point out that you can just move these up and down the fretboard. That's C5 that we're in. As long as you keep the same distance between the threads, and keep those other strings muted, you can just move this all the way up and down the neck. As long as there's 1, 2, 3 frets covered and you keep that same shape, that will work everywhere. Same with the lower E. You've unlocked a **** of a lot of fretboard there. I'll show you something later on which will help you work out exactly what notes and what chords you're plan. It was a quick riff so if you can utilize those power chords, we're going to stay on that third fret, the G5 and the C5. There's a song by Nirvana called Molly's Lips, it's a cover of a Vaseline's song, I believe, and that just has two chords throughout the whole track and they play it with the G5 and C5 power chord. Down, down up, on the G5, down, up, on the C5. Quick demonstration of what the tempo is. A little slower, after the upstream we move. You're going to be really quick changing on that last upstream. Don't worry if you catch some slightly muted notes in-between, that's okay, it can be more of a passive movement that links the two chords together. Then pick up the tempo when you're ready. Check out that power chord class if you want a bit more information on how they're constructed, and so you can delve a lot deeper into them and learn a ton of really decent tracks in that class as well. Power chords open up the door to grunge punk,, emo, metal, all sorts, so they're definitely worth looking into. 25. Percussive Strums & Palm Muting: There are a couple of techniques that you're going to hear mentioned a lot as you work through your guitar learning journey, and that's percussive strums, and palm muting. They're a couple of little techniques that I wanted to open the doorway for you today in this class. First one we're going to look at are percussive strums. They are a great way of adding rhythm to your plan, it's like having a drama with you, it's a great technique to have. Cruising the tile, percussive strum, very closely associated to percussion, so the say, we can add that extra rhythmic feel to our plan. We're going to use the C major shape as our example, so get that frayed for me, that foam coming over the top to already mute that lower A. We're going to play a, down down up, up down up strumming pattern. But after the down, we're going to relax our fingers, so the rest of the strums don't sound any notes, they just catch muted strings. To do that, we're just going to relax each finger, so that they're still on the string, but they're relaxed from the fret, so we've lost a lot of the notes there. We are then going to angle our fingers down slightly, so that the second finger can mute the G, and the first finger can mute the high A, save on the tips there, we relax everything and angle it down slightly, we have that muted sound. Let's see what that does to the strumming pattern. See how much bounce that has, it really brings it to life. Same strumming pattern and completely different fret. If you're struggling to cut all those strings out, just by lowering your finger slightly, bring your little finger down to help you can mute that G. Sometimes that's the tricky one to get, maybe your second finger isn't quite catching that G string, so your little finger can rest on it, to help mute everything. If you want to, just lay that little finger flat. Then you've covered all bases, and you know you're at least going to be muting all those strings with your little finger. Let's put that into a progression. We're going to go from the C major to the A minor, nice easy change. Apply the same strumming pattern, and this time do use your little finger to come across the strings, probably from the A, if you can, down to the high A. Again, just gently relaxing, we're not looking to apply pressure, just the slightest amount, lay on those strings, cut out the notes. Also just to ensure enough is coming through, relax your first, second, and third finger, just so they make the strings dead as well. See how that little finger just comes down gently? Now let's go into the F, quite a nice change from the A minor. I'm going to play that full bodied F again, so we've got a nice punchy sound for that downstream. Because we got four fingers down here, I can relax all four of them, and all those strings are going to be muted. The thumb is going to come over the top to mute the lower A. First finger is going to relax slightly, and it cuts out the high A. Let's play that progression, down down up, up down up on the C, and the A minor, and we'll do it twice on the F major. That downstream is the only one that's pulling out that code, really punchy, really dynamic, and the rest is advocacy feel. Cool, I really love what that does to chords and strumming, and gives us a whole another load of options to play around with. Let's try it out with a power chord. Go back to your G5, three fingers are down, first finger is already muting those higher strings. Just relax those three, they're freed, and we cut out all the strings. Move that around. Start to add more of the fretted notes within that strumming pattern. Be creative, experiment with that, and see what you can find. There's a really cool song by the band Green Day, is called Brainstew, really early Green Day, and that uses a power chord progression. It just has those stabby notes to begin with. We start on the fifth fret. I'm going to run through this very quickly, it goes into a lot more detail in my power chord class. But just see you've got a rough idea, and I'll stick in these PDFs as well. Fifth fret power cord is an A5, we just do a down up, relax those fingers so everything's cut dead, go back to the third fret, then the second fret, then the first fret, and then an A5. First finger laying across the A and D strings, angled up so it mutes the G, B, and A. You've got the opening in there as well, A5. Once it's done, the run down with the little steps, the little down ups, we add percussive strums in between. For the E5, we just relax our fingers like we did with the little finger onto the fretboard, so that we can mute that lower A. Check out the power chord class and get a full tutorial of that song, is a really good one to play, gets your power chords moving around, and introduces percussive strums in a really lovely way. Palm muting, lets have a quick little look at that. Palm muting is used in loads of music. It can be used across all sorts of styles. It can give you a really nice, chucky sound. It can be used to help apply dynamics to your music. You could be strumming chords, nice and open, and then want to bring it down for the base, maybe. We spoke earlier about, if our wrist is on the bridge and it comes too far across, we start to lose the definition of our notes. There they are, I mute it, they're gone. We've just got that percussive sound. Bring your wrist back slightly, find that sweet spot, when they're not too open, they're not too dead, you just got a nice, calm, muted sound coming through. I've used that third fret power chord on the A string as C5 because it links really nice to a quick song example, Anarchy in the UK, the Sex Pistols. If you want to try that, we've got our power chord shape from the A string, we go up to the 10th fret, to G5, we play that nine times. We then slide back two frets, play eight times, and then there's a quick one on the second, five, and then our palm muting on the third fret, we're back to our C5. Rest your palm down onto the bridge, make sure that we've got those notes coming from a little bit palm muted, and we just do free hits down on that chord. Then once we've done free, we bring our first finger off, and we catch the open string, the open I, but we still catch the D and the G underneath. We get this 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, open, 1, 2, 3, open, 1, 2, 3, open. Little bit more like the original. Really use that technique to experiment with your dynamics, applying even more light and shade to the music you're making. You can bring things right down. You can try it out on every chord that you know. Wherever you are on the fretboard, you can bring your palm down onto the bridge, and bring that clarity back, so you've got that lovely softened palm you incent. Then you also have the option to make it more chunky and aggressive. Just have fun, be creative and experiment with both of those techniques. 26. Metallica - Enter Sandman: I said we were going to have a look at a metal track in this class and here how it is. Enter Sandman by Metallica. If you're not a Metal fan don't worry, you're not going to have to put on the original recording and listen to it and put your foot at pain, if it's not your thing, you're just going to take this riffing technique development and it's a really good one to have. We've got an opening picking riff and then when it kicks up, we're going to look at how that main riff is played. There's all this chugy palm-your-in stuff in the middle that can become quite intricate, so we're going to cut that out for now. I'm actually going to show you a quick example, but we're just going to focus on those main elements for now. If you could put your third finger onto the seventh fret of the A string, but have your first and second fingers ready across the fifth and sixth, they're just there in waiting and they're allowing us to have that free fret stretch. We can rest our hand on the bridge, but we're not looking to palm you and we play the open E string to begin with. Thumbs quite low on the next, we can have that good stretch across the fret board, and we go open E and then third finger, seventh fret of the A. Our first two notes. From there, we bring our first finger down to the seventh fret of the D. Our third finger can stay on the A string. It just relaxes the note so it's not coming through anymore. It's just there ready for when we need it again later. Our second finger then comes up to the sixth fret of the E string and then we go back with our first finger to the fifth fret of the E string. Let's try that from the top. Once more. Then to resolve that riff, we just play the seventh fret again of the A string, and then it starts from the opening again. Notice how I'm alternating my picking pattern, I end with a little up-pick on that A string so that I'm coming down on the low E when that riff starts when it loops again. All the time, keeping those fingers nice and close to the fret board. When they're not used, they're there ready for when they are needing to be used. All very minimal movements, keeping everything very nice and tight and close. After that riff, there's these little chugs and slides, but pretty intricate for now. That's something you can build towards. I mentioned the chugs a little bit in the power cord class, and I will do a full tutorial of that at some point. Delve a bit deeper in your own time if you want to. But for now, play that picking riff at the beginning so it all kicks up, and then when it does kick up, we're going to revisit a chord we mentioned briefly earlier, which is our E5. We're going to rest our first finger across the second fret of the A and the D string. We have a curve in the first finger so it mutes the G, B, and e underneath, enough pressure in the tip of the finger so it brings out the A and the D string, and it's low enough down so that our low E can still come through nice and clearly. We do a down-up strung there. This is when that music really kicks up, the drums come in full power, it goes to that straight beat you know everything has arrived. I'm just going to quickly play through it from there and then we'll break the rest down. Lovely, looks complicated I imagine, but it's a really fun one to play if you can pick it up. Once you've done that down up on the E5, we slide our second finger to that seventh fret of the A that we've used. Our first finger is then ready to do the 6, 5 on the low E. Then there is a little bit cassive here. After that, I like to dig out, it lines up with the snare and the drums that are there, it gives you a bit of a