The Complete Guitar Chord Masterclass - Beginner Chords

1. Intro: Hi, My name is Jacob Lamb. Welcome to the complete guitar chord masterclass. This course is part one of three where we cover beginner, intermediate and advanced chords, taking you from the very first steps through every chord you could ever need to play and write your favorite songs. In this part 1, we're going to cover basic chord shapes, bar chords, strumming patterns, and how chords fit together so that you can begin writing your own songs. We're going to cover a little bit about keys and how we can use them to find sets of chords that sound good together. By the end of this first course, you're going to be able to play all of your open chord shapes comfortably and use them to play your favorite songs. I'm really looking forward to starting. Let's jump in together. 2. Half Steps and Whole Steps: Welcome to the first official course in the lesson. Now, before we get started, we need to understand something really important called half-steps and whole-steps. These are the building blocks that everything we'll be doing are founded on. Now thankfully, these are really simple to understand. A half-step is simply the smallest amount that you can move up or down on the neck of your guitar. Each of these metal bars are frets on my neck, and a half-step will just be from one fret to the next. For example, to play a half-step maybe I'll move from the third fret of my first string, to the fourth fret of my first string. That would be a half-step. Another way to play a half-step would be moving down as well. So maybe I could play the first fret of my second string, and then go down to the open second string or zero fret. You can move half-steps up or down, and from one fret to the next or even from a fret to an open string. They're all half-step movements so long as they're the smallest amount that we can move on our guitar. Now, whole-steps are pretty simple as well. As you may have guessed they're just two half-steps put together. We could think about that as being two frets away instead of just one fret. This time for a whole-step maybe I'll play the third fret on my first string, and then I would move up two half-steps which lands me on the fifth fret of my first string. Or if I want to move down by a whole step I could play the second fret of my second string. Now if I'm moving down by a whole step, I would move one, two to the open second string. To summarize, half-steps are one fret away or the smallest amount we can move on the guitar. Whole-steps are two frets away or two half-steps put together. 3. Notes on the Guitar: Now, here's something really cool, by the end of this short lesson, I'll bet that you all know every single note name on the neck of the guitar. Which sounds a little crazy, but stay with me. See if we understand half-steps and whole-steps there's only a little bit more we need to know to be able to figure out any note on our guitar. First of all, the names of our strings. These are E, A, D, G, B, and e. Or another way to think about that is elephants and donkeys grow big ears. Now, the reason this is important for our chords is that cords are made up out of individual notes. If we know where the individual notes are, we'll be able to better understand what chords are and how to find them on the neck. Now, here's the most important piece of information. Every single note in front of us is a whole step away from one another. From one note to the next, it's a whole step gap, except B to C and E to F. These are the half-steps. If we can remember this pattern, we'll go really far with it. Now, here's how we put all of this together. We can pick a string on our guitar, and we can count up the notes of that guitar by moving up either a whole step or a half-step. For example let's figure out the a string or the fifth string. We know of course that when we start with the open string, that's going to be an A note. Now, let's say I want to find a B note, or the next letter in my musical alphabet. Well, I look at my chart and I see that A to B is a whole step. That means I'm going to move up by two frets. Here's my, A, one fret, two frets is a B note. Now we can look at our chart and see that B to C is one of the half-step movements. Which means if I want to find a C note, I'm going to take my B and move it up by one fret and that's a C note. Now let's apply this a little bit and then keep going with it. Being able to find notes like this is really useful because these chord shapes actually start from the same letter name as the chord. Let me explain that a little bit. If we're playing A chord, we're going to start from an A note. If we're playing a C chord, we're going to start from a C note and play a G chord we're going to start from a G note. Knowing where these notes are is really useful. We just found A, B, and C. We found out that those are the first three notes of chords like A, B, and C. If I want to find a D well again, I look at the chart and I see that it's a whole step away. From my C, I'll move up to D. It's another whole step, a half step to F, a whole step to G, a whole step to A and we've landed at the same place that we started. Now, we can do that on any one of the strings. You'll notice the sixth string is an e and so if I want to move up to F, I start with a half-step movement to F, to G, to an A. All we need to know is what a half-step is and what a whole step is. The names of the strings elephants and donkeys grow big ears and the distance between the notes, they're all a whole step