Guitar Lesson - How To Play Your First Chord

hey my name is Brian wall with worship tutorials comm and Brian Wong music.com today we're gonna learn how to play our first chord so if you are just starting out playing the guitar this video is for you this is where we're gonna start before we get started though playing our first chord let's talk just a little bit about how to hold the guitar the names of the strings and we'll get set up with how to how we're gonna number our fingers and how to read a chord diagram so first things first I've got just a standard acoustic dreadknot guitar here you want to make sure that the body of the guitar is perpendicular to your leg if your leg is straight it should be straight the guitar should be straight up and down you want it right up against your body like this so you want when you look at the neck and the next should be going straight up and down a lot of people when they first start out whether it's because you're trying to see probably it's because you want to see the strings a lot of times they'll start you'll start out and you'll see people do this that is not good you don't want to do that you want to make sure that it is straight up and down to see the strings you might have to peek over the top a little bit so sit up straight which will help you play nicely don't you don't want your elbows on your knees or anything on your legs or anything like that you want to sit up straight you want to make your arm - you want to be comfortable sitting your elbows at about a 90 degree angle and that was the chord that we're gonna play it was a D chord but that's how you hold it and so let's talk about the names of the strings you want to memorize the names of the strings starting at the top width which is the thickest string it's also the lowest it is an E the next one down is an A the next one is D then G then B and then at the very bottom which is the highest string is an E so the two strings on the edges are both e you notice they're the same tone or the same note but they're an octave apart you want to make sure that your guitar is in tune every time you practice you want to tune it so if you don't have a tuner you'll get a tuner you can get a tune it has a little microphone on it that'll listen to the guitar or you can have ones that you can plug your guitar in if yours is a electric acoustic like mine or if it's an electric guitar okay so we've talked about the names of the strings how to hold the guitar let's talk about our hand so this is if you are right-handed person your left hand will be doing all of the fretting on the guitar so our fingers have numbers your thumb doesn't not so these four fingers are numbered one through four your index finger is number one your middle fingers to your ring finger is three and your pinky is four one two three four now let's look at chord diagram which we have right here and this is the D chord which is what we're going to play today now the chord diagram had it looks like the neck of the guitar and we get this so you can see it so on the chair so you'll see the diagram at the top of the diagram is this nut that is like the zero fret and then you see the frets going across the diagram and the strings going down those correspond with the strings on the guitar so EA D G B II and then the frets are the fret the lines going across on the diagram are the frets on the fretboard so it's like you're just looking straight at the fretboard of the guitar now on some of them you'll see like on this D chord for example there's an X on top of the low E string that means you don't play that string and we'll talk about that works later if there's a circle above the stream like there is above the D and the D string that means that you let the string ring but you don't have any fingers on top of it now there are dots on top of the strings where you put your fingers so there's a dot above the g string and has a one on it that means you use your one finger and you play it on whatever fret the dot is in this case it's the second fret there is a three above the B string so that means you put your third finger which was your ring finger on the B string on the third fret and then there's a two in the dot above on the high E string so you put your middle finger on the second fret so the dots tell you both where you put your finger and what finger you put down okay when you put your fingers down this is important this is how your hand should be on the back of the guitar so first of all you don't want your thumb over the top you want your thumb wrapped all the way behind if you can a lot of times just see people on their thumb including myself and their thumb will be wrapped around and there's a reason for that but if you can it'll make it easier if your thumb is back behind the rest of your fingers the my guitar teacher told me that you want to think about holding a tennis ball in your hand so when you've got it let me see if I can clip this guitar so you can see you see how there's like a circular area right here where the ball would be theoretically I don't know how you would get a tennis ball in there but that's what he told me it the point is you don't want your palm against the back of the guitar you want there to be some space and some air if the further down your wrist is underneath the guitar the easier it'll be for you to get your fingers on the frets and on the strings something to think about so you need to find a place that's comfortable for you but you want to make sure that you're not your palm is impressed against the guitar or the back the guitar like this okay the next thing is when you put your finger down it's important how your finger comes down let's see if I can show you this to illustrate probably better if I turn it this way so you can see you want your finger to come straight down on it like this you don't want your finger to come down flat like this you see if I can give you a better angle okay you want it straight down like like so and if you come down flat like this it makes the old what you'll do is you'll hit other strings you'll touch other strings with your finger and that's bad so you want to make sure that you only touch the string the one string that your finger is supposed to be on with your finger otherwise what will happen is let's say you put your index finger on this g string here on the second fret and but the rest of them down but it's sloppy and it touches that D string right above it it will you'll have that you mute it so you want to make sure you're touching the strings you're supposed to touch so come down like this not like that there's what you want that's bad good bad all right moving on so let's play our first chord so here's the D chord diagram so what we do is we take our first finger put it on the g string so e maybe G it's the fourth down from the top second fret with your first finger when you've got that down you put your third finger down on the B string so keep your first finger down and then put your third finger down on the B string second from the bottom on the third fret and then take your middle finger and put it on the high E string the very bottom string on the second fret so what your fingers look like is they kind of look like a triangle if you can see that when you're looking down okay now you're not supposed to play the low E string it's because it's not in the record that note so you can do you've got two options one is when you strum it you can just not strum it same with EA in my opinion the a actually sounds okay in this chord it doesn't sound bad to me but technically you're supposed to play the four bottom lines what I do and what a lot of people do is wrap the thumb around and touch the low e-string if you touch that low e-string it mutes now I'm touching it so you can play the full chord and not worry about that low e coming through so now that you've got your first chord this is what you should do you should play get your fingers into position and strum it and after you strum it pick out each note individually so [Music] so when you practice it should be and you want to get to where none of those things sound like this and if they do it first it is just fine it happens to everybody when everyone starts out they start out playing and the notes kind of sound like you know the second coming like that but that's okay all you have to do is keep practicing keep at it and the more you practice the more it will sound like this so one more thing if you're using a pick how to hold the pick the way I do it is take your index finger and put the pick on your index finger like it's pointing so plus light lay it straight down on your index finger like it's pointing now it's pointing at you now it's pointing this way and then take your thumb and come over the top of it kind of like that so that's the way I hold the pick that's the way I was done and so when you strung it kind of comes down it looks like this alright a lot of times I actually hold the pig backwards just because I like the way it sounds alright you can do whatever you like when you strum we're gonna talk about strumming later but if you try and get into a little strumming and I'll go into this more in depth you want to make sure most of it happens in hissed and not at your elbow so there you go that's your first chord how to hold a guitar how to read a count a court diagram and sort of how to hold your hand that you put on the strings so if you have any questions please head over to worship tutorials com there's a link right below and there you can see a big chord diagram so you can see exactly where to put your fingers if you have any questions please ask their if this is the first time you've ever picked up a guitar I want to encourage you to keep at it give it a few months and practice a lot and in that amount of time you'll be able to start playing and I will start doing more and more video lessons for you and they'll all be for free so you can follow along and we can learn how to play guitar together so please head over to worship tutorials and ask in comments or just say hello I'd love to hear from you and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Worship Tutorials

Views: 13,423,634

Rating: 4.8454041 out of 5

Keywords: guitar, guitar lesson, guitar lessons, lesson, how-to, play guitar, lessons

Id: cUxRhesT8gY

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 24 2012