punch and separates that ended riff from its start and gain. Now you notice I'm strumming through that riff because I'm able to arc my fingers enough so that they cut out the open strings underneath. I'm going up to there, my first finger is resting on that low E, and it's also muting the strings underneath , so I can attack. I can add more bite to that riff. But that might take a little while to develop, so you can just rest your hand on the bridge again and that'll give you a bit more stability, a bit more control. Once you've done that three times, we go to our power chord shape, but we take our little finger off. Our first finger commute that D string or the underside of our third finger commute it, and we play the low E and A string. Once you've played it once we take our first finger off, and we just catch the open e. Then we go back one fret and we do the same thing. We've got that lovely chug palm you in sound coming out. Once the open notes are being played around the second fret position, we put it back on and we go 2, 3, 2. Altogether, back to our E5. That kick-up is noticeably harder than that intro. You can still play the intro riff along if you want to just to get used to the feel, but start to build towards picking out that heavier version or with your hand rested on the bridge. The good thing about having your hand rested on the bridge is that when you come to that power cord run-down, it's already there waiting to do the palm you in. There we go. Great one to have available to you, if it's not your thing, don't worry, just take the technique from it. Just play that first riff if you want to , you get loads from that. It's something else to expand our ability. But if you want to tackle that kick up, that chug, that'd be great. Don't get too overwhelmed by all those little Mu tin and layered guitars that are going on in that intro to gradually build into that kickoff. We can just take those separate elements that we did. Take one or the other combine them if you want to, whatever you feel more comfortable with. 27. Hammer-Ons: We're going to continue pushing our play ability and develop our technique by introducing hammer-ons, a really great technique to have. Used a **** of a lot in loads of riffs and particularly guitar solos, so you are starting to delve into that territory. It gives you other options when you're approaching your practice and when you're writing your own music, you can start to add this hammer-on technique. It will also allow you to learn a lot of other songs that you love because hammer-ons will pop up very regularly. Let's do that. We're going to bring back the first stretching exercise that we did where we were doing 1, 2, 3, 4, starting with the lowest E string. This time, once we've played the first fret with our first finger, we pluck that once, and then our second finger is hammered down onto the second fret. We don't need to play the string twice, we don't need to use our pick twice, we just play it once and then our second finger does the rest of the work. When you're ready, play that for me, pluck that first string, and then a nice bit of power, hammer that second finger down onto the second fret. Hammer-ons can add a really nice fluidity into your play. Try that four times. Once that's done, go second finger, hammer down the fret. Tips of the fingers. Nice and controlled. When you're ready, third finger, forth hammer zone. Hardest one to do is not strong as the other fingers, but we can train it. We can build that strength and that muscle memory. Once you're confident for each of those, try playing the first fret once, but then hammer your free other fingers down after that, one after the other. Trying to keep a constant tone and level throughout and equal dynamic, and build the pace as you get better at it. Move that up to the next set of full frets. Altogether. Maybe the next string. Next string, next one, and higher, and the highest. You can incorporate this into your stretching warm-up exercises, and like we've said before, mix up your order of practice with these. One day you might just do you're stretching exercises normal, or up and down the fret board. Then you might decide to do hammer-ons and start on the D string. You might decide to put both of them together and alternate which ones you do, one after the other. This is another one that really improves your finger strength and stretching capabilities and works on their independence. I would refer you back to my guitar practice class that I mentioned earlier, that link is below. That takes this idea a bit further and uses it in some other ways, but it also works on that exercise that we've just done. You've got a bit of a headstart with that class already. Let's now see how we can use a hammer-on in a very popular guitar riff. 28. Arctic Monkeys - Do I Wanna Know: Let's implement that technique into a song. It's one of the best ways of cement in something and improving it. To do that, we're going to use Do I Want To Know by the Arctic Monkeys. We've got hammer runs throughout this and a little slide that we need to work on, but it's all good. We're going to get that nailed. Let me have a quick little run through that riff and then we'll break it down. Maybe you notice those hammer runs that are in there. We're going to start by putting our first finger on the first fret of the low E. When you play in this riff, keep your hand rested on the bridge, so we've got that nice solid stability that's going to help us pick out all these notes. Once we've plucked that once, we hammer our third finger down to the third fret. Let's get that technique practice first. First finger, plucked hammer our third down to the third fret. Once that's played, our first finger then pulls out the first fret of the A string. Then we go back to the third finger on the A third fret. If you need to take that third finger off when you play the first fret A, don't bring it too far away. Keep it there hovering, waiting to be brought back into action. If you can curve your third finger, you can pretty much leave it on that string so you don't have to move it away. After that, it repeats again, but it stops with the first finger on the first fret. It doesn't bring that low E back into play. Then it froze in a quick hammer from the one to the three on the D string. It goes back to the one afterwards. We go from the top. See how quick that hammer on happens on the D. Really want to bring that third finger down nice and snappy. From the top once more. Once we've got that, we then bring an open D third fret of the A, keeping that three fingers stretch going on at all times. Our first finger comes back into play, on the first fret A. Then a quick three on the A string, but it slides up to the fifth. After we've done that D string that slide happens really quick. One, three, slide to five and then bring your first finger back to the third fret of the A. We haven't covered slides too much, but once that third finger is there and ready to slide up to that fifth fret, it happens very quickly, but you keep the pressure down with that third finger. One, three, keep it down, slide to five, back to three. I'm trying to break this into little sections. As you've got each part, you're going to build that bigger picture, which is the whole riff, might seem a little bit confusing at first having to remember all these little elements but get each bit right, and then you will have the whole rif so it. After we've done that slide, we then get back to the first fret of the A. We're bringing a hammer on, onto the third fret of the A. We've done our slide and then hammer on, and then slide again after that fifth. Then there's another quick hammer on from the third to the fifth. Then we end on the third fret of the A. I'm going to play that from that D-string again, the hammer on because I feel like that stands out from the rest because it's much higher in pitch. Then we'll break that last bit down again. Get ready for the slide, back to the one, up to the fifth, and then the third of the A. Quick hammer on, from the top. Little bit faster. If it's hard to piece with those little sections together, try to split it into two. We've got a Section 1 and a second section. The first bit I would go up to this point. Think of that as one section because we've just bit in those first three frets. Now we've got that quick slide that's going to come. We're going to play our first finger on the first fret of the A, and then the third finger quickly slides from the third to the fifth. Then we resolve. Then we're back to the top. Lots of intricate little parts there, but just take it slowly looking at tablets coming up on the screen, pause wherever you need to and you will get that rif. It is a great one to have. One of those iconic rifs that when you first start learning an instrument like a guitar, that's something you set your sights on, you think man, that'll be a cool one to play. Well, with the right patience and perseverance, you'll have that saw it in no time. 29. Pull-Offs: We're going to play around with that stretching warm up exercise once more and implement a new technique called a pull off. It's basically the reverse of the hammer-on, another technique that is incredibly common for guitar, lead riffs solos, all these licks that you hear appear in all sorts of music. We are going to use a different string rather than the lowest E. We're going to pick the D string this time, and we're going to be playing around with that 1, 2, 3, 4 that we did. We then turn into hammer-ons. We're now going to turn into pull-offs. Your first finger is down on the first fret of the D. Our second finger then comes down onto the second fret of the D. We pluck that once and then we pull our second finger across the string, keeping our first finger down with enough pressure so that first fret sounds when our second finger pulls across the string. We're not looking to yank that string down and bend it, we're just pulling across. Once we've done that second and first, we pull our third finger down, much like we did in the others, and we play the third, put across the string, and then we hear the second fret. Our first and second finger remain down. We get that really nice, smooth sound transitioning from the third to the second fret by only plucking the string once. We are passing responsibility of the note creation away from our strumming hand to our freaking hand. Really cool. Sharing the load, splitting the work, allowing us to create different dynamics and different sounds with our instrument. Fourth finger comes down to the full fret. First three stay down. Fourth finger pulls across the string. We have the third fret sounding. Hopefully, you can really see how this starts to work independence of your fingers, building individual string is a great thing to have. Once you've done with those individually, same principle, but flipped on its head like we did with the hammer-on. We now start with our little finger, pluck that once, and pull across each fret, working your way back to the first. One pluck at a string, four notes created. Just take that right up the fretboard. Go to the 12th fret of the D. Cover the 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th. Play that 15th and then just pull across, and then from the 11th back to the 8th. Find different positions on the guitar and use different strings. As long as you're covering four frets each time, it doesn't matter. This again links into when I talk about warming your fingers out, that stretching exercise, that initial technique development. Implement this technique into that now. You don't just need to do to single note. You don't just need to do your power chord warm up, though it could be used any time. You don't just have to be when you're about to play power chords. You can now bring the pull of one into there as well somewhere. Maybe pick a string, hammer the first four, slide up, pull off the next four, and then just single pick the next four. Get your fingers loosened and warmed up. I expand on this idea a lot more in the guitar practice class, I've mentioned a couple