apart, except for B to C and E to F 4. Sharps and Flats: Now some of you may be thinking, hold on just a minute. You're skipping a lot of frets on our guitar. Every single note that has a whole step gap between them, we're missing something in the middle. Well, thankfully, these are really easy, these are called sharp notes and flat notes. Now, sharp is just when we take a letter and we move it up via fret. For example, we have a C note on the third fret of the fifth string. Now, if I jump up by a whole step, I'll hit my D note. But if I move my C up by a half step to something in between my two whole letters, I get a C sharp then a D, a D sharp, an E, and an F. Remember that E-F and B-C are half-steps, so we don't have any sharps or flats between them. Now a flat is the opposite of a sharp, where a sharp is when we move up by a half-step, a flat is when we move down by a half-step. Let's say now that I have a D, well, if I move down by a whole step, I'll land on a C note. But if I move down by half step, I'll hit a D flat. Now, you may notice that's the same exact fret as a C sharp. This fret here, this fourth fret would be a C-sharp or a D flat. The question is, how do we know which one to call it? Well, it's name is entirely dependent on what note we're moving. If I'm moving my C up by one, I would call it a C sharp. If I'm moving my D down by one, I would call it a D flat. In the future, you're going to see that we lay out all of the letters in the musical alphabet. When we do this, we're going to need to make some of them sharp and some of them flat to create songs. Now a really important rule is that we need to have one of every type of letter. We don't want to have two As or two Cs. That's also going to help us determine if a note will be sharp or flat 5. Major and Minor: Now we know how to find notes all over the fretboard and what sharps and flats are and that's fantastic. As we talk about chords, we're going to look at the actual shapes and we're going to look at the letters in that chord. You're also going to notice that some of the chord shapes we play sound happy, and some of them sound sad or more somber. Now, we've given names to these two types of chords other than happy or sad. See, happy chords are called major chords and they sound something like this. More somber chords are called minor chords and they sound something like this. By default, we assume that a chord is major. So if I ever tell you to play a D chord, you would play a D major chord. But if the cord is meant to be minor, we would specify that it's minor. We would either write out a little m next to the coordinate, or we would verbally say D minor. As another example, we have an a major chord so a happy sound or an a minor chord with that sad sound. 6. What is a Chord?: Now that we're about to play chords, what are they? How would we define a chord? Well, really simply, a chord is any three or more notes that we play at the same time. I could play a single note, an A note on my guitar and that's not a chord. It will never be a chord, it's just a note. I could play two notes at a time. That's still not a chord because it's only two notes. Now, what if I put third note in there? Now, I've got a chord going. Now I've got three note and that is a chord. As long as we're playing three notes, we know we're playing a chord. Now, some students might take their hand and just strum all of the strings together and ask if that's a chord and it actually is. It may not be a very good sounding one, but as long as we've got three notes in motion, we've got a chord. What we're doing in the following lessons is taking shapes, unique shapes where we combine notes to play chords. We're going to give each of those chords a name. When we know chords, we can take those names and put them together in order to play songs. 7. Em - C - G: It's time to learn three chords, and they're three chords that I just played, we're learning an E minor, C and G. You'll notice that we're doing a blend of minor and major chords. Now, when these are put together, minors and majors, they create really nice sounding songs. Most songs out there we will have a blend of minor and major chords. Rarely will you find a song with all minor or all major chords. Now, we're going to start with an E minor and we'll look at the shape and the frets we're hitting. Then we're also going to look at the notes we're hitting and find some patterns in courts. For my E minor, I'm going to be streaming all six strings. I'm going to start with the open six string. Now, I only need two fingers for this chord. My first finger is going to go on the second fret of the fifth string. My middle finger is going to go on the second fret of the fourth string. Second fret for both my first, and second finger just on the fifth and fourth string. Now, my next three strings that I haven't hit yet, we're going to play those completely open, so all three of them as open strings. When I combine that, I've got zero, second fret, second fret, zero, zero and zero. As for the notes in this chord, they're E, B, E, G, B, and E. One of the first things we'll notice is that we have a lot of repetition, but we do have three unique notes. That's E, G, and B. What that means is if we played those three notes, E, G, and B on the piano or any other instrument for that matter, we'd still be playing an E minor chord, which is really cool. Now, let's take a look at the C chord. For the C chord, we'll be starting on a C note. Remember for the E chord, we started on an E note. This time I'm going