Learn to play guitar: Beginner Masterclass

1. Intro: Hi, My name is Jacob Lam. I'm a musician, a recording artist, and a private music instructor. Welcome to the Introduction to guitar class. In this class we're going to go over chords, single notes, and a little bit of technique and theory to make you the most well-rounded musician possible in the quickest way possible without skipping any steps. Unfortunately, I've seen many people put down their instrument because they thought the song they wanted to learn was too difficult or out of their reach. In my years of teaching, I think I've found the most effective way to get you towards the songs you want to learn and to do it quickly and to do it in a way that's even fun. Every lesson in this class has the goal of getting you to play and enjoy your instrument through the songs that you love the most. By the end of this class, you should be able to look at any two, whether sheet music, chord charts or tabs. And be able to play it with ease on your own or with some friends around a campfire. I'm looking forward to meeting you and hearing your projects. So let's get started. 2. Parts of the Guitar: Now before we actually play the guitar, we're going to learn about the parts of the guitar. And we'll do this for both acoustic and electric guitars. But they actually share a lot in common. So we'll start there. Now, the parts of the guitar are strangely similar to the parts of the human body. But the top you have the head. The head is attached to the neck, which is the long part here. And the neck attaches to the body of the guitar. Now, on the head, you have six tuners that attached to each of the six strings. Soon, we'll learn how to put our guitar in tune. On the neck, you have these horizontal metal bars called frets, F, E, T, S. Now, frets are what we press with the fingers on our left hand to make different pitches come out of the strings. Tor example, if I played my second string here without any of the frets pressed down, just an open string will get this tone. Now on that same string, I can press down on different threats to make the pitch go up. Down on the body of the guitar. We have what's called the bridge, and this is what the strings filter into. Now on an electric guitar, you have a couple of extra things. First of all, down on the body, you have these pickups. Pickups are magnets which catch the vibrations of the strings to make it come through an amplifier. We also have a lot of knobs and switches. Volume knobs to change the volume of our guitar. And tone knobs to change the treble to the base or make the guitar sound more muddy or more treble. This here is our pickup switcher. What this does is it determines which pickup is listening to the strings. We can set it to. The pickup nearest the bridge. The pickup in the middle, or the pickup nearest to the neck. You may also have settings in between the pickups, which set both pickups to listen. Now the difference is the pickup closest to the bridge has a more treble Lee and tinny sound. It's often used for guitar solos. And it works its way down to the pickup nearest to the neck, which has a muddier but very full sound to it, which pick up you use is very much up to preference. Finally, one of the last things you might find on your electric guitar is a tremolo or the street name is a whammy bar. Now what the whammy bar does is it moves the bridge back and forth very slightly to change the pitch of your guitar strings. We'll do a demonstration of this later on. 3. Left and Right hand technique: I have bad news and I have good news. The bad news is, it can be pretty easy to make a chord or a note sound wrong when you play it. But the good news is they can be pretty easy to make a chord or a note sound right as well. The difference is just a couple little technique tips that will go over now. So that when we get to our chords were the most prepared that we could be, we're gonna make it really quick and really simple. We'll start with left hand technique. When I go to press a fret, where I'm actually going to press is just a little bit before the metal bar. So for example, if I wanted to press the third fret, say on the high E string, I would count up three metal bars, 123. I would then move my finger a little bit behind that metal bar and I would play right there. If I play too far back, almost towards the second metal bar, it's going to sound a little bit buzzy and I may have depress much harder to get a clean tone to come through like this. If I press right on top of the third metal bar, it's going to sound a little bit muted. The clearest place you can get a tone is right before the metal bar. Next, what I want to press down, I'm going to make sure to press down with the tips of my fingers and not the pads of my fingers. Now, the pads make it really, really simple. It's an easy mistake to make, but we want to play with the tips to make sure our fingers don't get in the way of any of the other strings. This can cause accidental meeting of some notes that you may want to shine through. So I'm going to press close to the metal bar and I'm going to press with the tip of my finger. And easy way to make sure you're doing this is to make sure that your first knuckle is popped out and never facing inwards. Last thing with this hand is I'm going to keep my thumb on top and it's going to bear the weight of my arm so that my arm never gets fatigued. Then I'll keep my wrist straight. And this will make my left arm being the most comfortable position it could possibly be. Then we can look at the right hand. The right hand is not all too difficult. When you hold your pick and you want your fingers to be kind of a half fist. You're going to place your PEC with the pointiest and down between your first knuckle and the tip of your finger right there. Then just lay your thumb over it. So you've got the pointy part of the Pig sticking down. The other three fingers are going to stick out. And there'll be kind of your anchor on the guitar. If you're flying free without those three fingers, it can be difficult to aim and know what string you're going to hit with those fingers grounded and your wrist nice and low, not curved. It can be much easier to aim with your picking hand. Now, when we're playing single notes, we're going to use our wrist to play the notes. It can be easy to want to use your elbow or even your fingers. But we want to make sure we're using our wrist. It's kind of a a new and unique motion and take a little bit of getting used to at least it did for me. But over time the muscle memory kicks in and it becomes much more natural of emotion. If we're playing chords, full chords, which are many notes at the same time, then we can use our elbow to make sure we're getting all of the strings that we want to. When we play multiple strings at a time, it's more useful to use our