of times, so feel free to dip into that whenever you're ready. Now, let's get that technique implemented into another iconic guitar riff. 30. The Rolling Stones - Satisfaction: The Rolling Stones satisfaction and absolutely iconic riff. One of those that is always associated with beginner guitar players as because it is very beginner friendly, nice, and accessible. Just one of those that I think you picture yourself playing when you hear it on the original recording and you dream of playing an instrument like a guitar that is probably a riff that a lot of people think of early on. I'm sure you know how it sounds but I'm going to have a very quick play for you. You can already see that we're stretched across four frets, very handy because of the stretching exercises that we've been working on. We're on the tips of our fingers and there's a couple of little pull off stuff thrown in there which we should be able to tackle nice and easy because of all that prep work we've been doing. We start by putting our first finger on the second fret of the a string and we play that twice. We want our third and fourth finger ready because they're going to come down onto the fourth and fifth fret in a minute. After those two hits we play one more and then we go four, five altogether. Bring your second finger down as well because that just helps with that stability. A lot like the stretching exercises we were doing earlier. Our hand is resting down on the bridge for even more stability. Once we've played that little finger we hit it twice more. But on that second time we pull the little finger off to a full finger, needs to be pushed down hard enough so that we can hear that fourth fret note that we want to come through. One, two, pull off on the second. Lovely. From the top. We can hear that full fret coming through. Now we play that full fret once more and we pull off onto the second fret. Our first finger needs to be ready for that. See what that work that we've done already without pull off. Hopefully this will be nice and easy for you to pick up. Once more from the top. You will see some people play this riff with just the first finger and do slides back down the fret board. That is something that when you very first pick up the guitar you could teach someone they'd be playing that hopefully in no time. Not really smooth straight away but it's something they can pick up easy because it just involves the one finger. But all the work we've been doing, the level that you'll be at now, I think it's important that we keep developing our finger independence, our stretching abilities and we use this stretch across four frets. You might also say which I do quite like is this version. I think I've even seen Keith Richards play this so you can't really argue with that. Third finger just slides from the fourth to the fifth which does really sound nice along to the recording actually. I might even do that on the original. Then you slide back to the fourth. Then you do that pull off from the fourth to the second. You've got options there. I'd suggest either the fore finger across four fret stretch or that version with the third finger. The reason I like the one with the little finger is because it's working on the strength and independence of our little finger. It's nice to incorporate that pull off technique and just keep expanding our ability as a guitar player. Nice one. Another riff down and what a great one to have in your locker. Catch you in the next video. 31. Scales: Scales, we have reached that point. I've known guitar as shudder at that word. When you mention it in lessons, it's not something that gets the best reception. People can associate it with being really boring, quite a dull thing to learn, not very creative, but I swear is the opposite to that if you apply it in the right way. Scales are the backbone and the building blocks of all those really cool lead licks and solos, if you're into that thing that you hear in the music that you love. The foundations of it come from how scale work. The techniques we've been working on earlier, the finger stretching and strengthening exercises are all leading us to the point of scale work. We're now going to start to tackle that. We're not going to dive really deep and I think that's people's mistakes early on. If you just overwhelm yourself with all this information and you don't apply in practical, in creative ways, it ain't the most fun thing to get involved in. But I'm going to try and present this in a more creative way. I admit the initial bit of information and the initial scale that we play isn't the most pleasing to the ear, isn't the most exciting thing. The very quickly you start to see how you do apply that in creative ways and you can go off and so many brilliant, weird, and wonderful tangents with the foundations that scales give you. Let's start to look at that in a bit more detail then. A scale is basically an order of notes, one after the other, ascending or descending. It's combinations of these notes that we put together that then determine what key we're playing. We also use notes from scales to create chords much like we spoke about earlier. If you was to take the first, the third, and the fifth from that root notes scale, you would create the major chord. We're going to use scales to start to understand theory. We're going to scratch the surface there and a little bit more than we have already. They going to improve our technique, our overall playing ability. Later we're going to utilize this scale shapes to play our own lead guitar riffs over a chord progression. I'm going to demonstrate to you. Then you're going to run with it, get really creative and write your own guitar lead parts. The best place to start is with the chromatic scale, which is also known as the mother scale. Now this is basically every note that exists on the guitar. Every note that we use in Western music. Western music has 12 notes. All of these can be found up and down the guitar in various places. We're going to play them one after the other, which means we're going to play chromatically much like the 1, 2, 3, 4 stretching exercise that we did. It represents a brilliant way to learn your fretboard. Once you know this chromatic scale, you will be able to find out what every note on the fretboard is. When we play this chromatic scale, we're going to be moving up one at a time. That means we're going to be moving a semitone. Each time we traveled from one fret to another, we have traveled a semitone. If we used to jump two, that would be a whole tone. You'll hear semitone and tone mentioned quite a lot in your guitar journey, or it might sometimes be referred to as halftone and whole tone. We're going to start with our open A string. We know that as an A note. We learned that very early on when we learn the different names of each string. Once we've played that A, we're going to work all the way up to the 12th fret and I'm going to talk you through each note. First, we have A, then A sharp, then B. From B to C, there are no sharps or flats, so we just jump from B-C. Then is C sharp. We're going to jump with our first finger to D. D sharp, E. Here, from E to F, there are no sharps or flats so from E, it goes straight to F, then F sharp. G. G sharp and then we're back to A. We have played all 12 notes, and we have traveled what is called an octave. Once we've started from 1A and we've got all the way up to another A, you've traveled an octave. That would be the same for wherever you start if you play D and you worked your whole way up and then you came to another D, you would have traveled a whole octave. This work back from that higher octave. We've got onto the 12th fret of the A string, which means we're playing an A note. When we got back, there's a slight difference to how we refer to these notes. When we're ascending, which we just did. The sharps start appear when we're descending, they are flipped to become flats. If we've got A, we got back when we've got A flat. Then we've got G, then we've got a G flat. Then we're going to bring our little finger up to an F. Then remember there's no sharps or flats, so F, go straight to A, then is E flat, then D. Then we jump to D flat. C. C and B have no sharps or flats, we jump straight to be B. B flat and we're back to A. You can see there why that stretching exercise we did earlier covering four frets has really helped us with learning in this chromatic scale as well. Let's pick up on one more thing with that 12th fret. We notice 12 notes in music now. We've traveled on how octave from open A to an A on the 12th fret. Those open notes are exactly the same on the 12th fret as they are when they're open. That 12th fret for A, below is a 12th fret D note, and then G, and then B, and then A and obviously we have our lowest E as well. The notes open E,A,D,G,B,E are the same on the 12th fret. E, A, D, G, B, E. We've already condensed our guitar a little bit there to go. If I'm somewhere in the middle and I want to work these notes out. I know that my open notes at E, A, D, G, B, E, and I know the 12th fret is E, A, D, G, B, E, and I can use my chromatic scale to work backwards or work up whatever's closest to what I need to work out. If I was playing the second fret of the A string. I'd start in my chromatic scale and go, open is E, there's no sharps or flats, so the next fret must be F. I've traveled what's known as a semitone. I've gone up by one fret, a semitone and after F is F sharp. Cool. If I was on the 10th fret of the lowest E, I know that the 12th fret of the E, is an E note. If I go back one is an E flat. I go back one more is a D. I can start to work out what the notes I'm playing are all over the fretboard. It's a great tool to have. Let's pick another string and start somewhere different on that chromatic scale. We're going to use the open D this time and try and follow along with me. Open D. Next would be D sharp, then A. E straight to F. F sharp. G. G sharp. A. A sharp. B. C. C sharp, and were back to D. Now when you do your stretching exercise or any of those warm-up ones, try and work out with notes you're playing. Start to be aware of where you are on the fretboard and what notes you're creating. Like I mentioned earlier when we then take certain combinations of those 12 notes that exist, that's when we really start to form keys of music. That opens up so many doors to songwriting and knowing what lead work we can apply over chord progressions that we're listening to or jamming along with. This delve a little bit deeper into that in the next lesson. 