to take my ring finger, and I'm going to place it on the third fret of the fifth string. And really important, this is where my chord is starting. I'm not even going to be hitting the sixth string when I'm picking, I have to skip over it and start strumming from the fifth string. I've got my C note on the third fret of the fifth string. Now, my second finger is going to go on the second fret of the fourth string. My third string is going to be open, no frets press down at all. My first finger is going to go on the first fret of the second string. Finally, my first string will be open as well with no frets press down. Now, a really easy way to remember this court is that the third finger goes on the third fret. Second finger goes on the second fret, and the first finger goes on the first fret. So that's pretty easy to remember. We've got E minor and we've got C. Now again our notes for C are, C, E, G, C, and E. Once again we've got repetition, but three unique notes, and that's C, E, and G. Again, we could play those three notes on any instrument and be playing a C chord. Finally, we're going to learn a G chord, and this is one like the E minor will be hitting all six strings. I'm going to start with my middle finger on the third fret of the sixth string, that's a G note. My first finger will go on the second fret, of the fifth string. Now, the next three strings, 4,3 and 2, are going to be open. I don't need to press anything down, so I've got 3,2 and then three open strings. Now, for the last note of G, you get to choose if you want to use either your ring finger or your pinky. I've seen it taught both ways and different students prefer different fingers. But either way, we're going to place it on the third fret of the first string. I could either put my ring finger there or I could put my pinkie there. I prefer using my pinky personally, I like having my ring finger open. If I want to play around a little bit and maybe press it on a note that I think sounds good. But a lot of people prefer using their ring finger instead. For the G chord, we've got G, B, D, G, B, and G, so, again, a lot of repetition with three unique notes, G, B, and D. That's how you play an E minor, C and G chord. Now, in your notes, these three chords are put in different orders, and I encourage you to try each of the order so you can get really comfortable moving back and forth from shape to shape. When you're comfortable with those, when move on to the next course and look at three more chords. 8. Am - D - E: Our next three chords are the next most popular chords. We're learning in order of popularity here. Now we have a minor D and E. One thing you'll notice is that we already have an E minor chord and we're about to learn an E major chord. We'll be able to see better how they compare and contrast, what's different about them and how they sound different. But we're going to start with an A minor. Now, when I'm picking for this one, I'm going to start from the fifth string, just like I did for the C chord. I'm going to skip the sixth string and start strumming from string number 5. But I'm not going to press anything down. You'll remember that our open fifth string is an A, and that's where our A minor chord will start from. Open fifth string. I'm then going to take my middle finger and place it on the second fret of the fourth string. Now, I'm going to take my ring finger and also place it on the second fret of the third string. With my first finger, I'm going to grab the first fret of the second string, and I'll play an open first string. I've got 0,2,2,1, and 0. Now for my notes here, I'm playing an A, E, A, C, and E. My three unique notes here are A, C and E. Now let's take a look at a D chord. My D chord, I'm not going to be strumming all six strings, I'm not even going to be strumming five of the strings. For my D chord, I'm going to be strumming four string. I'm going to start picking string number 4. My open fourth string is a D, so that's where I'm going to begin. Now, I'm going to take my first finger. I'm going to put it on the second fret of the third string. My ring finger will go on the third fret of the second string, right there. I have one more step here, my middle finger, it's going to tuck between them and go on the second fret of the first string. Now, these notes are D, A, D, and an F sharp. This is the first example of one of our notes being a sharp note. Remember the open string is E so the first fret is F, because E to F is a half-step. Then one more half-step up from F would be an F sharp between F and G. We have A minor, D, and our last chord is going to be an E. Now, here's the difference between an E minor and an E. There's a one note difference. We know an E minor shape. What I'm going to do different is I'm going to change my two fingers from the first and second finger to the second and third finger. Now I'm pressing with my two middle fingers. I've got my first and my pinky ready to be pressed down. Still an E minor chord, but I've changed my fingers, and now with that first finger, I'm going to press down on the first fret of the third string. We have minor and major. You'll notice there's a one note difference. We're playing E, B E, G sharp, B, and E. Where our E minor had a natural G,or E major has a G sharp. That's the difference between major and minor chords, is really one little note. That's something that's going to make chords really easy as recognizing, we're just moving one note and if we know what we're moving, we'll know how to shift back and forth from major and minor chords. Again, in the book, just like the previous three chords, you've got these three chords in a certain order, and we've mixed in chords from the previous lesson. Now we're blending lesson chords, go and give them a try and when you're comfortable with them, we'll move on to the next lesson where again, we're learning three more chord shapes. 