elbow when we're playing single strings are single notes. We want to use our risk for more of those little meticulous motions to make sure we're hitting the right string and not the wrong string. That's a lot. If I were on your side of the screen, I would need a list. So let's make a list. Left-hand. Play with the tips of your fingers. Press close to the metal bar, not right on top of it. Keep your thumb on top of the neck to bear the weight of your arm and keep your wrist nice and straight. With the right hand, we're going to hold the pick between the first knuckle and tip of the finger. And use our other three fingers as an anchor on the guitar to help us aim. Then for single notes will play with the wrist. And for full chords are multiple notes at a time. We'll use our elbow and the whole lower portion of the arm. 4. Names of the Strings: Different tones in the musical alphabet have different names. And we've named these tones based off of the letters of the English alphabet, a through G. Now, we need to learn the names of our six strings so that we can learn chords quickly and easily and begin playing the songs that we love. We're going to start with the thickest string on top. This string is an E. The next string down. An a. The next string down. Is it D? Is this confusing? Well, there's actually a sentence that we can use to remember each of these strings much easier. Now the sentence also starts with the thickest string, and it goes, elephants and donkeys grow big ears. That's elephants. And donkeys grow big ears. Now you may notice that there are two 0s. There is a low E and there's a high E. Well that's because there are only seven letters in the musical alphabet, a, B, C, D, E, F, and G. When we get to g, we start back over with a. So we have some low examples of letters. And we have some higher examples of letters, which may sound confusing. But there's actually a clear way to distinguish them both on sheet music and on tabs. To distinguish them when we're writing out the names of the strings, the thickest string is a capital E, while the thinnest string is a lowercase e. And easy way to remember this is to think of the thickest string as the big, thick and the thin string as the smaller, more higher pitched and fragile ie. 5. Tuning Your Guitar: Sometimes even when you're playing the right thing, your guitar can sound wrong or just a little bit off, and that's not always your fault. Today we're going to learn how to tune the strings to be the notes that they should be. So that issue never arises. Now, remember, the names of the strings from the thickest to the thinnest are elephants and donkeys grow big ears. So I'm going to start by tuning my thickest string, elephants. So it should be an E note. I'm going to open up my app on my phone or tablet. There are a lot of great free apps out there that you can find just by searching up guitar tuner or simply tuner. I'm going to start with my low E string. And you'll notice if the note is too low, a needle will be too far to the left. If the note is too high, the needle will go too far to the right. When my note is just right, the needle will be right in the middle with a little checkmark. So I'll play my low E string. Here. It's too low, so it's way off to the left. So I'm going to twist my tuners away from me until we get that check mark. Now, I'll move on to the next string when I get that green check mark. Isn't a string, elephants. And now it seems pretty good. I'll move on to donkeys, the fourth string. This one is too high, so I'm going to pull it towards me to bring that note down onto the third string. Elephants and donkeys grow. Keep a close eye on what string attaches to which tuner we're going in this upside down, U or V shapes. I'm working away from me now to the furthest tuner on the third string. And I'll bring them down towards me. Onto the second string. And the last string, the thinnest string. The high E ears, elephants and donkeys grow big ears. Give each string one more check. And you're ready to go. 6. Reading a Chord Image: In our next lesson, we finally get to play some of these chords that we've been talking about, many notes played at the same time. We're going to be learning from these chord images. And so it's important to know how to decipher these, but it's actually pretty simple. This image is like we're looking at the guitar straight on. We're looking right at it flat. So all the way on the left is going to be your thickest string, string number six, or the capital E. And all the way on the right is going to be your first string, the thinnest string, string number one. Now these strings run vertically down the image. Horizontally along the image are going to be your frets. And so when you see these black dots on the image, those are where you're going to place your fingers on the frets. So for example, here in this image you have two black dots on the second fret, and they're on top of the fifth string and the fourth string. Now, underneath the image you'll find some numbers. These are the fingers. You're going to use. Your first pointer finger, your second middle finger. Sometimes the image will have your third ring finger or your fourth pinky finger. So here what we're going to do is take our first finger and we're going to put it on the second fret of the fifth string. Our middle finger will be also on the second fret of the fourth string, tucked right behind. The open circles at the top of the image are strings that you're going to play, but you don't need to press anything down. These are called open strings. So when you strum with your right hand, you'll strum through those strings, but you don't need to worry about touching or pushing down on those strings. Finally, sometimes an image will have an x over a string. What that means is your right-hand has to aim just a little bit to start playing your cord from your fifth or even your fourth string. Not all of the strings will be included. At the top of your card. Image will be the name of the chord. And there are two types of chords that we're going to be working with. The first one is just the letter of the cord alone. This by default is called a major chord. Now major chords tend to sound a little happier like this. The other type of chord is characterized with a little lowercase m next to the letter. Now this stands for minor. Minor chords. In contrast to major chords sound a little more sad. So we have major happy chords and minor sad chords. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at four chords that are pretty simple and we'll go through them. You don't have to memorize them quite yet, but we'll start working on them and we'll keep these CT images in front of us as we practice them until we're more comfortable with them. 7. Our First Chords (Em, G, C, D): It's finally time to begin playing our guitar. We're going to start by learning four of the most popular chords used in songs today. So by the end of this lesson, you should be able to play a huge amount of songs, which is super encouraging. It's only a few minutes away. Now the cords may take a little bit of practice and time and getting used to especially switching between the different shapes. It's not easy at first. But very shortly, you'll notice that your transitions become faster and faster and your fingers land more accurately. So there are four shapes for us to learn. We're going to start with one of the minor chords. Now remember this has more of a sad sound, so I'm going to play the chord for you, tell you its name, put it on the screen and we'll take it and note by note. Here's what the chord sounds like. This is an E minor chord. Now something that's important to note is that most of the chord names are the same as their starting note. Now, that's kind of a confusing sentence, but it's actually very simple. What it means is an E chord begins with an E note. A C chord would begin with a C note and so on and so forth. So we're going to be playing an E minor chord in our first note is that open thick string. Now, here's the chord shape. All we have to do is take our two fingers and place them down. Our first finger is going to go on the second fret of the fifth string. And so what we do is we count down the strings, 12345, and we'll place it on the second fret right before that metal bar. Our second finger is also going to go on the second fret of the fourth string, tok, right behind the first finger. Now the rest of the strings, you'll notice have that open circle above them. So we will play those strings, but we don't need to press anything down. What that means is that we can play through our chord right now. And we're playing an E minor chord. So again, first finger on the second fret of the fifth string. Second finger on the second fret of the fourth string. And that is your first chord. Our next chord is also going to use all of the strings. But we're going to press down one more finger than we did with the E minor. This court is going to be major, so it's a G major chord or just a G chord. Here's what it sounds like. To play the G chord, we're going to start with, of course, a G note. We're going to take our middle finger, our second finger, and place it on the third fret of the sixth string, the very thickest string. So we'll count up the frets, 1, 2, 3, and place our second finger just a little before that metal bar. Now our first finger is going to play the second fret of the fifth string. So we have middle finger on the third fret of the sixth string. First finger on the second fret of the fifth string. Now our next three strings are going to be open. So our fourth, third, second string are played open. So, so far Here's our chord. We have one more thing to do. We're going to take our pinky finger and place it on the third fret of the first string, the very thinnest string. So altogether we have the middle finger on the third fret, the first finger on the second fret of that fifth string. And the pinky finger on the third fret of the very first string. Now here's our full chord. The next chord we're going to do is also a major chord. It's called a C chord. And here's what it sounds like. We're going to strum this one starting from the fifth string. So it's the first time that are picking hand will need to aim just a little bit. What we're going to do is take our third finger, our ring finger, and place it on the third fret of the fifth string. This is a C note. Now we can count from string 1, or since we're so low to the strings, we can count from the sixth string, we can count 65, and then count up the frets, 1, 2, 3. Our middle finger, our second finger, is going to play the second fret of the fourth string. So we have this note together. Remember if your notes are coming out buzzy at all. Press down nice and hard and make sure that you're close to the metal bars, but not on top of them. You want to play with the tips of your fingers to make sure that none of them are touching the other strings and accidentally muting them. If I flattened my third finger too much, the notes aren't coming through. So I want to play with the tip of my third finger to really let each note ring out. Now as you may have noticed, the third string is open. So ring finger on the third fret of the fifth string. Middle finger on the second fret of the fourth string, an open string. And then our first pointer finger is going to go on the first fret of the second string. And finally, our first string, that high E is open. An easy way to remember where your fingers go for that chord is that your third finger goes on the third fret. Your second finger goes on the second fret, and your first finger goes on the first fret. And now we have the last chord for this lesson before we start playing songs with these four chords, this chord is also a major chord. So we've learned one minor chord and three major chords. This chord is a D major chord. Here's what it sounds like. Now for this chord, our right hand is going to aim a little bit more. We're going to start picking from the fourth string and down the sixth and the fifth strings won't be played at all. Let me show you one more time and look nice and close at the right picking hand. For our left hand, we're going to place our first pointer finger on the second fret of the third string. We're going to place our third finger on the third fret of the second string. Finger. Second fret of the third string. Third finger, third fret of the second string. So a lot of the same number in different places. Finally, our middle finger is going to talk through those fingers and play the second fret of the first string. The chords we've learned so far, our E minor, G, C, and D. At the end of this lesson, you'll have some notes with each of those chord shape pictures. Practice the chords individually, but also practice the chords one after another. See if you can start to get some transitions between the chords. Then we're going to start learning a song using those chords. 