Today I’ve got another easy finger picking pattern for you and your guitar. I used a very simple and mellow chord progression in this lesson, and there are literally tons of different directions you could go with it.
I tried to give you a couple of different ideas on how you can change up the progression, but I really encourage you to get creative with this one and go nuts on it.
Start with the E Minor Diatonic scale (or G Major -- same difference) as that gives you the root notes you can use from the key of G. Basically any of the notes in those scales on the lowest three strings will qualify.
Keep your drone notes the same all the time -- the open G (3rd string) and the D on the 2nd string. These two notes are the I and V of the key of G, a perfect fifth, and therefore go well with every other note in that scale, which is the reason why its easy to be creative with this one.
In addition to mixing up the root notes, try mixing up your picking pattern once you get the hang of the one I showed you in here. Try alternating different strings, or use the two strings at a time method I showed in the video.
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.
Here’s a guitar lesson on how to play Mary Jane’s Last Dance by Tom Petty. I didn’t address the riffs in this song, as this video is targeted towards beginners. Instead, we focus mostly on the strumming aspect, which sounds pretty cool on its own anyways.
The chords are quite simple -- all open chords -- Am, G, D and back to Am. The chorus (didn’t get into that in the video) is Em7, A, Em7, A, G.
Leave a comment down below and let me know if you like the song and I’ll do another video for the riffs.