32. Major Scale: We've covered the chromatic scale. Now, it's time to start forming keys of music. We're going to start with major keys. We are going to form a major scale. We take combinations from those notes to exist in Western music. The 12 notes that we have to play with, the 12 notes that are in the chromatic scale. By taking certain combinations of these, we can form our keys of music. Much like there are 12 notes available to us, that means there's 12 major keys and 12 minor keys available. That might sound a bit overwhelming, a bit daunting but don't worry because there's ways to make the information easier to digest and we're not going to delve really deep again, don't worry, I don't want you to panic about that. We're just going to take small bits of information to help keep us moving along in this guitar theory journey that we're just dipping our toe into. Major and minor scales will have seven notes in them. Instead of counting up with semitones, like we did with the chromatic scale, there's a combination of tones and semitones, sometimes referred to as whole tones and half-tones. Let's build run so we can start to understand this a little bit better. We're going to build the C major scale. Nice place to start because it has no sharps or flats in it, so it tends to be a little bit easier to remember. We're going to put our second finger on the third fret of the A string. We're going to have our little finger ready to come on to the fifth. Our first finger is hovering around this second fret, ready to do some work on the D string in a minute. Now with our major scale, we count up tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. Or that would be referred to as whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. I tend to veer more towards using tone and semitone, probably because that's what I was taught when I was a youngster. I'm going to be referring to him as tones and semitones throughout this lesson. We can utilize our chromatic scale to help build this major scale using that tone and semitone combination. This third fret of the A string is a C note. We need to jump a whole tone to get to our next note, which would be D if we think about chromatic scale. Our next note is D, which appears here on the fifth fret of the A string. We didn't need to jump another tone, so we'd miss out D-sharp and we jumped straight to E. That E appears here on the second fret of the D. You now say that we're at a point where we need to move a semitone. So one fret, that's where our F note comes in. Remember there's no sharps or flats between F. We now need to jump another tone in that pattern that we can see. We jump from F to G. We've cut out that fret in the middle, we've cut out that F sharp. We jump another tone from G to A, we jump another tone from A to B, and we jump a semitone to end with, which brings us back to C. We have jumped from a lower octave C up to a higher octave C, using that pattern and that tone semitone combination. Let's now play that together. Go back to your third fret with your second finger and we go, third, fifth. Then on to the D string, 2, 3, 5. Thumbs, nice and low so we've got that spreading, that fanning of the fingers and then 2, 4, 5 on the G. I'm still alternating my picking pattern to keep everything moving nice and fluidly. See the benefit. Again if those stretching exercises that we were doing earlier on, four fingers across in four frets, tips of the fingers, nice curve in the knuckles. Hopefully, all those things that we are working on earlier on are helping you with this. Once you've finished that scale shape, reverse it, that's going to really help sink this information in. So 5, 4, 2. Then 5, 3, 2 on the D, 5, 3, 2 on the A. Start slow and then gradually build that speed. Keep it all the fingers stretched across those four frets. They're all ready for what's coming next. There we go. We have the C major scale. C is the root note, it's the home note, what the focus of this scale is. It's also the first note obviously in that scale. As much as you hear the notes referred to as C, D, E, F, G, A, B. You may also hear them numbered from 1-7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then we're back to the beginning. Now we know all the notes in C major, you know all the notes that work really well together, everything that compliments each other. If you was playing something in the key of C, you could use this C major scale and you could jam along to it and you know that you couldn't hear a bad note. A good trick with this guy was it's got chromatic abilities. Much like the chromatic scale where we're moving one fret at a time, you can shift this whole shape alone. If I move this up two frets, think about chromatic scale. From C, B, C# and then D, we can just play the same shape as long as you keep those distances where we had two fret stretch. Then our first finger came down, one fret behind the second finger. We play that same pattern. We've now got the D major scale in C, shift it up two frets, 1, 2. We've gotten C, C#, D. We have the D major scale and you can just do that up and down the fret board. Maybe pick a part of the fret board. Once you're comfortable with that C major scale, and use that pattern of the tone, tone semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone to see if you could build another major scale. Say you went to the seventh fret of the A string, you could use your chromatic scale to get there. A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, A. We are on A. We start out with our second finger. We want to count a tone up, which we know is two frets. That brings in an F-sharp. We then know we count in another tone so if we think of our chromatic scale, we're on F sharp, there will be a G and then there'd be a G#. That G# exists here. A semitone brings in our A. A tone jump brings in our B. Another tone jump from B to C to C#. C#, we jump to D#, and then a semi-tone brings us back to A. We've just built the A major scale. Now as much as you can just use that pattern up and down, and as long as you memorize the fret distances, you can play that shape in every key and you could learn the root now and go okay, on the 12th fret, we know that's an A now. I know I'm playing the A major scale there, but I think it's really important to know the notes you're playing as well. You want to be aware of where you are on the fret board and what notes you're creating. It's a bit like driving a car, knowing where the pedals are, but not knowing what they do. It's really important to start building these references that can start with the shape and then the root note, and then use those patterns to help memorize and work out the notes that you're creating. I'm not expecting you to suddenly memorize 12 major keys. It's not going to work like that. But the more you play, the more diversity you add to your plan and the styles and songs that you learn that a really eclectic and has a big poll, a big mix of music presented to you, you're engaging with and you're creating with and slowly this information will sink in. 33. Order Of Chords: We know every note that exist on the fretboard, every note in Western music. We know every note that exists in a major scale and how we can find those notes with our tone, tone, semitone patterns. We can now use those notes in the major key to create every chord that works in that key. Again, I'm not going to delve really deep here, I'm not going to talk about how every individual chord is constructed, but I'm going to give you something called the order of chords. You will find this pop-up if you start to look into chords that work within particular keys, every key will have its order of chords. A major and a minor key will have that order of chords, and that is basically chords that are constructed from the notes that exist within that key. Let's do a quick example with C again, that's become a nice focus point for us. We know our first note is C. That would be a C major chord. A second note is D. For a D chord to work in this key made up of the notes that exist within this key, it would be a D minor. We know our next note was E, that chord would be an E minor. We know our next note was F, that chord would be an F major. Again is constructed solely from the notes that exist in the C major key. After F, we had G. That would be a G major. After G we had A, that would be an A minor. After A we had B, and this where we've found a new chord for us, a B diminished. Pretty nasty sounding to begin with. It doesn't appear a lot in your standard pop music but it is used a lot in things like classical and jazz. It can be a nice parsing chord. Sounds pretty nasty on its own, but used in the right way, it sounds beautiful. That was B diminished, and then we're back to C, a C Major. Your order of chords in a major key are major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished, and then we're back to the top. Again, let's not overload ourselves here. That's a big step in the right direction of understanding how music is constructed, but we don't need to dissect every element of that information. This shift that to D now. We're going to use that same scale shape as we did earlier as a reference point and you're going to see that major, minor, minor order of chords appear as well, and we're going to work out what those chords would be. You don't have to play all these chords along. It's just another quick example of how this works in practice. Our root note was D, that would be a D major chord. Our next note was E, that would be an E minor. Our next note was F sharp, that would be an F sharp minor. Our next note was G, that'd be a G major. Our next note was A, that would be an A major. Our next note was B, that would be a B minor. Our next note was C sharp, that'd be a C sharp diminished. Then we end on D. C is nasty as that can sound on its own, it resolves to its home note, it's D, its root note, really well. Lovely, just a little parsing note to link it together. Now you have the tools to see what chords work in every major key. You can use that combination of the major scale, that tone, tone, semitone construction, and the order of chords to eventually work out all the chords that would work in that key. We can have chord progressions, it sound lovely together, and we can have lead guitar work singing over the top that doesn't hear a bad note. You're taking huge strides here to be able to write your own chord progressions and lead guitar parts, and be able to jam along with other musicians or along to some of your favorite pieces of music. 34. Minor Scale: We're going to look at one more scale before we break things up with a nice guitar riff to learn. We've looked at chromatic, we've looked at major, we're now going to look at a minor scale. There's 12 major keys, 12 major scales, and there's 12 minor keys, which means 12 minor scales. Now, don't worry, don't sit here and think, I've got to memorize 24. You haven't got to do that. There's a way to link the two of them. There's something called a relative minor. We're going to use C again as our starting point, C major. C major and A minor have exactly the same notes in them. There's just a different starting point and in that new note, that new starting point becomes your home note and it's the note that you could accent to bring out a different mood in that scale. The notes you accent will dictate how that scale feels over the top of the chords that are played underneath. Think back to your tone, tone, semitone for the major scale progression. With the minor one, it looks different, but let's break that down and see how they're linked. A minor scale progression is tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone. Now that might look very different, but jump to the third point in that minor scale progression, the second time the tone appears. If you start from there, you'll see that it's tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone. This relationship of three is very important because if I was to start with the major note, the C major, and I count it back three semitones, I'd get B, B-flat, A. That means that C major's relative minor is A minor. You can do that with any major key wherever you're starting point is, you count back three and you will find its relative minor, which means it will have the same notes, you will just start at a different point in the scale in the progression. If you worked the other way, you knew you had A minor. If you count up three from A minor, this count of three from the A note, A, A sharp, B, C, and back into C major. The point at which you start this note that becomes your home note, your focus will dictate the mood. Minor is going to have more of a sad feel, major is going to have more of a happy feel. For our piece later we're going to focus on the major sounding vibe where we want to create that feel in our music, but we're going to use a minor and a major shape, a C major and A minor, and link them together so that we can cover more of the fretboard with a lead guitar work. Let's play an A minor scale, just so we can start to put that into practice. We're going to start with our open A hand resting on the bridge. We then bring our second finger down to the second fret of the A, third finger across to the third fret of the A. That's our C note, we've counted up three, now open D string, a second fret D, a third fret D, now open G and then we're back to A on the second fret of the G. We can reverse that. Up once more. I could move the A minor scale into the C major shape. After we've gone A to three, we could slide up to that C major progression we were doing earlier. Fifth