8. First Song: Viva La Vida: Now that you're getting more comfortable with those four chords, we're going to learn a song that uses each of those chords. Now you may recognize it. It's Viva la vita by Coldplay. What we're going to do is with our right hand, we're going to strum each chord two times. Now, here's an example of what that should sound like with the chords on the screen. The progression of these chords is right below in the lesson notes. I'm excited to hear you guys work through this song. And the nice thing about this song is it's relatively repetitive. So as long as you're getting somewhat comfortable with these chords, you shouldn't have too difficult of a time with it. 9. Our Next Chords (E, Am, Dm): You've now got four chords down and a song with those chords. And maybe went and found some songs on your own that use those same chords. There's a lot of them out there. Now we're going to pick up three more chords in this lesson. But the good news is that these chords largely work off of the ones we already know. We've got a great foundation for learning most of the other chords. So for example, the first chord we'll learn today is an E chord, which is very similar to the E minor that we know. Now here's our E minor chord. Now here's our E major chord. With a much more lighthearted feel. There is a one note difference between minor and major chords. So here's how we'll do the E chord. We're going to take our two middle fingers and put them in the same position for our E minor chord, except instead of with the first two fingers will use the second two. This is also a fine way to play your E minor chord each time. So we'll take our second middle finger and press it to the second fret of the fifth string. And our third ring finger will go on the second fret of the fourth string. This is our E minor shape with our two middle fingers. Now, the only difference is we're going to use our first finger to press down the first fret of the third string. So instead of an open third string, we'll have this term. And then the whole chord, E minor and E. Next we're going to learn an, a minor chord. And we're going to take it note by note. But there's also a really simple way to reach this chord that we'll go over after. First, our right hand is going to pick from the fifth string downwards. We'll skip over the six string. Again, we'll use our two middle fingers. But this time, our middle second finger will go on the second fret of the fourth string. Our third ring finger, we'll talk behind on the second fret of the third string. And our first pointer finger will go on the first fret of the second string. And then we'll play it from the open fifth string to the open first string with our fingers pressed down. That is our a minor chord. Now an easy way to get there is from the E chord. You may have noticed this is actually the same shape as our E chord, but it's moved down one set of strings. So we have our E chord. And then we can carry this shape, shift each finger down a string. So from an E, our first finger moves from the third string to the second string. Our third finger moves from the fourth string to the third string. And our middle finger moves from the fifth string to the fourth string back and forth, same shape. And finally, the other chord we're going to learn is a D minor. So we know our D chord. Now we're going to make it minor, a D minor with more of a sad, somber feel to it. There's only a one note difference from the second fret on the first string down to the first fret on the first string. But we have to move our fingers a little bit. So here's what we'll do. Our middle second finger will go on the second fret. The third string, same place as our original D chord, but with a different finger. Our third finger will stay where it usually goes for D, it will play the third fret of the second string. Now with our first finger flying open, we'll press it on the first fret of the first string. So we've learned now E major, a minor, and D minor. In the same way as last time. Learn each of these chords individually and practice the transitions between them. And you can also practice transitions between these chords and our last set of chords. In the next lesson, we'll look at a song that uses some of our new chords and some of our old chords blended in. 10. Second Song: Crazy: We have three new chords added to the four that we already know. Now it's time to practice song number two. Now again, you can always look up songs on Google with specific chords. So you are free to practice any song you want. For this video, we're going to be practicing another popular song, It's crazy. By now, Charles Barkley. Here's the chorus of the song with the chords on the screen. Let's go. You'll notice with our right hand we're going a little bit faster. This time. We're playing each chord with a downstroke, 8 times 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and then changing the chord that we're playing. Now again, so long as you're comfortable with the new three chords we've got, and some of the old chords we're using a C here. You should be good to go and have a good time doing it. I'm excited to hear. 11. Our Newest Chords (A, Bm): We're already halfway through our chord videos, which is super exciting. Now today we're only going to be working on two chords, a major chord and a minor chord. And we'll start with the major chord. And it's an a as opposed to the a minor that we already know. Here's what an a chord sounds like. Now we know from minor to major, there's only a one note difference. And so we'll start with our a minor. Now the one note difference is we're going to be placing our pinky right above where our first finger is. So we'll take our a minor and move this first finger on the first fret. We'll put our pinky on the second fret. So we have all our fingers in a row. On the second fret, our middle finger will be on the second fret of the fourth string. Our ring finger will be on the second fret of the third string. And our pinky will be on the second fret of the second string. You have minor, a minor, and a major. Now another way to play a major is with the other set of fingers are first, second, third, instead of second, third, fourth are second chord today is going to be a B minor chord. Now there are couple of ways to play a B minor chord, but we're going to start with the simplest way. Here's what the chord sounds like. With our right hand. We're going to start this chord from the fifth string. So we'll be skipping the sixth string, just like with the a minor and the a. Our pointer finger, first finger on the left hand will go on the second fret of the fifth string. This is a B note. Our fourth string right after it we're going to play, but we're going to leave it open. Our middle finger or second finger will go on the second fret of the third string. Last finger will put down is the third finger, ring finger on the third fret of the second string. Kind of like what we do with it in a D chord. Our first string, the low E, will just play open. So first finger, second fret of the fifth string. Second finger, second fret of the third string. Third finger, third fret of the second string. And then we'll play the fourth first string open. We'll work with these two chords to get them comfortable. And then like usual. And the next video we're going to be practicing a song that uses these two chords in it. 12. Third Song: Set Fire to the Rain: With our two new chords under our belt, we can now move on to practice song number 3. Now, this one, I would think you might know, it's set fire to the rain by Adele. Now here are the chords played for the chorus and put up on the screen. That a and B minor are both incredibly important for this song. As long as you have them somewhat comfortable, you should be able to work your way through. As always, the cord sheet is below and I'm looking forward to hearing your projects in the next couple of videos. We're not going to go over chords just yet. Those are a little bit later. We're going to go over strumming patterns with the right hand so that you can pair some rhythm with your chords. 