One of the most common questions that beginners ask me is “Show me how to tune my guitar!”
So I thought I would make a quick lesson here on how to use a digital guitar tuner to tune your guitar.
Tuning your guitar is incredibly important. If the guitar isn’t in tune, you’re not going to want to play it, because it will sound terrible. It’s pretty much that simple. So if you’re just getting started, there’s nothing that’s more demoralizing than sounding terrible all the time, so that’s something you need to fix!
Thankfully, tuning your guitar only takes a few moments with an electronic guitar tuner, so sit back and learn what you can in the next 8 minutes!
As you’ll see, I initially started this strumming lesson using G C and D chords. Which of course works fine, and is highly relevant for teaching the strum pattern, however then I realized just how much this strumming pattern is used in the blues, so the last part of the lesson is really just a demonstration of how you can use 7th chords and make that exact same strumming pattern sound great in the blues.
7th chords are probably among the most common chords you’ll find in the blues, so if you ever want to make a song a little more bluesy, try swapping the major chords for their 7th counterparts. For instance, E goes to E7.
So without further ado, let’s get into the lesson!
You don’t see too many people using guitar capo’s -- in fact I know some guitar players jokingly call them ‘lady fingers’ -- but the fact is you can get some really cool and unique sounds out of your guitar, completely different from what you normally hear, simply by using a capo.
Using a capo is the easiest way to transpose something, and can work great if you want to play a song that is in the wrong key for your voice -- simply move the capo to a place on the neck that works with your voice, and away you go!
Just be careful though, if you’re playing with other instruments, you’re going to need to be careful to transpose the chords that you’re playing, because you are actually playing different chords once you capo the guitar. For instance, a normal open G chord, with the capo at the second fret, becomes an A chord.
One of the questions I’ve been asked now and again is ‘What chords sound good together?‘
Well, there are a couple of ways for me to answer that question I suppose. I could show you specifically, and I could teach you the reasons why chords sound good together so you can figure that out on your own.
In a way, I’ve done both. Today’s beginner lesson shows you all the chords that work well together in the key of C. Simply, they are: C, F, G, Am, Dm and Em. In the video you’ll see that you can put these in literally any order and they’ll sound ok.
In the lesson I actually randomly play these chords in any order, to demonstrate that although it doesn’t end up sounding like any song you know, there aren’t any clashes -- these chords all work well together.
Over at OneFourFive.com I’ve take the time and gone into much more detail which chords work together which each other, but rather than giving you all the specifics, instead I teach the concept of I IV V and how to apply that to finding all the chords in any given key, in a matter of seconds. I’d recommend checking that out if you haven’t already.
Leave a comment below the video and let me know if this was useful for you or not. If so, I can make some more videos showing some of the other common keys as well.
