Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, My name is Jacob. Thank you so much for looking
at my course on how to play any song on guitar
in just three days. And it's true. Here I'm going
to give you the basics to play your favorite songs
by the end of the week. Songs are played with chords. What we're going to do is
we're going to learn for individual chord shapes that are movable all over the neck. So that when you look up the chords to the
songs you love, you're going to be able to play them fluidly and effectively. Soon, you'll be
jamming out better than you thought you ever could. Join with me in the next lesson. And let's start together.
2. Half Steps and Whole Steps: Welcome to the first
lesson of the course. Now to start, we need to know the difference between a
half step, whole step. Half step on your
instrument is just moving up or down from
one fret to the next. It's the smallest movement
you can make on your guitar. If I'm starting from
the second fret, a half-step is going to
bring me up to third friend. Or if I'm starting
from the first fret, half-steps going to bring
me down to an open string. A whole step then
is two frets away. Or you can think of it as
two half-steps put together. I'm going to skip over a threat when playing
a whole step may be from the second fret
of the fourth fret. Understanding half-steps
and whole-steps is going to allow us to find our way and communicate where we are moving on the
neck of the guitar.
3. Names of the Strings: Now the names of
our strings are E, a, D, G, B, E. But that's kind of odd to memorize and
just say like that. And so we have a sentence we can use to memorize the strings of the guitar from the
thickest sixth string to the thinnest first string. The sentence goes, elephants
and donkeys grow big ears. Elephants, donkeys.
4. How to Find Notes: Now that we know the
names of the strings and what a half-step
and a whole step is, we're actually able to find any single note on the neck of our guitar
from any string. We just need to remember
that every note is a whole step two frets
away from one another. Besides to B, to
C is a half-step, and E to F is a half-step. Even though we're
in a guitar course, the best way to visualize
this is actually on a piano. Each white and black key
is a half-step away. The smallest movement you
can make on the piano. But you will notice that every
note is a whole step away from one another besides
these two and these two. So of course you may
have guessed those are E to F and B to C. It's harder to visualize
on our guitar, but we'll keep it
in mind as we work our way up the strings
of the guitar. What that means is
we can start from any string and we'll
use the a string, the fifth string as our example. If I want to work my
way up at the notes, I just need to remember
which ones are whole step and which
ones are a half-step. A to B is a whole step, so I'll move up two friends. B to C is a half-step, so I'll move up one fret. C to D is a whole step. So I'll move up two frets. Right there. I've found a
D note from my a string. I could also find a denote from my E string if I wanted to, and that's count that out. I have my E. Now, E to F is one
of the half-steps. I'll move up by one frame. F to G, we know
is a whole-steps, so I'll move up to friends. G to a is another whole-steps, so that's two more frets. A to B is a whole step. B to C is the other half-steps, so I'll move up by one fret. And finally, C to
D is a whole step. I've just worked my way up
the notes on the E string, finding myself a D note. Next, we're going to learn
what chords are and why it's important to know the
notes on these strings.
5. What Are Chords?: So what is a chord? It's actually a really
easy definition. Accord is just any
three or more notes that you play at the same time. Now, like I mentioned
in the intro, we're going to find
four chord shapes that we can move around
anywhere we need. And that's where
finding the notes like we did in the last
lesson comes in. So handy. Accord is named based
on its starting note. So if I want to play a D chord, I need to be able to
find a D note and then play the right shape
starting from that D Note. Practice, practice, practice finding the
notes on the strings. Then we'll practice
these four shapes. What are the four shapes
that we're learning? Chords are broken up
into major chords, which sound more happy, and minor chords
which sound more sad. Now, all the best songs use a blend of major
and minor chords. Even if your song is happy, that's going to have some
minor or sad chords in it. Even if your song is sad, it's going to have some
major or happy chords in it. What we need to do is learn a major shape and a minor shape. And we'll do that starting from the fifth string and
the sixth string. So two types of chords
for each string. Then we'll be able to move back and forth between these strings, playing the chords that we need.