13. Strumming Patterns (4 Beats): We've got the majority of our common chords down now and a handful of songs that we can play under our belt, which is exciting. Now we're going to shift our focus from the left-hand chord shapes to the right-hand strumming patterns. Now strumming patterns are different down and up strokes using different rhythms that match a song best. So for our purposes, we're going to mark down strokes as D and upstrokes as a U. Now, there are two kinds of timings that we'll be working with. Four songs. Songs either have four beats or three beats. What that means is a song can feel very natural when you count to four, 1, 2, 3, 4. Or feel more natural when you group it in groups of three. One 23, One 23. In this lesson, we're going to go over some strumming patterns for four beat songs. In the next lesson, we'll focus on three beat songs. For now, let's jump into our first strumming pattern. Now, here we have our first strumming pattern measured with downstrokes and upstrokes. If there's a dash, that means that the change is going to be relatively quick. If there's a comma, that means you're going to give it a little more space to breathe before the next down or upstroke. Now, for timing and counting, we're going to put the four numbers underneath our strumming pattern. We may also use a metronome and parts of the lesson so that you can hear the click along with the plane. We can break this into two sections. The first section, we're going to use a G chord to listen with. First section goes down, down. That's pretty straightforward. The next section we go down. Now you may notice that there are two upstrokes in a row. And this is intentional. It's a little odd to skip over the strings to go up and then up again. But you'll get the hang of it. Here's the whole strumming pattern together. Down, down, up, Down, up 12341234. I'm going to slow that down just a little bit. And when two repetitions of the strumming pattern is over, switch, courts will go from G down to E minor. Our next strumming pattern is just going to be more of a shuffle. For every single beat, you're going to have a downstroke and an upstroke with even timing between something like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. Really straightforward and fills a lot of space. There's not a lot of room to breathe, but that's okay in loud or parts of a song. Our final strumming pattern for four beats is going to be one downstroke on 12. And a down and up stroke for 34. So it will be down, down, down, up, down, up. Let me play you an example. There are a lot of strumming patterns that you can play over four beat songs. But these are just three to get you started. So you can take some of the chords we've done before. Or you can make your own chord progression and practice any of these strumming patterns over it. Next, we'll look at strumming patterns for three-beat songs. 14. Strumming Patterns (3 Beats): Three beat strumming patterns. Now, like we mentioned last time, for three beats, we count in groups of 3123123123. Here's our first strumming pattern for a three beat song. This one, we're going to go down, up, up. That's all there is to it. Here are the downs and ups on the screen, as well as the three-beat numbers below. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. 123123123123. Our next strumming pattern, just like with the four, B, is a three beat shuffle. So for every beat, we just go down and up. Evenly spaced out. Like this. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. 23123 are very last three beats. Strumming pattern for this lesson is probably the most complicated. The timing feels a little strange. This one goes down, up, down, up, and then you come back in on the down. It sounds like this. And then I'll explain why it's so strange. The reason this one tends to trip people up a little bit is that it sounds when you do it long enough, like it's going up, down, up, down, Up, down, up, down. It's important to remember that the, one of this strumming pattern comes in right on that downbeat. As long as you fall into that one beat with the downstroke, you should be good to go. Now we'll practice it a little bit with the strumming pattern on the screen. And will also count it out. Up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down, up, down, up. 12312312312. Just like with our 4-bit strumming patterns. These are far from the only strumming patterns for three beats. There's a lot of them out there and a lot of them fit three beats songs in a great way. They each have their own characteristics and they each sound a little different from the last. Different parts of songs might have different strumming patterns over them. Dynamics is such an important part of playing guitar. And different strumming patterns can really help your song have varied dynamics throughout. In the next lesson, we're going to head back to some chords and we're going to talk about bar chords. But for this lesson, practice these three beats strumming patterns with some of the chords that we already know. Then I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. Bar Chords 1 (6th String): It's time to move on to a type of chord called a bar chord. Today we're going to use a bar chord to learn both an F and an F minor shape. Now, bar chords are shapes that we can learn that are movable up and down the neck of the guitar. So there are a little difficult, but absolutely very handy down the line. We're going to start with an E chord, and I'll explain why. What we want to do is we want to move our E chord up one fret to make it an F. The problem is we want the other notes to move with it, but the other notes are open strings. So what we need to do is find a way to bring all of the open strings up one fret. And we do that by barring our first finger along the neck of the guitar and then creating our E shape on top of that. So for example, let's play our E shape again. But this time, instead of using our second, third first finger, we're going to use our third pinky and second fingers. So third ring finger on the second fret of the fifth string. Our pinky tucked behind it on the second fret of the fourth string. And our middle finger, our second finger. On the first fret of the third string. There's our E shape, but with a different set of fingers. Now if we wanted