Why You're Learning Chords SHAPES On The Guitar WRONG!
(disclaimer: contains irony and sarcastic tone. Read if your sense of humor has been recently checked and found functional)
Here’s a fun fact or you: we (humanity) know more about the ongoings of outer space than we do about our own oceans.
While you may have already heard this, what you may not know is that we actually know much more about both space and oceans than the average guitar player knows about their fretboard.
To many, the fretboard is an unceasing abyss:
“Why do the frets keeping smaller but my fingers stay the same size?” Some ponder.
“Why does this fret have two dots on it while others have but one, and even more have none? Who appointed these frets to be the dot holders while others wallow in dot poverty? What is this, some kind of dot oligarchy?” Others ask.
These and more are the questions guitar players ask themselves - while balancing their other daily activities, such as learning how to read, count to 10 (*), and incorrectly placing blocks into equivalently shaped holes.
But don’t fret (hehe), much of the mystery of the guitar can be uncovered fairly easily.
And unlike space exploration, it isn’t rocket science.
To begin, we should first learn that chords can be played in a myriad of different ways, all across the fretboard.
So instead of always playing every chord the same way every time, like a donkey, you can play them all over the fretboard. Because you’re not a donkey, you’re a guitar player (a backhanded compliment, I know...)
And if you’re intelligent enough to match the rectangle to the rectangle hole at least 60 percent of the time then, by golly, you can do this too!
If you want to start learning how to take chords all around the entire fretboard, watch the video below and I’ll show you how.
(*) This is for guitar players. Drummers of course need to be able to count just up to 4.
If you want to learn even more about chords and harmony on the guitar, check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course. This course will teach you everything you need to know about chords on the guitar fretboard.
Video Transcription
Hello internet, so nice to see you! One important thing to understand when you want to learn to play chords on the guitar and when you want to move beyond just the usual cowboy chords is that chords on the guitar come in sets.
They don't come alone. If you learn one chord, you have learned nothing. You want to learn those chords in sets because they are organized in sets and once you learn them this way, everything becomes much, much easier, okay?
Now this idea of learning chords in sets could be a bit complex for you to follow at first. So fair warning here. But I'm gonna show you how to do it, okay? And I'm gonna show you what I mean with chords in sets and I'm gonna show these for two different situations for a triad and for a minor seventh chord just because, okay, those are two interesting kinds of chords, okay?
But you can do these with any kind of chords, okay? So let's see how it works. First of all, you are playing a chord on the guitar when you are playing the notes of that chord. So I want to start again with a triad situation and think I have a C major chord, okay?
And the notes in the C major chord are C, E, and G. Well, if I am playing those three notes on the fretboard, I am playing the C major chord. The question is where do I find those three notes on the fretboard?
I can find them anywhere. So it's a good idea to start and restrict yourself to a specific set of strings, okay? Specifically, in this case, I would restrict myself to string number two, three, and four, okay?
So the B string, the G string, and the D string, okay? So now if I do this and I add this little... tablature here, okay, whenever I can put those three notes on those three strings I have a C major chord, okay, there are in some cases you're gonna have some unplayable position because I could have I don't know an E on the second fret of the fourth string, a C on the fifth fret and a G on the eighth fret,
okay, I'm gonna write it in the tablature, that's not a playable position but I could have 2, 5, 8, formally I am playing all the three notes C, E, and G because that's an E, that's a C, that's a G but in practice it's very hard to play, I have to tap one note to make it work, okay, so this is not really an acceptable solution, okay, I'm gonna eliminate it, we want to have playable shapes, okay, so again as long as I have C,
E, and G I'm fine, anywhere it works. Now, as it happens, one of the easiest position to find this is the position where I have only all those three strings played at fret number five. Because this note here, it's a G, this note here it's a C, and this note here it's an E, and if I play them, all three of them together, I have those three notes and then played the C major chord.
That's where most people stop. They're like, I have my three strings, I have my three notes, I'm playing the C major chord, we are done. No, no, we are not done. That's the thing, because there is not only one possible solution.
There will be other positions that have those exact same three notes, sorry, there, in on the same exact three strings, but in the different position, okay? And so the idea would be to search around.
I'm going to give you the solution immediately. I'm not asking you to search around. The next solution is on 10, 9, and 8, and the next solution is 14, 12, 13. In this case, you have C, E, and G, C, E, and G, and in this other case, you have E, G, and C.
Yes, they're always in a different order, or in a different inversion, if you want, but in a different position. Are there other positions? In a sense, yes, and in a sense, no. For instance, I could find this position here, which is 2, 0, 1, but this position here and this position here are in fact the same position, okay?
Because they are just the same thing 12 frets apart. Notice, 2 plus 12 is 14, 0 plus 12 is 12, 1 plus 12 is 13. So it's the same thing at the higher octave of the guitar, so those two positions are effectively the same.
The same way I could have this position here and move it up 12 frets as to 17, 17, 17, which is correctly still the same, but I mean it's the same shape, okay, so we don't really count that or that. We are only three actual independent shapes and the others are the same thing, 12 frets higher or lower, okay?
Three shapes, there are three strings, there are three notes and there are three shapes and because three notes and three strings, you can put them together this way, this way, this way and this way, okay?
And so there are three, when you have three notes and three strings, you're gonna have three different positions, okay? This works whatever is the set of strings you grab. I could've grabbed the first 3-string, I could've grabbed the last 3-string, I could've grabbed the first 2-string and the fourth string and not the third.