6. Major Chord: 6th String: It's time to learn our chord shapes and we're going to
start with the major chord, the happy chord on
the sixth string. Now we're going to
reference fret numbers. And which fingers to
use on that fret. I'm going to use
the third fret as my starting point
for this example. But remember that these
shapes are movable and it all depends on what note you need to start on or want to
start on for your song. So you can follow along from the third for
it, for this example. And you can practice
moving it around to different threats to
hear how it changes. I'm gonna take my first finger. I'm going to put it
on the third fret of the thickest sixth string, and that's my starting point. Now you may know already
that this is a G note, and so this is going
to be a G major chord. Behind this first finger. I'm going to take
my third finger and put it on the fifth fret. That's on the next string
with a fret between them. The nice thing here
is that we can count using the dots on our guitar. If we're starting on a dot, our next finger will also
be on the next dot up. Or if we're starting
between dots are next finger will also
be between those dots. I'm starting from a dot. So my third finger is gonna
go on the next string, the fifth string
on the next dot. Now my pinky is going to tuck behind it on the fourth string. The D string, also
on the same dot, will work our fingers around
to make room for that pinky. Finally, our middle
finger is going to go on the fourth fret, or in-between the dots
on the third string. Now here's the sound
of that major chord. The trick here is
that we only want to pick MS strings that
were pressing down. We've got two strings that were not pressing anything down on. We need to find a way to stop
those from wringing out. We can do that either with our right hand just
to pick down to that point or with
our left hand, I actually like to take my first finger and
lay it down ever so gently on those other strings
so that when I pick them, nothing is coming out. Now you can practice moving
this minor shape around. This is a G. So if I want an a, now I can move my entire
chord up by a whole step, which is two frets. So I have g. Here's one fret,
and there's my a. All of a sudden, now I'm playing an a chord.
7. Minor Chord: 6th String: Now we're going to look at the minor sad chord shape
for the sixth string. For this one, it's
actually pretty easy. We'll start from the same
fret, the third fret. So I'll take my first finger, I'll put it back on
that third fret. Now, all of our notes are actually going to be
on the third fret. So again, we can
aim with the dots. If you start on a dot, well, all your notes are going
to be on that same dot. If you start between dots, all of your notes
will be between dots. I'm going to start
on the third fret. Then I'm going to take my
middle finger and also put it on the third fret of
the fourth string. I'm skipping over
the fifth string and taking on the fourth string. Now, all in a row, my third finger
is going to go on the third fret of
the third string. And my pinky finger
is going to go on the third fret of
the second string. I've got my fingers
on the sixth string, fourth string, third
string, and second string. Now here's what the
chord sounds like. Just like the other chord. We want to use our
fingers to mute the strings that we're
not pressing down. We'll adjust them as needed. To make that happen. It's not that difficult. The pinkie should be able
to mute the first string and the fifth string can be
muted by the first finger. And you'll find
that those mutes, while there's something
else to think about, they do happen relatively naturally as you
play these chords. It's not a big concern. We'll just try
picking through with our left hand fingers
all on the same frets.
8. Let's Play: Chord Progression #1: Now that we've got
a major shape and a minor shape on
the sixth string. We can practice them using
a chord progression. This is just a set of chords, one after the other, and they often repeat
themselves in songs. For example, let's
say you looked up a song and it had the chords G, F, C, and a minor. So I'm going to start
by working my way up to a G note and playing
a major shape. Remember that chords
that you look at don't specify if their major, if you just see the letter
that's a major court, they do specify if they're minor with the little m.
We just see a G, So we've got a G
major chord to play. I'll count up my string, e, half step to F, a full step to G. And then I'm going to play
my major shape from here. Next, I've got an F chord. So I can count a very
small amount from E to F and play the
major shape from there. My next chord is a C, which is a little
bit of counting. And you'll see
later That's where the fifth string
shapes come in handy. The C is lower on
the fifth string, and so we can just
move back and forth. For now though, we'll
practice counting up to see from E a half step to F, a whole step to G, whole step to a, whole step to B, and a half step to a C. I'm playing my major shape
now from the eighth fret. Last chord is an a minor, so I'm going to count my
way up to a, E, F, G. Then I'm going to play
that minor shape that was all on the same fret. My chord progression Is G, C, a minor. We can use the right hand to
add some rhythm to our song. I'll just do downstrokes. There's nothing too
fancy happening, but I do want to add some rhythm to bring those chords to life. Practice that chord progression. Maybe you can find
some already from songs you love and you can practice those
with what you know. Next, we're going to
look at the fifth string major and minor
shapes and how we'll use them to make chord
progressions even easier to play.