9. F - Dm - A: In this lesson, we're going to look at an F, a D minor, and an A chord. Now, a lot of these you'll notice are played without using all six strings. We're going to start with an F chord. It looks like a C chord that's been scrunched up, pushed together. We're going to start with our ring finger on the third fret of the fourth string and that's where we'll be starting our chord on an F note. Now our middle finger is going to go on the second fret of the third string and our first finger is going to do something new to us called a bar. That just means we're going to use it like a bar to press down multiple frets at once. In this case, we're using it to press the first fret on both the second and the first string. Now our notes are F, A, C, and F. You can really easily see our three unique notes here, F, A, and C. Next is the D minor. We already know our D chord. The note that needs to change to make this a minor chord is on the first string. That second fret needs to become the first fret. To do that, we need to move our fingers around a little bit to get there. I'm going to still play my open fourth string. Whether a chord is major or minor, we're starting from the same note. D major and D minor will both start from the D note. Now I'm going to take my middle finger and put it on the second fret of the third string. My ring finger is going to go on the third fret of the second string. So far everything is the same we've just shifted what finger we're using. We shifted that so that our first finger can get the first fret of the first string. We changed from an F sharp to an F, so our notes are, D, A, D, and F. We've got F, D minor, and now we need an A chord. Well, we already know an A minor chord. Now, the note that we're shifting, moving from minor to major is on the second string. We need this first fret to move up to the second fret. Here's what we're doing, playing the open fifth string, taking our first finger and placing it on the second fret of the fourth string. Taking our second finger and placing it on the second fret of the third string and taking our ring finger and placing it on the second fret of the second string. Still playing the open first string, so I've got open string, second fret, second fret, second fret, and first string. The notes there are A, E, A C-sharp, and E. When we compare it with an A minor, we see the note we moved was C to C sharp. In the same way, we've got the previous chords and these new chords in the book in different orders for you to practice through. But those three chords are F, D minor, and A. 10. How Strumming Patterns Work: Knowing chord shapes with the left hand is a ton of fun. But we can really bring songs to life when we start thinking about different strumming patterns with our right picking hand. Instead of just strumming down over and over, we can combine down-strokes and upstrokes. Now, there are two really important things to know to do this well. First of all, we should know that songs are generally broken down into things called four beat songs and three-beat songs. Now, there are other beats, but they're very rare. All that this means is that we can count songs either as groups of four or groups of three. One song I might count as 1234,1234,1234. The other type, which has a little bit more of a swing feel. I can count 123,123,123,123,123,123. As we listen to songs and as you look up songs that you like, try to identify if they flow more using four beats or three beats. Now, the other thing we need to know is that all of these beats, all of these numbers, can be subdivided with the word. Instead of just 1234, we can count 1&2&3&4&1&2. You may notice this thing, what my hand is doing on all of the numbers we call those downbeats, 1234 on all of the ends between the numbers. We call those up beats 1&2&3&4&1. It's really solid playing things on the down beat. But we can use the up beat really creatively to make some cool strumming patterns. In the next two lessons, we're going to look at strumming patterns that fit four beat songs and strumming patterns that fit three beat songs. 11. 4 Beat Strumming Patterns: The first strumming patterns we'll look at are four-beat strumming patterns. Now, these are really simple. Our first one is just going to be a shuffle-type beat. Now, that just means that for every downbeat, we're going to go down, and for every upbeat, we're going to go up. Our picking hand is just following the down, up, down, up of the down and up beats. Really simple. I'll use a D chord as my example here. I'll play 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Then I'll shift my chord to something like a G, 1 and 2 and. Speeding it up a little bit, this is what we've got, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. Really simple. Our next four-beat strumming pattern is going to be a little bit more complicated. This one goes down, down, up, up, down, up. Mentally, I like to break those into two different sections: First one down, down, up, and then the second section up, down, up. Here's how it fits over the four numbers and their upbeats. Here's what it sounds like. Again, I'll use the D as an example and play really slowly. Down, down, up, up, down, up, down, down, up, up, down, up, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 4. Here is a few chords on the screen. Now, we can try going back and forth between these with that strumming pattern. 