fret of the A string, D, E, F, G, A. See how they start to link together and then from that A, I could work back. Hopefully you can start to see the relationship between these two. Now if I was focusing on the A note, we would create more of a minor sound. If we shifted that into the C major. You can hear this more of a major brighter feel about it. It's fascinating to start to think about the relationship that major and minor keys have and the possibilities that it gives us. I'll stress this a lot, but we don't need to delve right into every key, we're just bringing these little bits of information into place that hopefully will start to link everything together for you. Use that open A minor shape, link into the C and you could use your first finger on the second fret of the A this time so you can maintain that shape that we used with the C major and then finish off the C major. You start to see how they link and it gradually changed the mood of what you're creating and see if you can do the same with another position on the guitar. Find the major scale, work back three and create your relative minor or vice versa. If you can memorize that A minor shape, that minor scale shape and shift everything up one or two frets, then you could count up from your starting note to find your relative major. If I was on C sharp, I could count up three, 1,2,3. E major is going to be C sharp's relative major. Let's break all this up with a bit of fun now and learn another riff. 35. Aerosmith - Walk This Way: Let's break that scale work up with a decent guitar riff to learn it's Aerosmith's Walk This Way brought back to life by Run-DMC in the '80s and man, what a good version that is as well. This is prominent guitar riff that runs throughout both versions is great for us to learn. I have a quick little run through that and then we'll break it down. Now that might look a bit tricky and intricate, but they're all techniques that you've learned. We're going to start with an open A string. You can rest your hand onto the bridge for a bit of stability. Sometimes you'll see people add a bit a palm muting into the song. It depends what you want. For a bit more attack, you can open up those strings, bring your wrist back and make sure it's not interfering with the strings. If you want a dead in that note slightly at a little bit of a chuck to it, you can bring that hand across. I'd say, for now, just bring it back to the strings open. You don't want to have to be worrying too much about that picking hand when we want to focus on the fret and M first get those notes right, and then you can play about with a dynamic afterwards. We are playing an open 1, 2 on the A string. They happen pretty quick, but as always, start slow and build towards the right pace. Once you play that open 1, 2, we lay the second finger flat and put out the second fret of the D. The pressure comes off of the A string and we're now focusing the slightly lower down part of the tip of your second finger to put out the second fret of the D. It rolls off of the A string onto the D. You'll see some people play this with one finger, which is obviously doable but I like the idea of us working on more finger independence by using two fingers. Once that's done, you repeat that pattern. We go back to the open 1, 2 second fret of the D, but this time we throw in an open E string at the end of it. Nice and slow. That all happens pretty quick in the original. We want to cut that low E string out, so it sucks away and it doesn't hang over that little gap in the music. We want everything to be quite punchy here. Relax the fingers when you play the note that you need to play. See how I add that extra punch and push to it all. Next, it repeats that same pattern with the open 1, 2, and then two underneath, it does that twice. But this time at the end instead of the open E, we pull off the third fret of the E with our third finger and resolve with that second fret of the D so we get. We can use a thumb to cut that note dead the open E once it's been pulled off. Altogether, that second section happens very quickly. Again it's already small little movements the once in this track, but they're great if you can pick them up. Once we resolve on that D string second fret, just give it a little bend. We haven't really worked on bend yet, but we want to keep the pressure down with that second finger. Once you've pluck the string, use your first finger for a bit more stability and help, and just wobble that string a little bit. Like it. From the top. After that, we move into the second half of that riff. We do the same pattern. The riff starts with the open 1, 2 on the A string, and then the second fret on the D, and we end with the open string E. The final one is slightly different. It does an open 1, 2 again, but once we do that last two with an A5. An A5 power chord. We did A5 briefly earlier. A5 is basically an open A string and your first finger lying flat across your D and G string. Thumb comes over the top to meet the lower E. Curve in the first finger to meet the B and E and we strum, we attack the guitar as if we are strumming all six strings is that power chords. We really want to bring out that punch. That last bit, nice and slow and you have that punch to the power cord to resolve everything. It goes into a different part of the music, and then it comes back to that riff quite a lot throughout the track. I'm sure you'll be able to hear where it is. This play from the top once more nice and slow. Cut that note dead, you bend into that A5 power chord. Hope you've enjoyed playing that one is a bit more advanced than what we were doing earlier on, but that's the idea with this class. We're gradually up in our level, up in our game and that is a really good one for you to master. Let's jump into the next video. 36. Pentatonic Scale: We're going to learn one more scale shape and it's called the pentatonic scale. Now, this scale only has five notes in it. It's a different version of the major scale. You've basically taken a major scale and you've removed two of the notes. In this instance, in the pentatonic scale, we've removed the fourth and the seventh. We don't need to analyze too much why that's happened, but generally speaking, they are the notes to create a bit more tension in that scale. They might not sound as smooth and transition quite as well as the others, even though they don't necessarily clash, they're not the best ones so we're moving them to one side. Pentatonic means five, so we've got rid of those two notes from the seven that we had in the major scale, we have our five notes that make up the pentatonic scale. This is a very popular scale to use, very common, very accessible used in lots of music. Many of the solos that you hear or little lead licks will be formed around the pentatonic scale. It's a great one to know. It does have chromatic abilities. You can move it up and down once you've learned that shape, but I'd like to stress again that it's important to note a note, not just the shape because as you progress as a player, you're going to want to be able to dictate your guitar playing. You're going to want to focus on certain notes to create certain moods. This is why it's important to know where you are as much as possible at all times. But don't worry, this is not going to become a constant brain exercise where you need to be calling out the notes the whole time and know exactly what note you're playing every time. The more you do this, it'll become second nature, a bit like walking down the street. You don't have to think about every step that you take, it just happens. My classical guitar tutor used to say, sing the notes, which I'm not going to put you through the pleasure of right now. But that is something I would encourage if you're comfortable to do, that play through the scale and sing the notes as you do them. Maybe I'll just put you through a little bit of it. We're going to start with a minor shape and then show you how that links to the major, relative minor, relative major. Remember that. Well, this is going to be another good demonstration of how that happens. If you could put your first finger for me onto the fifth fret of the lowest E, you're about to learn a very common scale shape, it's the A minor pentatonic. We play at fifth fret. Little finger getting ready for this four fret stretch, comes across to the eighth fret, 5,8. After that we go 5,7 on the A string. Now, first finger creeps down, 5,7 on the A string. We then do 5,7 on the D, 5,7 on the G, 5,8 on the B, then 5,8 again but on the highest E. You see that just feels a bit simpler. It sounds more accessible. Let's reverse that, 8,5, 8,5 again. Keeping those fingers close to the fretboard, 7,5, 7,5, 7,5, 8,5. The A minor pentatonic scale. Lovely. This is honestly so important to learn. It's going to open up a ton of doors for when you want to start playing lead riffs, lead licks, righting solos, all that thing. This five pentatonic shapes, we're just going to be using one minor and one major now. I don't want to overwhelm or overload you too much. There's a trick that we can link our minor shape into our major shape. Think back to relative minor, relative major. We've just played an A minor pentatonic. If we count out three from that A note, so we've got our root A note 1, 2, 3. A-sharp, B, C. C major is A minor's relative major. A minor is C major's relative minor. Remember all of that. Well, we can start a pentatonic shape in C major. We know it's going to have the same notes as A minor. We spoke about this earlier. A minor, C major, they've got the same notes, just a different starting point. We're going to use a different shape this time, but we're going to be able to link both of them later on, so remember that. If you've shifted this minor shape anywhere, say, you've kept the same distance of frets, that same 5,8, 5,7, 5,7, it could then become 12,15, 12,14, 12,14. Wherever that little finger plays, that is the relative major, so this minor shape, which in this incident will be A, F, F-sharp, G. G major is the relative major of E minor. We've done our A minor. Your little finger is now a starting point, but we're going to replace the little finger with our second finger. We're going to use a four fret stretch again, so get ready for that. We are on the eighth fret with our second finger, and then our little finger comes down to the 10th. After that, our first finger plays 7,10. Then we move down to the D string and play 7,10 again. Then G, we play 7,9. Then on the B, we play 8,10. Then the highest E, we play 8,10. We have our C major pentatonic. Now, let's reverse that, 10,8, 10,8, 9,7, 10,7 10,7 10,8. Now, if you can try and memorize those shapes, lock those in as soon as you can. By repetition is a good way to do that, just repeat those scales. You could use scales as you're warm-up, replace your stretching exercises that we spoke about earlier, some days with scale shapes as a warm-up. It's a very similar thing and a great way of training your fingers and that muscle memory. We can start to link these shapes when we're playing our lead riffs, which we're going to do in a little while. If I want that major feel, I can still focus on the C note and this C major shape, but I can dip in and out of that A minor shape because we know A minor and C major have got the same notes in them. Try and envision that for me if you can. I'm going to muck around with the order of the notes in this scale. It's great to play them as they're meant to be in order as your initial technique and your development and awareness, but then when you start to create lead parts, we're going to muck around with the order of those notes. I'm going to do that a little bit now and it will come up on the screen when I've transitioned from the major shape into the minor shape. Let's take that idea of expanding scale techniques a little bit further. 