to move it up a fret, we have to bring the other strings with it. So we're going to take our first finger and bar it on its side and squeeze nice and tight so that it's covering all of the strings that were open. So we have R and everything moved up a fret and barred for our F. Now we can move that along the neck of the guitar, this same shape to play different chords with the same shape. For now, we'll stick with our F chord. Bar chords can be incredibly difficult and frustrating, but squeeze nice and hard and make sure to use the side of your first finger. Now, we're going to turn that into an F minor. We already know that to make a major chord minor or a minor chord major, we just have to change one single note. To do this with the bar chord that we're going to lift our middle finger off completely. Now it's more of a sad, somber F minor chord. Major. And minor. When you play minor chords and your second finger is more free, you can use it to help push the first finger down. When you're playing a bar chord. Think primarily about squeezing your first finger and thumb together. You may have squeeze harder than you think you need to at first. Bar chords are very difficult to get down and it may take some practice. So don't be discouraged if it's taking you longer than you think that it should. Keep pushing, keep trying, and work with the other chords, learning songs that you enjoy. Now in the next lesson, we'll learn major and minor shapes, starting from the fifth string instead of the six string. 16. Bar Chords 2 (5th String): It's time to learn R bar chord shapes for the fifth string. Meaning our right hand is going to start picking each chord from the fifth string down. And the sixth string won't be played at all. Now we're going to do our barcodes from the fifth string by learning a B major chord and a C minor chord. This will help us know the major and minor shapes of bar chords from the fifth string. Let's start with a B chord. It's very similar to our E and moving it up and bringing the open strings with us. Except this time we're going to do that with an a chord. So let's play an a chord using the second, third, and pinky finger, like we had learned. Now we're going to bring this shape up two frets, so each finger up two frets. And we're going to use our first finger again to bar the second for it. So it's a difficult shape and the little uncomfortable, but you will get used to it. Thankfully, the minor shape is a little bit more comfortable. We're going to take an, a minor shape instead of an a shape and slide that up. But let's take it note by note for our C minor chord, our third finger is going to grab the fifth fret of the fourth string. Our pinky finger is going to grab the fifth fret behind it of the third string. Our middle finger, our second finger is going to grab the fourth fret of the second string. And so you'll notice we have kind of a minor shape slid up a few frets. Now to bring those open strings up with us, our first finger is going to bar the third for it. It's very similar to our sixth string. Major shape. Moved up one string. Now just like the sixth string shapes, both of these shapes are movable. So this is a C minor. But I could also bring it up two frets to be a D minor. Now we have a D minor chord down here. It's just another way to play the same chord. It's the same thing with the sixth string shapes. I could play the F minor we had learned, or slide it up to play a G minor. Those are our fifth string bar chords. In the next lesson, we're going to learn a song that helps us remember these bar chord shapes. 17. Fourth Song: Bar Chord Practice: Now we're going to practice a song using bar chord shapes. Here are the four chords we're going to do. We're going to start with the F major chord that we just learned. Next we'll go to a C chord, but not the C that we know. We're going to do C as a bar chord. Now remember these shapes are movable. So we'll start with the B bar chord that we just learned. And we're going to move it up one fret, so it starts on the third fret. Same starting note as the C chord that we all ready know. So we go from F to C. Now we're going to go up a set of strings and play a G minor, same as the F minor, but moved up two frets. So it starts from the same note that our other g starts from. And finally, we'll go back to a C. So altogether we have F, C, G minor. Back to see. With our right hand, we're actually going to try these using one of our strumming patterns that we know now. So we'll do the first strumming pattern for four beats that we learned. This one was down, down, up, up, down, up, like this. The court sheets are below in the description. I'm looking forward to hearing your projects and remember that the bar chords aren't the easiest thing, especially when combining them with now a right-hand strumming pattern. To a couple of difficult things for your brain to think of it at once. As long as your records are somewhat comfortable, you're getting the shapes down and you're getting more comfortable with the strumming patterns, we should be able to work our way through. 18. Reading Tabs: It's time for us to learn tabs. And it's important to distinguish between sheet music and tablature, where sheet music has five lines. These lines don't correlate to the strings of the guitar. And sometimes my newer guitar students will make that mistake. Sheet music is simply a way to read or write music that works for any instrument that makes a tone. You could read sheet music with a trumpet or the base, or the piano or guitar, and it stays the same for each instrument. Now, tabs have six lines, and these are the six strings of the guitar. So it's important to be able to identify each of those and put them in their own space. Tabs, flip the strings of the guitar. So your thickest string is on the bottom and your thinnest string is on the top. So we have low ie, a, D, G, B, and the high E. Instead of using dots and notes on the lines like sheet music, does, tabs use numbers to communicate what note we're going to play? Now these numbers are very simply the fret that we're going to play on that string. So if I see a number three on the low E string, the thickest string, I know that means I'm going to play the third fret on the thickest string. If I see two numbers on top of each other, threes on the fourth, third string. That just means I'm going to play those two notes together as a unit instead of one after the other. We can also put entire chords as tabs. For example, here's a G chord tabbed out. It looks a little different than the cord picture that we're used to, but it's also a fine way to communicate what a chord looks and sounds like. Tabs are fairly easy to read and to create once you understand them. In our lesson notes, we have a couple of exercises for you to practice tabs. And if you look up tabs in Google, I'm sure