12. 3 Beat Strumming Patterns: Now, let's take a look at some three beat strumming patterns. We'll start the same way we did with the four beat shuffle, except now as a three beat. I'll warn you, when you've learned four beat songs and you've got the shuffle in your head, it's really hard to transition to the three beats, but I know we can do it. Same thing down, up, down, up, except we count one and two and three and start back at the beginning. This time, why don't we use an A minor as our example. One and two and three, and then maybe I'll transition to a C. One and two and three, and one and two and three, and one and two and three, and one and two and three. That's pretty good. Same concept, we're just dropping the fourth beat. Now our next three beats strumming pattern is a little bit more complicated, just like the second four beat strumming pattern we did. This one goes down, up, down, up and that may not seem super complicated. But one of the really tricky things is that it sounds like it should look like this. You get in the habit of playing up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down but it's not. We have to make sure that the first beat is on this down and it sounds down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down and so we have to put a little bit more emphasis more on that first beat. Let me try playing it. Going between again, A minor and the C. One, 2, 3 down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up 1, 2, 3. Now, all of the chords in the book that we've gone over so far let's go back and revisit those but this time, let's play them using some of the new strumming patterns that we've got under our belt. 13. Power Chords: Let's take a break from our regular chords and learn a type of chord called a power chord. Now, power chords are interesting because we're playing three notes, but we're not playing three unique notes. We're doubling up one of the notes. For example, when we play something like a C chord, you'll remember our notes are C, E, G, C and E. We've got three unique notes. Power chords are a little bit different. We've got three notes, but it's C, G and C so we're doubling up the first note. Now, the cool thing about power chords is that it's this one shape that we can move around the neck of the guitar, we only need to learn one shape. Now, if we know the notes on the neck, like we talked about in one of the first lessons. Then we know a lot of chords really quickly. Let me show you the shape real quick and I'll show you what I mean. We're going to start from the third fret of the sixth string as our example. But remember we can start this from anywhere, it's a movable shape. Starting from the third fret of the sixth string means E, F, G. We're going to learn a G power chord because the note we start on is the same as the chord we're playing. I've got my first finger on the third fret of the sixth string, the first note in my power chord shape. Now, my ring finger is going to go up a string and down two frets. Here I'm going to be playing the fifth fret of the fifth string. This would be G and a D. My pinky is going to come behind the ring finger and also play the fifth fret of the fourth string and then I'm going to stop. I'm only going to pick the three notes that I'm hitting. This shape starts on a G, so it's a G power chord. Now, these power chords can be really useful because they can fit both major and minor chords. They're a little less open. You get a full G chord, sounds nice and full. The power cord, not as much. It's got a good strength to it. It's a little punchy, but it doesn't sound as full. What it does do is it can replace G major or a G minor, which is not a chord that we know yet. If we haven't covered something yet like a C minor chord, we can also just play a C power chord. That's really cool. We can have C major as a power chord, or C minor as a power chord. The other thing they're really useful for is playing sharp chords. Now, we haven't talked about sharp chords yet. But remember that whatever note we start on is the name of the chord we're playing and we do know that we have sharp notes on here. I could play C to D or I could play C sharp as a power chord. Now, we haven't talked about playing sharp chords. We don't know a unique shape yet for a C Sharp. But when we know this slidable movable power chord shape, we can play it from every thread and that unlocks for us all of the sharp or flat chords. Maybe I wanted to play G to C, D to A, and we'll even call it A minor, get an A minor in there. I could play G to C, D to A minor, or I could play these as power chords. Again, you'll notice that from major to minor in these chords, I didn't change my shape at all. I only changed what the first note I was playing was. 14. Major Barre Chords: We know that we have our standard chords down here or open chords, they're also called, and we know we have power chords. Now, power chords are great because we can play sharp and flat chords, but like we mentioned, they just don't sound as full. Now there is a chord that gives us this full sound and is a movable shape like power chords and they're called bar chords. Now, bar chords are a little bit tricky. We have to use our first finger as a bar to lay down across the strings. This is honestly where a lot of people start going, my