37. Expanding Scales: We've got one more bit of preparation to do before we start talking even more about writing our own song, and you're going to start playing your own lead ideas over the top of a chord progression. We can expand a scale technique by adding the hammer ons and the pull offs that we incorporated and learned earlier on. It's going to make the scales sound more interesting and it's going to push our ability that bit further. We'll start by playing the scale in its correct order of nodes, but then we will look at how we can chop up and take little segments to practice lead riff ideas. They start with a minor pentatonic. Instead of just playing that note by note as we did a minute ago, we're going to hammer that scale instead. We're going to hammer on each note. We play the first note on each string, and then we hammer the next. It sounds lovely, I really like that. You get comfortable with that technique, take your time, really make sure you're hammering down on the tips of those fingers. Needs a lot of pressure from that little finger is a four fret stretch and it's got to go from the fifth to the eighth, and still bring out that eighth fret note. Once you've got to the top of the scale, and you've hammered each note on, pull the notes off on the way back. Hammer on the way up, and then pull off. Let's try that in the major shape , and then the pull offs. The guitar practice class that I mentioned earlier takes this idea a little bit further, incorporates all those different techniques we've been working on and implements them in scales and lead work. That's something again to check out when you're ready. But for the moment here where we are now, we're practice in the beginner journey we're on, that is really going to help give you that lead guitar work ability. We could just take little areas of these scales, and start to practice little patterns, come up with your own ones. Maybe you could just do five-seven on the D and G, stay around there, and just muck around with the order of the notes. The binding on that seventh fret of the D, that is our I note, so that'll be your home node. That will feel right if I didn't end, there. Doesn't feel like it's resolved until the back of the I note. The same as if we were in the C major shape that's taken area of that. Let's go onto the eighth fret of the D and the A string. Expand it a little bit. I can also slide between the shapes if I wanted to. Again, we know A minor, C major have got the same notes in. If I'm on that five-seven, we know that the ninth fret of the G, which is an A note, was in that C major shape. If I want to, when I'm playing that A minor I can slide to that E note on the ninth fret of the G, and now I'm in that C major shape and we can run from there. Slide back if we want. Start to look at your scales in that way, they don't have to just be one note after the other. That's definitely our starting point. That's what we want to do to begin with. But now just take some time, start with those hammer ons runs and pull offs and then just take little areas of those scales mock around with them. Again, you've got free reign here, you can't do anything wrong. You've got all those notes to play with, you know the notes that sound nice together. You've got the shape that you can work with that encases everything. Now just get creative with it. Just take your time, be free, experiment, and enjoy that process. Is so important to just enjoy, not put too much pressure on yourself and believe that you definitely can create something. 38. Writing Your Own Music: This is the section I've really been looking forward to. All about writing your own music, taking those skills, techniques that we've been learning, along the way and then starting to implement them in a way that makes you realize and believe that you can start to create your own music. We're not trying to write a masterpiece here, we're just enabling that realization that you can create something of value. This process is just designed to give you self-belief, creative confidence, and awareness. We noticed only 12 notes available to us. Think about all those different styles of music that are created from that. Start to look at music in this way, deconstruct it, break it down into it's simplest form. Realize, like, we spoke about earlier, a lot of time, the biggest hits of the modern age, or back in the day, are just made up of very simple chord formations. As a starting point, take these ideas, whether it's Nirvana to Metallica, Outkast or George Ezra, or whoever. Look at what those chords are, start to think about how you could muck around with them, reverse the order, chop and change them, put the third chord first, see what that does to a chord progression as a starting point for writing your own music. Because that's all a lot of people are doing, "still like an artist" is a very famous saying. That's basically boiling down the fact that you are just taking all these little influences and ideas from other people and turning them into something that's your own. Writing music is very similar, you can't help but be influenced by the music that you love and listen to. Deconstruct that music, use it as a reference and then experiment with what that person has done, and you are then starting to open the door to songwriting even more, and you're formulating your own creative ideas from something that's already been created. Then as a progression from that, we want to take something from scratch, start from the basics, start from the chords, and then write some lead parts over the top. I'm going to demonstrate that process now. We focus quite a lot on the key of C major. We know the notes that exist within C, and we know the chords that exist within C. I've composed a short piece of music that takes a handful of those chords. I've put them together with a simple strumming pattern. I'm going to then play that back in track that has got those chords laid down. I know I'm in the key of C, which means I can use my C major pentatonic shape to just jam some laid ideas over the top. I know I can also shift into that A minor pentatonic shape because they've got the same notes, and we've already demonstrated a couple of times how they link very nicely together. The chord progression I'm going to use in what we'll call our verses is just going to be C major, A minor, F major, and then back to C. I'm just going to single-strand them with a little bit of a push. We're then going to go into a chorus, which is going to be A minor, E minor, F major, and G. Then at the end, the last part of the chorus is going to throw in a quick little B minor, F, G. That chorus is going to be strummed with a down, down, up, up, down, up. Then we're back into that verse. The next lesson is going to be the backing track playing with me jamming those lead ideas over the top. You can sit back and watch if you want to, just to get a little bit of inspiration from the lead guitar work. I'm not going to be doing anything really complicated. That's not the idea here. This is not about being really fancy and woodling up and down the guitar neck. That's really not the style we're after here. I just want to demonstrate some simple little old lead riff, some combinations of notes, I might do some slides, some little hammer on, some little pull off, maybe play a couple at the same time to show what that does to the different dynamic, the different mode. It's really not about trying to do anything over the top here. It's just showing what a little bit of knowledge, with order of chords and scales can do for your own creative possibilities. If you do want to play along with these codes, the structure for this song is going to be six times around the verse, AC, A minor, F, C. We go into our chorus, the E minor, A minor, F, G, that goes around twice. Remember the second one's a little bit different because it is frozen in the D minor, F, G. We got back into a verse four times around the verse and then a double chorus That's still resolves of that D minor F, G at the end of it. And then the very end of the track just rings out a nice C major chord to bring everything to an end. The next lesson, we'll come straight, back in track, get involved with a chord or sit back and just digest a bit of the information and get ready for your own attempts at the lead work. 39. Lead Guitar: I hope you managed to get something from that. Those parts aren't designed for you to go and emulate them and totally copy what's going on there. You can if you want as a starting point, that's absolutely fine. It was hopefully just able to demonstrate that once we know the key we're in, the codes, we can play and the scale shapes we can refer to. We can just bounce around and we can have fun. We can be free and creative, safe in the knowledge that we know we're not going to hit a bad note. I added a bit of light and shade to that plane. Some notes were pulled out a bit more, some of them sat back. I combined a couple of notes and we're still within that scale shape, particularly in the C major pentatonic if you think of the latter part of that, once we get to the bottom. From here on the G string. Well, I just combined the notes that exist in the G, the B, and the E and I think I might have thrown in the D string as well. We're actually creating a C major chord there. For those opportunities, it don't just have to be one now after the other, you can start to double them up, find those positions in the shape, and start to see what they sound like together. I did a bit of that in that lead example. Now it's your turn. The backing track is going to come on again. This time I'm just going to be playing the chords. I could have just left the backing track running for you to play along to, but I thought would be quite nice if we did this together. I will be playing the chords live to that backing track and then you're going to be adding your lead ideas over the top. The verse plays around four times, then the chorus is a two. Remember that D minor F, G at the end. See if you can find something subtle or nice to shift along with that. The next verse is four times again, and then as a double chorus to end with, that also will have the D minor F, G progression at the end. Then the very last chord or ring out at the end of the track after that double chorus is just a C major. If you want it to end on your home note, find the C. You've obviously got your low-root ones. You've got the last note of the scale. This is C and maybe that temp fret of the D. You could land there if you wanted to but I'll leave that up to you. Good luck. Don't put pressure on yourself. Just relax, try and enjoy, experiment, and have faith in the shape. Faith in the shape. What does that even mean? You know what I mean, have faith in that scale shape. 40. Backing Track: I hope you enjoyed that, and I hope you haven't put too much pressure on yourself. Remember, this is not about setting big goals and high standards. What you're doing has got unique creative value. From the moment you play a couple of those notes, you are creating something unique to yourself. Believe in your ability. Relax and just enjoy that process. I can't stress that enough. There's no right or wrong here. There's no one's judging. We're just aiming to instill that self-belief. At the very least, just facilitate this time to sit back and enjoy music for its creative abilities, as well as the practicing, the technique development, the learning of other people's songs. That's great. There's a lot of merit in doing that, but there's so much to be heard from finding your own unique, creative voice as well. I encourage you to play that back as many times as you want. You will create something slightly different every time. Maybe you'll find a little element or something you love previously and you'll keep that in the next time round. You might develop it. You might expand on it a little bit. But each time, you might stumble across a new idea. That's one of the most beautiful things with music, happy accidents. Things that just come out of nowhere and turn into a beautiful idea. They hide and they're out there everywhere. The more you do it, the more you create, the more you experiment, the more you find. This could be part of your class project. I would honestly love to hear what you're creating. It is such a big, enjoyable part of this process of creating classes and putting it out there to anyone who's willing to watch. Hearing new music is one of my biggest passions. If it's from a student who's taking the class, then it doesn't get much better than that. Please, I encourage you to take part in the class project, however you'd like to. Even if you don't want to post this underneath for everyone to see or you don't even think of it as particularly the class project, you just want to send me what you're doing, show me what you're up to, I'm seriously up for that. The email address is coming up. You can get me on the socials or you can post discussions in links below. You could use SoundCloud private links, YouTube private link, whatever you'd like to do, attach your recording and email me. I'd honestly love to hear from you. If you want to know a bit more about the production and recording side of things similar to what I've been doing behind the scenes here, there's a whole little recording setup going on, then you should check out the class that's coming up now by an amazing teacher that I know. Go and give him a little look when you get a chance. Huge well done for taking that on. Keep experimenting, keep creating. I'll catch you in the next video. 