9. Major Chord: 5th String: It's time to look at our
2 fifth string shapes. And we're going to start
with the major chord, just like we did with
the sixth string. Now again, for the
sake of example, I'll start from the third fret. Since we're on a
different string, this time the third
fret is a C note. We're going to make a C major in the next class, a C minor. I'm going to take
my first finger and I'm going to put it on the third fret this
time of my a string. Now, just like last time, I'm going to take my ring finger and put it on the
fifth fret. Next. Up, so far, everything is exactly the same as when we
did it on the sixth string. Then I'm going to take my pinky. I'm going to put it
also on the fifth fret. We've got the exact same start as our sixth string major shape. That's great. But this
is where things change. I'm going to take the fingers
I have pressed down and I'm going to roll
the pinky back. It's grabbing the fifth fret
on the third, second string. Now if you're finding
this too difficult, there are other ways to do this. One of which involves
a little bit more of a stretch where we take our three fingers and we
put them all down in a row. I find that one to be
the most difficult. The other way to
do it is to skip the third string altogether
and press down the fifth, fourth, second string
with the pinky. Now, here's what the
chord sounds like laying down the pinky
to cover two strings. Here's what the
chord sounds like. Skipping the third string
and putting a string gap. I think it's worth it
to lay the pinky down. It sounds the most full, but that's going to
be our major shape. Now again, we can move that
from the fifth string. We could take that shape. We're playing a C right now, and we could move it up to a D by going up by a whole step. So we have C half
step, whole step. And now I'm playing a D chord. In the previous class, we talked about using fifth
string shapes to kind of have the slide less when we're
doing six string shapes. And that's true.
That's because when we wanted to see in our
other chord progression, we had to slide our
way all the way up to the eighth fret
with that major shape. Now that we have a fifth
string major shape in there, we could easily
change to a C chord. From here to here. It's a lot easier than
sliding up to there. Next, we're going to look at
fifth string minor shapes.
10. Minor Chord: 5th String: We've come to our
last movable shape, which is a minor shape
from the fifth string. Now I'm going to start from
that third fret again. So I'm gonna take
my first finger and put it down on the third frame. Now, it's almost identical. I'm gonna take my
third finger and put it on the fifth fret
or one dot away. Then again, my pinky and put it on the
fifth fret as well. We're starting the
same exact way as we did for our major chord. But now I'm going to take
the middle finger and put it in between the dots on the fourth fret of
the second string. So I've got this shape here. And you may recognize
this shape. The minor shape for the
fifth string is exactly the same as the major shape
for the sixth string. We're just starting from
a different string. Here is the minor shape from
the fifth string sound. Like the others, we
still have to mute the 6 first strings so that none of the open
strings are ringing out. But that does mean that we
have all of our shapes. Here. We can practice. Maybe we want an E minor chord. I'll go from C up
a whole step to D, up a whole step to E. And I can play that minor shape. I've got an E minor chord. Next we're going to look
at to practice songs. The first one focusing on
the fifth string shapes, and then the second
one moving back and forth between the strings.
11. Let's Play: Chord Progression #2: Welcome to our next
practice song. Here we're going to be looking
at major and minor shapes on the fifth string and getting
comfortable with those. For our chord progression, we're gonna try to
do C, E minor, D, and F. So again, we're going to start by counting up to a C note,
our starting note. We have a string to B, to C, and then I'll do my
major shape from there. Next is an E minor. From C, I'll count up to D. Both whole-steps and
play my minor shape. Then we have a D chord. I'm at E, and so I could count down to D by one whole-steps. So I'll slide it down to D
and play that major shape. And our last chord is an F, So we have D to E and then
a half-step up to an F. You may remember we've
already got an F chord, and that's our lower f
from the sixth string. There are two things
to consider here. There are multiple examples
of each note in music. We have lower ones and
we have higher ones. It's up to us which
one we want to play. Of course, they have the
same notes in the chord, but they have different sounds. One is lower in deeper and one is a little more
light and airy. You can pick which one you
think best suits the song. But another thing
to consider as well is how close it is to where
you're already playing. I'm playing my E minor up here. I don't want to jump
down to F. It's so much easier to just slide
up a little bit. Sound matters when you're trying to pick which
chord to play, but also how easy it is to get to and where your
hand already is. Let's take one more look
at our chord progression. Again, using the right hand to bring those chords to life.