goodness, this is difficult, I can't get this down, but wait. As long as we understand how they work, we can move forward and call it a success. The technique and skill of playing bar chords will come as you practice and as you play, this isn't something people get on the first try. I suppose some people, but not everybody certainly. The nice thing about bar chords is they are movable shape like power chords and they give us a nice full sound like open chords. Now, we can play these bar chords either from the sixth string or the fifth string, and there's major and minor for each one. We have four shapes to learn that we can move around anywhere. In this lesson, we're going to cover the major shape, in the next lesson, we'll look at the minor shape. Now, probably the most useful way to think about bar chords is to relate them to the open chords we already know. Let's look at the major shape for the sixth string. Now, this is like if we took an E chord and wanted to move it up somewhere different, but when we play it, it's not very pretty. The reason is, when we played our E chord shape, we were playing a lot of open strings. Those same notes of the open strings don't fit when we slide that shape up. For every fret that we slide up our chord, we need to move the open strings with it. That's where we lay our first finger down to grab the rest of the strings. It's like thinking of our finger as this white bar following behind the chord. We've got this E chord shape with our ring, pinky, and middle finger and our first finger laying down behind it. Back to an E. This is the shape right here. I've got actually a power chord shape on the first three and then I'm laying down the rest of it. This is a major shape from the sixth string. Now again, we want to think about whatever note we're starting on. This I'm sliding up my E, F, G, this will be a G bar chord. We can apply what we know about half-steps and whole-steps. I know from G to A is a whole step. I could now move this whole shape up by a whole step and get another way to play an A chord, which is really cool. Then you get some chord shapes that we haven't managed to go over with open chords like an A sharp. That's our sixth string major shape. Let's take a look at our fifth string major shape. Again, the best way to do this is to relate it to a cord we already know. In this case, it would be an A chord. This is like if I want to take an A chord and slide it up, but again, we've got some unhappy open strings now, so for every fret, I slide it up. I want to bar that first finger like that. I've got an A chord shape and my first finger, two frets underneath it. Now, I'm starting from a C note right here. This would be like another way to play a C chord. I'm starting from the same note, but playing it in a different way and so I can transition back and forth from sixth string major shapes to the fifth string major, and that's A to D. You still get that full sound. Again, you can recognize the power chord is the first three notes of that whole shape, and so that's the major shapes for the bar chords. 15. Minor Barre Chords: Now let's go ahead and take a look at the minor shapes for the bar chords on the sixth string and on the fifth string. For the major shapes, we related them to like sliding around and E major, and sliding an A major. Instead of the majors, we're switching it to minors. Now it's like if we're sliding an E minor and then A minor. E minor. If I wanted to move it up, I'm going to just have two frets press down and lay my first finger down. The whole shape here, I'm on the fifth fret as an example, I've got 5, 7, 7, 5, 5, 5. Now, it's really hard to get all those notes barred down with the first finger. I like to do two things to help. First of all, I like to make sure I'm on the side of my first finger. I'm rolling it because it bends a lot less that way than it does the other way. Using it on the side helps and then using my middle finger since it's not in use anymore to push down on it, push it into the neck. You can see it become an E minor as we move it down. Now it's an E minor. For the fifth string we're moving the A minor. For every fret we move in A minor up. We want our first finger to lay down on those strings. That's our shape right there. You'll notice this shape is actually shockingly like the sixth string major shape or just sliding it up by one string. To recap those four shapes, I've got sixth string, major and minor, taking off the middle finger. The fifth string, major and then minor as well. That opens up major and minor chords from any fret on the neck. Now, here's what's important. If you know the whole steps and half steps between every note and the names of the strings. You can find notes on the fret board like we talked about. Well now with these bar chord shapes under your belt, you can play any basic chord, every basic chord. That's really cool. Now when you go look up some of your favorite songs and the chords that go along with them, you should be able to find, that's a C sharp minor chord in the song, which sounds scary. But we're just counting our way up to C sharp, one fret above C, and it's a minor chord. From that note, we'll play the minor bar chord shape. All of these shapes are also in the booklet that comes with this course. Make sure to download that to reference as you're practicing 16. What is a Key?: So far, we've learned open chords in the left-hand, notes all over the neck, power chords, bar chords, major, and minor. That's incredible. If you've made it to this