41. Restringing Your Guitar: I thought it'd be good to show you how to restring your guitar. You might have snapped a string already. I hope you haven't obviously, but it happened to me in the early days. I'd gone to my first lesson, I ended up buying a guitar from the guitar seller. A nice, cheap little white strat, sounded beautiful. Still got it to this day, I love it. I got home, a couple of days into the practice, snapped a string. Now there was no YouTube back then. Man, that makes me feel old. I rang my guitar, went around there. He showed me what to do. It's something I've remembered ever since, so I thought it'd be nice to show you how to do it just so you haven't got to go scaring around and searching on the Internet if you do or when you do snap a string, because it will happen. The guitar I'm going to use, which is this Gibson SG, a very old faithful of mine. A lot of scars, scratches, war wounds on it. It's been with me a long time, but I love it. The finished string on here is a 10. That means I'm using a set of 10s. These are skinny top heavy buttons, which means the thicker ones are a little bit thicker than an average set of 10s. But just so you're aware, working up, we know that we've got a thin to thick string, but they're all going to be a different gauge, have a different number associated to them. In this instance, there'd be a 10, 13, 17. I've taken the next two off, but they would have been a 30 and a 42. I'm going to check a little bit and look at the packet to make sure I've got that right. It is a 30, a 42, and then the thickest one is a 52. But you'd be asking for a set of 10s. If you had a set of 9s, they'd be thinner, the finished string would be a nine. They are a bit lighter, a bit breezier, a thicker set of strings will give you a little bit of a warmer and a bit of a chunkier sound. This string of this guitar, I've taken the D off to make things a little bit clearer. It's actually the I that I'm going to be stringing. I remove the D as well just so there's not as much going on and you can hopefully see a little bit clearer. I is a 42. We're going to uncoil that. Now we spoke earlier about bridges on guitars and how they can be slightly different. This becomes apparent when you are stringing your guitar. Your holder, you're going to put the string through, might be at the back of your guitar, like the jazz master. You might have it right at the end of the body, right at the edge. Here we come in through the side of the bridge. There's a little hole on the side of the bridge that we're going to put our string through. We'll be able to tell from the thickest to the thinnest, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There's be holes running all the way along. Usually you would come in this way and you would go over the top and you would make sure it sits in that little curve, that little slip there. But with the SJ, [NOISE] someone in a guitar shop told me before that they keep their tension better if you come in from the other side, push it all the way through, [NOISE] and then loop back over. If you have that option on your guitar, you could do the same thing. Maybe have a little research online, see if there's any suggestions, but there's really no harm in just coming through the right hand side slot in an over the slit on the top. Then we go to the other end of the guitar. We want to make sure it sits in that. Remember we have those slits in the nut as well. We've come over the nut and we've got that little device that's attached to our machine heads at tuning pegs, we're going to come a full term round and there's a hole either side. I've lined this hole up. The hole on one side is basically at three o'clock, the hole on the other side is at nine o'clock. I do a full loop and then I push the I string though that hole on the right and I thread it through, creating a little loop there. When it comes out the other side, I pull that nice and tight. We've already got a loop created. We've gone round the machine head once and then I pull it out nice and tight from the other end. Then as I am tightening this string, it's good to keep tension, keep that string pulled up and away from the neck because then you're already bedding that tension into the guitar. We then just tune our tuning peg, we tighten it, We're turning it away from us. You will start to feel that pull on your finger as you're getting tighter and tighter. You can check what's going on in the machine, make sure that guitar string is still looping around nicely. It's not getting caught on anything like it was there. We're looking to keep this nice and tidy as well. We don't want it all over the place, a nice curve, a nice loop if we can. Once that's really pulling on your finger, let go. [NOISE] It'll probably still be quite slack. Make sure you haven't done it too light because we don't want to already be too tight with our guitar string. We're going to do the final bit of work with our headstock tuner. Let's grab that headstock tuner. Put that on the end of the guitar. We are now looking to make that an A note because you can here that still sounding very loose. I'm just going to gradually turn that string, tighten it, turning it away from me. Keeping an eye on that headstock tuner, looking until it becomes an I note. Now we're a little bit sharp, but don't worry because our job isn't finished yet. We need to stretch this string in, and we can do that by just putting the string up and down. We want to wear that string in, because otherwise if we don't do this stretching, you'll find when you're playing a new string, if you haven't stretched it in properly, it will keep slipping out of tune. I've done that stretching. You will now see that slipped down to a G. We're back into A. Let's give it another little bend. Put your finger on the 12th fret, pull up away from the string, get that nice and bent, do some natural bends on the guitar. Not looking for anything pretty sound in here which is wearing our string in. We can see there, we're just below the A. We are back in. That might still need a bit of wearing in. If I was going to be playing this a lot, now it'd be mindful of that. If I was about to record with it or gig, I'd make sure all that tension is settled in, same with all the strings. Give them a nice pull around, wear everything in before you're happy that it's going to sit in tune. That principle would be applied to every string from the thickest to the thinnest. You'll notice on the headstock, I have gone around one way with the lowest strings and then I've tried to keep that unity by going round the same direction away from the headstock. On the finished strings as well, it goes round to the right. Here, it goes round to the left. We've got that unity of where they go away from each other. If you do one this way, one another way, one this way, it gets very complicated because that means your tuning pegs would have to turn a different way to sharpen or flatten. By doing it this way, every time you turn your tuning pegs away from you, they will be sharpening the string. Every time you turn them toward you, they will be flattening, loosening the string. I hope that helped. I hope you feel like you can string your guitar now. I hope you got a long time before you have to, but don't leave it too long because the string start to sound really dead. They pick up all that finger dirt that's going on and they lose a lot of their lives. You will have to restring your guitar. Anyway, some people say monthly, some people don't touch their strings for a few months, and some people don't touch them until they break. But you do whatever works for you. If you start to lose that clarity and that definition in your strings, they're not sounding as nice, pick up a pack, a set of 9s, if you want a bit of a beefier sound, a set of 10s. That will be a bit harder on your fingers, the 10s. So maybe go for that nine to begin with. Freshen up your guitar, you'll definitely notice the difference. 42. Chromatic Chords: Now you know a lot of information about the chromatic scale and order notes that exist on the fretboard. I want to show you a little trick with the F code that we was doing earlier. You'll notice a lot of times I've gone to the full bodied F major seven shape. There's a reason why I wanted to get that reference quite a lot and hopefully get it in your head. You might have been doing the three finger version, which is cool, that's really good. That is your F major chord. We've been adding the third finger to the third fret of the A, tucking the little finger underneath, and then letting the E note ring through that high open E. That is our F major seven over C, If you want to include that third fret of the A as the C note, so typically F major seven over C. If we remove that high E, so we can relax our first finger, so it mutes that high E string. We've just got the A, D, G and B string coming through. We can now move this shape up and down the fretboard using the principles, the theory from the chromatic scale to obtain that shape for every note that exists up and down the fretboard. We've got F, remembering to carry out the high E string. If I move that whole shape along one fret, I've now got F sharp. One more, we've got G. G- sharp, A, A-sharp, B, C, C-sharp, D, D-sharp, E, and we're back to F. Brilliant. What a cool little thing to have. You've now got that shape for every note, every major version of that note that exists up the fretboard and we can use our chromatic scale to work it all out. You could do it with the three finger version as well still. Same principle. F major into A major. A-sharp, jump to C, D, F. I like doing that shape because it's more full bodied, it brings that bass note out, it's got a warmer sound to it. But the three finger version is the same. Something else to think about when you start looking at the possibilities around the guitar neck, around the fretboard, what you can do with code, you're not just confined to that one position. There is possibilities ahead of you, always a little something around the corner, and much lower when we was talking about linking codes together, what fingers can stay down. Start to look for little tricks like this. What shapes can you move up and down? If there's an open note, make sure you cut the open note out because once you move everything, if you don't adjust and cater for that open note, you start to create something very different. It's not necessarily always going to sound bad, it sounds really nice here. Now opening, it sounds beautiful. Sounds nice there as well. It's not always going to sound lovely. Another little tip and trick for you to experiment with there. 