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He who dies with the most chord shapes wins Myth.
By Mike Hayes | May 25, 2010
It’s a popular misconception that the more chord shapes you
learn on guitar the better you will be able to play.
Cost of believing the myth: Every day heaps of guitar chord books
are sold around the world to newbie guitar players, some books
contain thousands of chord shapes others have cool pictures of
famous guitar players sprinkled throughout a book chock full of
guitar grids. The latest gadget for learning chords is an
electronic pocket chord dictionary where you can dial up any
chord shape and hey-presto the shape appears on the screen.
Reality: The reality is that whether you know three chords or
three thousand is irrelevant it all comes down to (a) knowing
which chords go together to make a successful accompaniment and
(b) knowing how to connect the chords musically on the guitar
fretboard.
To put it another way … let’s say a song only required two
chords to create a satisfactory background for a song if you
don’t know which two chords go together it doesn’t matter how
many chords you know.
Chord books full of random chord shapes without teaching you the
necessary musical skills of how to connect chords together are a
waste of time and money, there are many standard chord
progression templates that musicians must learn to play and
recognize by ear and not one of these templates have ever been
presented in a chord book.
Learning isolated chord shapes is the same as learning isolated
words the trick in both cases is acquiring the skills to string
the material together to enable us to communicate our ideas,
To gain control of your chord playing you must:
1. learn to spell your chords.
2. understand how to create open voiced chords to make your
chords easy to play on the guitar.
3. Study voice leading concepts to produce smooth, musically
strong chord progressions.
Benefits of going with the reality: Once you learn these skills
you will be in control of your rhythm guitar playing, your
chords will sound more professional and you will be able to
accompany vocalists and other instrumentalist better. so let’s
take a look at how to get started.
Learning how to spell chords: Each chord is not an unrelated
group of notes they are created from scales usually by stacking
notes from the scale in thirds although certain types of chords
are created by stacking the scale in fourths.
To see this concept in action I will use the “C” scale
C scale: C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C
If I start on the first note “C” then skip one note (D) to
select the next note “E”, I will have the first two notes of
a C major chord. Indicated []
C scale: [C] – D – [E] – F – G – A – B – C
Since the traditional definition of a chord is “three or more
notes played together” I will have to continue my leap-frog
concept to find the third note of the C chord.
Back to our scale, next step is to hop over the “F” note to land
on my third chord tone the “G” note. Here is the completed C
chord. Indicated []
C scale: [C] – D – [E] – F – [G] – A – B – C
C chord = C – E – G
You can create other chords from any point in the scale via the
same leap-frog style system of playing a note, skipping a note,
playing a note etc., until you have the three chord tones.
Here is another example this time starting from the second note
of the C scale.
C scale: C – [D] – E – [F] – G – [A] – B – C
The resulting chord structure will produce a D minor chord this
time.
Dm = D – F – A
How did I know this chord was a minor chord and not a major chord
like the previous chord?
Each major scale produces exactly the same chord structures.
chord 1 = major, 2 = minor. 3 = minor, 4 = major, 5 = major, 6 =
minor, 7 = diminished, 8 = major.
No matter what key you are in the chord structure create from
each degree of the scale will remain the same.
The really neat thing about learning chords this way is right
from the start you will know which chords work together since you
will be learning to spell and create chords all constructed from
the same scale, try working out a few and playing on your guitar.
Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson, Guitar Chords | No Comments »
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