you can find a lot of guitar solos that you may be interested in that are already tapped out. 19. Theory 101: Half and Whole Steps: Even if you're just starting out in guitar, a little bit of theory knowledge can have a huge impact on the way that you play and how comfortable you are on the neck. Today we're going to be talking about half-steps and whole-steps. A really simple lesson, but it unlocks something for us called sharps and flats. You may already know about sharps and flats and you may not. And that's all right. But half and whole steps are really going to explain them for us. A half-step on the guitar neck is the smallest amount up or down that you can move a note. So a half step, for example, would just be from one fret to the next. Or working down from one fret down to another fret could also be from an open string to the first fret, or the other way down to an open string. A whole step, as you can imagine, is 2.5 steps put together. So you would jump to frets, maybe from the third fret to the fifth fret, or moving down. This also includes from an open string up. Every single note in the musical alphabet is a whole step apart from one another. That means that there's a mystery note between them at the moment. But there are two sets of notes that are a half-step apart. B to C and E to F are natural half-steps. That means if we want to play one of our E strings, I'll play the lowest E. And then I want to find an F note. I just need to go up a half step from E to F. What this little bit of theory also does for us is it allows us to find any of the letter notes all over the neck. We can work our way up and say E to F is a half-step. F to G is a whole step. So we go up two frets. G to a is another whole step. A to B is a whole step. Now B to C is a half-step, and so we move up just one fret, C to D, D to E, and at this point we've arrived back at E. A higher example of e. You may notice that the frets have dots on the odd frets to help you aim a little bit better without thinking so much. You may also notice that a fret further down has two dots instead of one. This fret further down is the same note name as the open string. This is an E. And if I press on the double dots, that's also an E. But it's an E one octave higher. And in this class that's a new word to us. An octave is the same letter at a different pitch. You could have an octave, or you could move from this E, an octave down. You can practice finding the notes now on every single string, E, a, D, G, B, back to e. As long as you remember that B to C and E to F are your natural half-steps. And every other set of notes is a whole step away. That means that now you can start from any string and find all of the notes on that string. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about what mystery notes are between whole-steps. 20. Theory 102: Sharps and Flats: So what do we do with these mystery notes in between letters? In-between whole-steps. What's between a and B, or what's between f and g? Well, this is where we come into something called sharps and flats. A sharp is a note or a letter moved up a half-step, and a flat is a note or a letter moved down a half-step. For example, let's work with a and B. If we took an a note, we have a B. A whole step after that. A sharp is if we took an a and moved it up a half step between a and b, we could call this a sharp. A sharp can work for other letters to like if we took F and G, we could call it F sharp between them. And it's symbolized with this pound sign next to the letter. Now we have another type called a flat, and it's exactly the same but opposite. It's also a half step away from a note, but it's a half step down. So we'll go back to our a and b example. If we took a b and moved into a half-step down, we could call it B flat, But hold on. That's the same note as an a sharp. But hang on. That's the same fret that we played the a sharp on. Well, sharps and flats between two notes can share a fret. And that Fred has two different names, which sounds confusing. But it won't be if you remember this one rule. What we call that fret, is determined by which direction we come at it from. For example, if I'm playing an a and I wanted to move it up, I'd call it an a sharp. If I'm playing a B and I wanted to move it down, I would call it a B flat. I wouldn't call it an a sharp because I'm changing the B note. If you think of our musical alphabet, a, B, C, D, E, F, G, back to a. There needs to be one example or one instance of every letter. So if I wanted to change my B and move it down to that first fret, I wouldn't say a, a sharp, B, C, D E, F G. I would have to say a, B flat, C, D, E, F, G. I can't have two A's and skip the be entirely. I need to have one of each. Note. If you think of our natural half-steps, B to C and E to F, there's nothing between them on the fret board, which means there's no sharp and flat between them. There's no B sharp, there's no C flat, there's no E sharp. There's no F flat. Which means there are 12 tones that we can work with. A, a sharp or B flat. B, C, C sharp, or D flat, D, D sharp, or E flat, E, F, F sharp, or G flat. G, G sharp or a flat? A. And you're right back home. So why are sharps and flats important for us learning beginner guitar? Well, there are two ways we can use them. We can use them with single notes. If someone says play a D sharp note, it's helpful to know where that is. But it works for chords. Well. For example, if we take our bar chord and we play the F that we had, instead of moving a single note up, we can move the entire chord up a fret between f and g, and have an F sharp cord, not an F sharp note, but an F sharp cord. If you move a note up and it becomes sharp, if you move a note down, it can become flat. In the same way, if you move a chord up, it can become sharp. Or if you move a chord down from G, we could have a G flat. You can also do it with minor chords. If I wanted to play F minor, I could move that up a half-step. And that is an F sharp minor chord. 