point, congratulations. But as you practice, especially if you're writing your own chord progressions, you may find that some chords sound better together than others. Every now and then you may come across a chord that doesn't really sound very good with the others you've put it with. We need some kind of method to figure out what chords work well together and to know what chords to avoid. This is where we come up to building a key. You may have heard it said that a song is written in a certain key or you could play in this key. The key of C, the key of E. The question is, what is a key? In its most basic form, a key is a set of notes that sound good together. Each one of those notes can be turned into a chord. This is a way of finding out which chords work well together. You can think of it like a family of chords. This means we have to do two things. We have to figure out how to find notes in a key and then we have to find out how to turn those notes into chords. 17. Finding Notes in a Key: How do we find the right notes that make up one of these keys? Well there's a really simple formula we use to do this. The formula uses whole steps and half steps, just like every other part of this course. The formula is whole, whole half, whole, whole, whole, half. Now, here's what that means. We can start from any note we want. Let's start from a C note. What we're going to do is write out one of every letter and we'll end the same way we started with a C. Now we've got a formula and we need to make our letters fit this rule. We're going to do that by adjusting some of these to be sharp or flat as needed. Now, we need to make sure that the gaps between the notes fit the rule. C to D needs to be a whole step and it is, D to E needs to be a whole step and it already is. E to F is a half-step. F to G is a whole step. G to A is a whole step. A to B is a whole step and B to C is a half-step. What that means is in the key of C, there are no sharps or flats needed for it to be perfect. We can play the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B, back to C. You may recognize that pattern. That's where Do, Re, Mi comes from, DO, RE, MI, FA, SO, LA, TI, DO. Now you're thinking, hang on. This is a course on chords. Why do I need to know this? This sounds a little too much like music theory. [LAUGHTER] Well, that's because that each one of these notes can be turned into a chord. But before we get there, let's look at another example where we might need to put in some sharps to make it fit our rule. What if we were in the key of A? Now we write out one of every letter and we finished the way we started with an A. Let's take that same rule and put it underneath and take a look. A to B needs to be a whole step and it is. But B to C needs to be a whole step. We know that that's one of our half-steps. B to C is one fret away on the guitar. We need to widen that gap. If we moved backwards and adjusted the B, it would mess up what we've already done between A and B. We need to look forwards. If we make the C-sharp, now we've widened the gap. B to C sharp is a whole step that's two frets away on our guitar. We've also fixed another problem, C-sharp to D is a half-step. By changing the middle note, we've changed the distance on either side of it to fit our rule. Now D to E is all set, it is a whole step. E to F needs the same fix so we're going to make F sharp, and that's created a problem. Now, F sharp to G does not fit the rule, so we need to do the same thing to G and then it is a half-step to A. What this means is in the key of A, there are three sharp notes to make sure the key sounds good together. That means when we turn these notes into chords, there's going to be three sharp chords. We have the key of C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, and we have the key of A with the same distance between the notes, but starting from an A. A, B, C-sharp, D, E, F-sharp, G-sharp, back to A. That fits DO, RE, MI, FA SO, LA, TI, DO starting from an A. That's how we build a key of nodes. Now we need to figure out how to turn those nodes into chords. 18. Turning Notes into Chords: Let's take a look at turning each of the notes in the key into chords. There's one more rule we need to know, but instead of half and whole-steps, this one deals with major and minor. Now we write major with a capital M and minor with a lowercase m, and so we write this like major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, minor, which looks like you've just had a really delicious bite of food. [LAUGHTER] You'll notice there are seven steps in this rule and seven notes in our key. Which means we can take this rule and apply it to each of the notes in our key. One is major, two is minor, three is minor, four is major, five is major, six is minor, and seven is minor. Then we're back to the one. So in the key of C, now these are the notes we have. C, D minor, E minor, F, G, A minor, B minor, and C. Now, you can put those chords in just about any order and know that they're going to sound good together because they're in the right key. They are in the same key. Let's do this for the key of A that we were looking at. This means we have A major, B minor, C-sharp minor, D, E, F sharp minor, G-sharp minor, back to your A. So this is how we start with a key that we want and we build out every note. We make sure it follows the half and whole step rule, and then we turn them into chords using the major and minor rule. That way we can create songs out of this bank of chords that we know sound good together 19. Roman Numerals: It can be really helpful to look at these chords and write out the letters. But there are some times where it's helpful to use Roman numerals. One through seven, we can label chords in a key and then make chord progressions with the Roman numerals. Instead of C, G, F, A minor, you might write I, V, IV, VI. In the next lesson, we're going to see why that might be helpful. But one other thing that's helpful about it is that some people know Roman numerals better than they know chords. I actually played with someone once and I gave him a chart of chords and he wasn't quite sure what to do with it. But he was a phenomenal player. What he needed to be told was, we're playing I, V, IV, VI in the key of C, and then he could play it with no problem. Knowing both the chords and the Roman numerals is going to be really helpful, especially when you're playing with other people. 20. Transposing Chords: Now, another reason that Roman numerals are so helpful is that we can use them when we do something called transposing. Let's say you're playing with a singer or you're singing a song yourself, you're in the key of C and you're playing I, IV, V, VI, which is C, G, F, and A minor. But the melody doesn't quite fit the singers range or your range and what they need is they need it moved back a little bit, maybe from the key of C to the key of G. Well, there are two ways to do this. Number 1, you could have the chords written out and have to change every single chord from C-G and from G-D, and from F-E. You see where I'm going. Another way to do it is to have the Roman numerals so in the key of C, You've got I, IV, V, VI. You can shift it to the key of G and recognize, that's still I, IV, V, VI, just in a different key. The actual progression is the same, the key you're playing it in is different. Roman numerals make transposing really simple because it's an easy way to see the progression is the same, the key is what's changed. 21. Song Form: It can be easy to listen to a song and get lost on the roadmap of where you are in the song. Let's briefly talk about standard song form. Songs have a pattern that they generally follow. There are three main parts of a song. The first is the verse. The verse is where you get the bulk of the story. The story or the theme is unfolding. Typically you have two verses, but you might have three. The second part of the song is called the chorus. Now, the chorus often has the title of the song in it, but not always. It often as the title of the song. It has the main theme of the song in it and the main hook of the song. If you're asking your friend, hey, have you ever heard of that song and then you hum a portion of it or sing a potion of it, you're probably humming or singing from the chorus of the song. Verses tend to change. Verse 1 versus 2 versus 3 will have different lyrics and between them will be choruses with the same lyrics. Now, each of these sections of the song is borrowing chords from the same key. But the chords are probably in a different order. Just as an example, your verse might be I-V-IV-VI, your chorus might be VI-IV-II-I. If we're in the key of C verses might sound like this I, V, IV, VI. Then we move to a chorus VI, IV, II, I. Back to your verse. Those two chord progression sound good together because they're in the same key. Now in a song you've got verse, chorus, verse, chorus, you typically end with a chorus. To keep it interesting, there's a third section called the bridge. Now lyrically, the bridge can be anything. Maybe it wraps up the story of the song and makes the chorus mean something different. Maybe there's a twist or a resolution. Musically, the bridge is the most varied. You may get a bridge that fits perfectly inside the key, you might get some chords out of the key as a creative choice. The bridge is a free for all but you can also keep it in form. These are the main sections of your song and your very standard song form is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. Now, there are other sections of a song as well. You might have an intro or an outro. Some songs might have a pre-chorus which separates the verse from the chorus. You're also going to get dynamics in a song which in a really simple way to explain it is different volume levels, different strength levels. Dynamics can shrink and grow throughout a song to keep it interesting. Typically, your choruses will be louder than your verses. You have these waves getting louder and quieter, and that keeps a song interesting as well. After a bridge, you might have a guitar solo and that's your part right there. You might have an instrumental after choruses. There's a lot of different options that songwriters have to choose from but as long as we have this primary form in our head, we'll know exactly where we are in a song when we're learning chords to our favorite songs. 22. Congratulations!: You've made it to the end of the learning portion, congratulations. Now, as a final project, we're going to do one of two things; we're either going to find chords to a song we're interested in learning and practice those or write chords to our own song. We're going to record the video or audio and upload that. Or if you're recording shy, you can also just write down the chords and how you manage them, what you found easy, what you found difficult. Beyond that, really well done making it this far. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach me at jacob@lamblessons.com or visit me right at lamblessons.com. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one.