43. David Bowie - Rebel Rebel: So far we've been working on lead riffs that involve one note at a time or even one string at a time. Now we're going to see an example of a lead riff that's pulled out of a chord, exists within the chord and you're catching sometimes more than one string, so more than one note at a time. It's Rebel Rebel by David Bowie, I can never remember which way, but you know what I mean. Rebel Rebel, another great iconic guitar riff. I'm going to have a quick play through that, and then we'll look at it in a bit more detail. It's around the D major chord to start with, so fret that D major for me, first finger on the second of the G, third finger on the third of the B but don't worry about putting your second finger down. We're going to rest their hand on the bridge again for a bit more stability and we're going to play the open D and G, catch both those strings at the same time. If you look at the tab for this, you'll see slight variations of what open strings people catch. They might just catch the A and the D, you see that sometimes you can bring that open A note into this if you want to. A firm can come back a little bit so it's not muting the A. We're basically looking to catch more than one string and pull out the initial definition of that D major chord. I'm going to play from the open D to make things a little bit easier, just the D and the G. Once we've done that, we catch our open E string and third fret of the B. Lovely, so two strings on the way down and two strings on the way up. Then we just play the third fret of the B on its own, so altogether. Then we move our second finger onto the second fret of the B and we take our third finger off. From the top and we play the G and B strings together. Again, two notes at the same time, and then we continue that movement back and our first finger goes to the first fret of the G and we play the G open B and open A. We're about to form our E major chord and this is the starter. Again from the top, we play it twice with a little gap in between. We can relax our other fingers, they can come down and help us mute the strings if we want to. We're nearly there. Now we form the rest of our A major chord and we catch the low end of E, we bring out the low e. Sometimes people will just play the low e on its own and not form the rest of that chord. I think it's a good habit and good practice for us to have to form that E major chord so if we don't just catch the open string. Any strings that we catch after are going to work well, they're going to resonate with this riff. Cool. There I was catching the low E and the A string, it sounds really nice together, hear the D string there as well. Then a little bit of a trickier part, it's bringing in the pull of technique we used earlier. We're going to put our little finger onto the second fret of the B and just pull off. Once we've done that, we go, one, two. It's the first fret of the G, second fret of the D, it's our E major chord, it exists within a major chord. Another good reason why it's cool to fret the E major as soon as we get to the open E part. From the open E part, open E, pull off the second and the B and then just work out the E major chord, change string, D string. You've got to be really quick when you finish that A, the end of the riff to get back to that D major chord. Soon as you play that second fret of the D. We're getting back over to a D Major chord. Great fun to play, I love that riff, an example of how you could ever set a cause but this is lovely little melodies that exist within them. I really like that when it's a combination of the two, not just the chord progression, not just the lead riff, but they're found within each other. 44. Final Thoughts: Big, well done for making it through to the end. Honestly, that is a huge achievement. You should be proud of that. Learning an instrument is incredibly rewarding, so enjoyable and you've got a really exciting journey ahead of you. I hope you're feeling confident and creative and I hope to hear some of what you've created soon as well. Let's have a recap of everything. Start slow with each of these techniques. There's no point running before we can walk. We want to iron out all those creases early on with that slow, regular practice to make sure everything is sounding as clean and smooth as possible, and persevere. You're going to have these aches and pains to begin with, but regular practice is essential. I'm not saying you have to push through the pain barrier. If your fingers are bleeding, put the guitar down, but where you can, crack on and have a little go as regular as possible and you really will see those improvements come on nice and quick. Little and often is key. I remember my tutor saying, even if I'm not sitting in front of the TV, the equivalent would probably be an iPad or a laptop nowadays, I'm starting to show my age. But anyway, Margaret Archie was like, when you're just sitting and watching the TV, if the guitar is on your lap and you're just threatening those chords. You don't even need to be strumming, if you're sitting with a load of other people and you don't want to disturb them just creating that muscle memory is essential. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. Patience is key. Small steps can create massive breakthroughs. It's important to remember that everyone's hands, their size and shape, are different. So it'll be these small little movements, these tiny adjustments, which will correct things for you that someone else might have to do in a slightly different way. Implement those stretching techniques early on. They're a great way to build the dexterity of your hands. Get your chord shapes transitioning nicely. Remember to check each notes coming through nice and clear before you start getting ahead of yourself and jumping between loads of different chords, make sure they're right and everything's coming through clear before you move on. Be aware of your timing, try to do the metronome practice when you can. The Metro Timer app that I mentioned is definitely worth getting hold off unless you'd actually like a physical one, which are really nice to have. You don't have to use the metronome every time. But as we've discussed, it's very important for being aware of your timing and developing it in more of an efficient way. Then you can take the metronome away and you will naturally be playing more in time. When you're using that metronome, remember to gradually increase that speed wherever it is you're practicing along to make sure each time, push it up a little to BPM. Don't go too far, just a little creeping up will really help push your ability forward. Well, we mentioned an equipment, capo and headstock tuner, definitely worth getting hold of. There some links below for you to check out. Keep that strumming pattern loose, not too rigid to begin with. Remember we want to have that nice movement in the wrist, and then we can build towards being more aggressive and attacking the guitar when we need to. There's definitely a time and a place for that. Dynamics are really important as well. Be aware of that. We don't just want to be hitting the same strumming pattern every time, again, unless that's what the style dictates, that's what it's asking for. But generally, we're looking to have the ability to pull out that light and shade in our music. Learning other songs is a great way to develop. We've covered quite a broad range of styles and tracks here, but there will be some extra ones in the PDFs, and definitely go out now and start looking on websites like a Ultimate Guitar for taps of some of your favorite songs. You'll be surprised how many chords you know now and how many songs and styles you can actually play along to. Go out, delve deep, and see what you can find. Be creative, believe in your own creativity. You do have something unique to share with the world, or at the very least, something unique to share with yourself, and enjoy that process of creating an experiment. We said about taking other people's chord progressions and muck around with them. There's endless possibilities there. Now that you're comfortable in particular keys of music, you could lay down particular chord progressions that you've worked out. Pick numbers at random in those keys. We know we've got seven notes, we know we've got seven chords in those order of chords. Say right, I'm going to play 2, 5, 7. See what that sounds like. Start to think about how you can be free and creative. If you are lying down those chord progressions, say you're in C, you know your scale shapes that you can run around and play all these lovely notes over the top that aren't going to clash. Then if you want to delve a bit deeper into the recording and production side of things, I've been using the program Logic today. GarageBand is basically the free version of that, comes with any Mac that you'll get and is that really cool class that you can check out that goes into that in a lot more detail. Very accessible, very beginner friendly. I'd encourage you to go and have a look at that as well. The class project, I would love to hear from you. So please consider recording something. Post it below or like I've mentioned before, you're more than welcome to send that to me privately if you would prefer. But either way, I do encourage you to take part in that because recording yourself is a great way to reference your development. You can be in the moment, you can be listening to yourself playing, but it's something so different about when that's laid down and being played back to you. You'll hear things in a very different way and you'll get a lot more insight and analysis to what you're creating, what you like, what you don't like, what you want to improve and what you're absolutely smashing. Your journey doesn't need to end here. There is so much ahead of you. If you wish, you could start by checking out the other classes that I've got. The first class I did was a beginner class back in 2020. This class is actually a reworking of that. I've learned a little bit more about filming and lighting since then. I went into that very blind. I taught for years, but I'd never filmed an online class. I wanted to update that and improve it a little bit from that perspective. The class after the original beginner one was the power chord class, which you'll be able to check out. You'll notice I'm probably look a little bit younger there. I just had a baby as well so I'd definitely look pretty haggard. There's loads of good content in there. It'd be lovely if you wanted to go and check that out. It was intended as a follow-on from the beginning guitar chord so it would work well after this power chords are a great thing to look into a lot further than we did earlier, opens up tons of possibilities. Loads of music will be available to you after that. I've also got a finger picking class, beginner finger picking, very popular style with guitar players. That beginner class is designed to take someone with no finger picking experience through a journey to becoming an intermediate player. Loads of good techniques we cover in there and some really cool songs thrown in as well. Then there's that guitar practice class which can be jumped into any time. Nice techniques to develop in the finger strength, stretching capabilities, speed, and independence. A good few options for you to look into. Reviews are huge so please consider posting one for this class. It really helps other people find it and I love learning from students. It's really nice to get that insight from you to learn what I've done well, what I could do better, and any suggestions of what you'd like me to cover. There's discussions below here or you can email me. People have got in touch with song suggestions or techniques I want to cover, and I've then included that in the next class I'll create. Definitely, all ears if you've got anything you want to say or suggest, and please consider leaving that review is a huge help. Thank you. Reach out to me on the social, or the emails, or discussions I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to know how you're getting on. I have loads more classes coming your way so keep an eye on emails from me, and I will hopefully see you again soon. Take care.