21. Power Chords: Now we're going to talk about a different type of chord called a power chord. Now, power chords are largely used in rock music. And like bar chords, a single shape that's movable around the guitar. The good news is it's a lot easier than bar chords. So let's talk about this single shape. And as a demonstration, I'll show it from the third fret of the sixth string. And then we'll talk about how it can be moved around anywhere. We're going to take our first finger and put it on the third fret of the sixth string. For this example, this is where a G chord usually starts. Then we're going to take our third finger, ring finger, and put it on the fifth fret of the fifth string. And so we've got a fret between our fingers and it's a string away. Finally, we're going to take our pinky finger and we're going to tuck it behind the third finger on the fifth fret of the fourth string. This chord doesn't have a major or a minor example. It's just one shape that works for either G major or G minor. So here's our G chord, and here's our power chord starting from a G note. We could also move this shape up to the fifth string by moving each finger down a string. Or we could move it up a couple of frets. Let's go back to the first four chords we ever learned. That's E minor, D, C, and G. Now we're going to turn each of those chords into their power cord examples. So E, D, C, and G. These can be incredibly useful because it's just one shape that you can move around. But it also shows the importance of knowing where the notes are on the neck so that you can know where a C is to start your power cord from there to replace the full C chord. And the same goes for the other notes. So as you work with power chords, be sure to get comfortable with where the notes are on the neck, counting up using the half and the whole steps. Finally, this power chord shape works, starting from the sixth string and the fifth string. If you play this power chord shape starting from the fourth string, it gets a little strange. Thankfully, we have all of the notes we need for the 12 tones on the sixth and the fifth string. 22. Warm Ups: As we come to the end of our class, we're actually going to talk about one of the things that you should do first before you play guitar. And that's just warm-ups. Warm-ups get your fingers warmed up and ready to play. But what they can also do is exercise your fingers in a unique way that regular practice and playing doesn't. This means when you come across something that's more unique and playing your fingers are already ready to do that. For example, our first warm up is just going to be using all of the fingers, four fingers on four frets. So we'll take our first finger and put it on the first fret of the sixth string. Then what we do is work our way up 1234. And we do that for each of the string. So I would move up to the fifth string, 1, 2, 3, up to the fourth string, 1, 2, 3, 4. I'd finish that off. Now that I'm at the top, I'm going to come back down 4321 and go down to the second string, 4, 3, 2, 1, down each of the strings. Until I land in the same place that I started. Our next warm-up is entirely meant to build finger strength and it's a little painful. But I at least notice a large difference in my playing when I do this warm up versus when I don't. What you'll need is a timer. And you're going to start your timer and you're going to press the frets as quickly as you can from your first two, your second finger, like this. Any frets that you choose are fine. We're not concerned about the tones, were concerned about the finger movement. Watch your timer and you can start by doing it for maybe 10 seconds. Then move on to your second finger and tap with the third. After 10 seconds, third finger and tap with the fourth. Then you can play with different finger combinations, one to 32 to four, or one to four. You'll notice by the end, after you do enough of these in a row that you're arm begins to burn, but that's okay. That's what it's for. It's building dexterity and endurance in your hand so that you can continue to play without your finger muscles or your arm muscles growing fatigued. Once you get comfortable doing those for 10 seconds, you can up the time to maybe 15, 20, or even 30 seconds if you're bold. Our last warm-up, like the first, is meant to get our fingers and mind used to some odd combinations. Like the first warm-up, we're going to use four fingers and apply them to four frets in a row. Except this time maybe I'll start on the fifth fret. So first finger on the fifth, second on the sixths, third on the seventh, forth on the eighth. Now, you don't have to go in a row like that. In fact, that's what this warm up is, four. And you can also play this warm-up from any starting position. All you're going to do is number your fingers and then choose a combination. For example, maybe I'll go 1324, which means with my fingers, I would play with the first, third, second, fourth. And then I would work my way up the strings using that combination on each string. When I get to the top, I'll do the same combination, crawling on my way back down. Then you pick a different order, maybe 4312. Before you play. Take five to ten minutes working through different warm-ups to get your fingers ready for your practice session. You can notice a big difference in your playing after you've warmed up versus not warming up at all. 23. Alternate Picking: Now we're going to learn about something called alternate picking. And as you may guess from the title, that has everything to do with the right hand and how it picks with our strumming patterns were well rehearsed, strumming down and strumming up. But now that we know some warm-ups, It's a great opportunity for us to practice picking single notes down and up. This is alternate picking. It's easier on the wrist and you can play much faster and more fluid than just picking down. So for example, let's take that warm up, the first warm-up where we just go, 1, 2, 3, 4. I'll put my first finger on the first fret of the sixth string, and I'll pick all down at first. Now, we'll try some alternate picking. Every other note going down and up. You can only go so fast with down strokes. But when you start going back and forth, it opens up a whole world of possibilities. And it's much easier on the wrist. As you learn and progress as you do the warm-ups and as you learn some songs with tabs, practice these songs now with alternate picking, it's a great habit to get into. 24. Final Project: We've made it to the end of our class, and so it's time to work on a final project. Now what we want to do is bring everything together into one song. Here's what I want you to do. Pick four chords, any four chords you want, and make a chord progression out of them. Then pick a strumming pattern and play those four chords with that strumming pattern. See if you can repeat it three times in a row. Now, that's the project. But if you're feeling ambitious and you have a way to record a couple instances of your guitar over itself. Maybe add a little bit of a melody line that you think sounds good. Some single notes over your chords with alternate picking. That part of the project is fully optional. But whether you make chords or whether you make chords and a melody, I'm very excited to hear what you come up with. 25. Wrap Up: We've reached the end of our class. I hope you learned something and you're much more comfortable on the guitar. You're ready to go out and jam with friends. There is a lot of information there. So if you have any questions, please please reach out. I'm happy to answer anything. Thank you so much for taking this course. I'd love it if you left a review, a comment, and have fun.