Whatever set of 3-strings you can play those 3-notes and find 3-position, 3-playable position for that chord. Works every single time, right? Okay, it's kind of magic. The idea is that you don't learn only one of those positions, you learn them in sets.
So when you learn them, you just play them up and down a few times. Okay, they kind of sound like an arpeggio, because it is. Okay, and this way you learn the set of positions, okay? And knowing the set, it's always more useful, because the idea is that whenever you're playing a piece of music and you see the C major as on the chord chart or the score or whatever, you can decide to play it here, or here,
or here, or here, okay, or here, or anywhere on those 3-strings. And it sounds different, because in a different position it's higher and lower, but you get the choice. So if you get a chord progression, okay, let's say my chord progression is super simple and it's just C and G.
And of course, I need to know all the position of the G chord too, okay? If I could play it, C and G. Or I can play C and G. Or I can play C and G. Or I can play C and G. And if my chord progression is always C and G, C and G, C and G, I can change every time, so it's gonna be C, G.
C, and G, and C, and G, and C, and G, and C, and C, and G, and G, okay, and so even if the chord progression was C, C, C, C, G, G, G, G, and a normal guitar player with just used those two positions at the time, you have the variation, you can play it however you want, wherever you want in this set of strings, and so you have more control on how it sounds, okay?
Now in the case of triad, you may think, and that's not really useful, right? I mean, it seems to be a lot of work for nothing, but when you start seeing these with seven chords, it starts to become much more useful, because you're going to find other shifts that sounds better or are easier to play, or you have more shifts throughout the fretboard, so it's easier to move around the fretboard, okay?
Basically, trust me, okay, I learned the chords in sets. it helps you. Let's do the same game essentially for a minor seventh chord, okay? I'm gonna delete all these, okay? And I'm gonna write an A minor seventh chord, okay?
A minor seventh. The notes in the A minor seventh chord are A, C, E, and G, okay? And I'm gonna play those, again, I could pick anything, I could pick the first four strings, I have four notes, I need four strings, or the last four strings, or I could play on the first two strings, jump one, then the next two strings, or the first three strings, jump one, and then the next string.
I can do whatever I want. Right now, I'm gonna play them on the first four strings, okay? And when I do that, I need to find again A, C, E, and G. It may require a little bit of trial and error to find those positions, because you need to be able to find all those notes close by, because if the one note is here, again, like before, if a note is here, one note is here, one note is here, whatever it is,
it's not playable. The surprising thing is that whatever chord you pick, you're always going to be able to find, and whatever chord you pick, and whatever set of strings you pick, you're always going to be able to find a compact shape for it.
It's crazy, but it seems to happen every single time, okay? And indeed, you're gonna find very compact shapes for those two, okay? So for instance, this is what I was playing at the beginning of this video, and I was playing those shapes.
I have this shape here, 2, 2, 1, 3. Okay, really not hard to play. And I have the easiest shape of them all, 5, 5, 5, 5. And then the next shape, which is 7, 9, 8, 8. More than one way to finger this one, okay?
And then I have the next shape, which is 10, 12, 10, 12, okay? And the beauty of it is that this, again, will work for A minor 7, but if you shift those up and down, this will cover any other minor 7 chord, okay?
So the idea will be to first learn the shapes one by one, and find a way to finger them, okay? The way to finger this one, there's only one way to finger this one, really. Let me... The way to finger this one, it's just with a bar.
The way to finger the last one, it's this, do the bar and then use the ring and the... Use the bar on the 10th fret and use the ring and pinky to get the 12ths. This one, on the other hand, the middle, the shape here can be fingered in two ways.
The best way would be to do a mini bar, okay, on 8 and 8 with the middle finger, the index finger gets the 7, the ring finger gets the 9. This is the best way because it's only three fingers and you have the pink E3 to hit some of the notes on string one and two, other notes on string one and two, which you may require later for other things.
But another way to finger those is to have the middle on the second string, the ring on the first string and the 9 is hit by the pinky and so do this kind of thing here. Either this or this and it's the same chord, okay.
Sorry, I was playing in the wrong fret, that was something strange. There we go, or this. Okay, and then you notice, whenever I play those chords, I have all the same notes, now an E, C, E, A, C, G or G, D, A, E or A, E, G, C or C, G, A, E, okay.
It's just those notes here in a different order, okay. They are the exact same chord, but in a different position. Why would we do that again? Because we could, we can pick how these whole things sound and honestly it sounds quite nice when you can move around.
This way or just going up, up, up, up, up, up, up and down, down, down, down, down, okay. It is a great technical exercise, it sounds good and it gives you option whenever you're playing those chords in real life.
That's how professionals live. learn their chords in sets, not one by one, okay? If you want some help in learning those things and in seeing how all these work, I recommend you have a look at my course, Complete Chord Mastery.
Because Complete Chord Mastery starts with the idea of sets from session one, we take it really easy and we start with sets of triads, but we also see how to remember those things, how to connect those things in different group strings, different groups of strings in different string groups, okay?
And how learning the chords in sets actually help you with connecting those chords together when you later play them in chord progression. There's plenty of practical exercises and you start sounding better from the very first session, okay?
But even if you don't take the course, the suggestion is learn your chords in sets, not one by one, and you... we'll learn your fretboard much faster and you will be able to understand how all these chord thing works much much better.
This is Tommaso Zillio for muictheoryforguitar.com and until next time... Enjoy! Thank you.