12. Let's Play: Chord Progression #3: For our last song example, we're going to be combining sixth string shapes and
fifth string shapes. So we're going to do G to C, to a minor, to E minor. So we can find a g from the sixth string by
counting up E, F, G, and playing our
major shape, see, is actually just the next
string up we have a, B, and C. And that's a
really easy transition. Again, we've got a C
on the sixth string, but we want to consider
how easy it is to get to G and C from the fifth string are
right next to each other. Next we have an, a minor chord. From my sixth string. I'm going to count to F, G, and play that minor
shape all on the same fret. Finally, an E minor from
my a string, I'll count a, B half-step to C, D, E, and then I'll play
that minor shape up there. My four chords, I've got G. C minor. E minor. Here is our third song practice. Now that we've got
our four shapes down, it's time to learn about
special chords and how to find the chords for the songs you're
interested in playing.
13. Sharp chords: Pretty frequently you're
going to come across a chord with this
symbol next to it. But what symbol is that? Well, that's actually
called a sharp cord. This is a sharp symbol in music. Now a sharp cord is
nothing fancy or new. In fact, we use the shapes
that we already have. But for every note that's
got a whole step between it, you'll notice we're
skipping over a fret. Now, these frets are actually
the sharps in our songs. Between a G and an a, for example, would be a G sharp. Between an a and a B
would be an a sharp. Let's say for example, I've got a G-sharp
minor chord in my song, and it looks scary, but it's actually not. We're going to start
with a G minor. So from that third fret
with the minor shape, now to make it sharp, all I do is put it
between G and a, so that would be G sharp. On the fourth fret. Sharp cords come into songs very often, but again, all we have to
do is move our chord up by a half-step and put it
in-between whole letters.
14. What About Special Chords?: This is a very
underwhelming lesson. Every now and then
you're going to come across chords with
some special symbols, letters or numbers. After them. You might see a G seven instead
of a G or a Jesus to G, sus4, G slash F, you might see some slash chords. These are all good
shapes to know. But for this class we're looking at just these
basic four shapes that we can move around while we do go over
these in another class. Right now, what we want
to know is that we can actually skip all
of the extra stuff. G major seven could
always be simplified to G. G sus4 could always
be simplified to G. And so we want to just
focus when we come across these big letters or things after the chord
that we don't understand, we want to just focus on the first part of
the actual court. When you're comfortable
with these shapes and you feel comfortable
with chords, you can always go out and learn these extra add-ons
to the chords.
15. How To Find Chords to Your Song: Now this is a little bit
of a different format, but one of the most
important parts of knowing how to play songs is knowing how to find the chords for the
song that you want. And this is actually
very simple. I'll show you how to do this. All we do is look up the
name of the song that you want and then the
word chords after it. Now my personal favorite website for doing this is
ultimate guitar. There's also one called E
chords That's super-helpful. But we'll look at
ultimate guitar. Now at the start, the song, It's going to give you a list of the cords that are
used in the song, along with a little chart of how to play that chord
and where to put your fingers when you go
through the actual song. You could also
hover over a court, See how to play
that specific one. This is enormously helpful. The only thing
that it doesn't do is tell us where
to play the chord. In terms of timing. How long to play a chord, how fast to play a chord. Sometimes it will try to tell
you a strumming pattern. Top, sometimes it doesn't. And so typically, not always, but typically it will put
the chord up above the word. We play the court width. For example, over the word Jude, replay a D chord. Hey, Jude, with a d. Over. Bad is where we lay
our a coordinate. So as we come to
these chord charts, it's really important to
know how the song goes, or at least the melody
with the words. If you know the
melody and the words, then you can better
know where the court goes as you sing and play.
16. The Final Project: You've made it to
the final project, the learning is done and
that's super exciting. What we're doing for
our final project is I want you to think about the song you came
into this class really hoping you could play. Then go out and find
the chords for it. Record either video or
audio of yourself playing these chords and then share it with us in the project tab. If you've got the four shapes, your half-steps and whole-steps, and you know how to
find those chords. You can practice as much as you need to before you
upload anything. But I myself am really excited. In the final project
you come up with.
17. Congratulations!: You've made it to the
end of the class. Congratulations. I hope you found something helpful whether you're
a beginner or you know, some of the open chords
and you wanted new shapes. Hopefully, you're able
to take now some of your favorite songs and play
them like you wanted to. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to
me or just to say hello, I'm looking forward
to hearing from you. And so thankful that you've
joined me on this class, we'll see you next time.
Jacob Lamb, Musician, photographer and videographer
