How to instantly turn 5 chords into 500 and never need a chord chart again

every new guitar player starts out by learning a few of the so-called Cowboy cords and then as we learn more songs we typically end up learning more and more of them after a while the number of chords starts to really add up and it can be easy to confuse them but if you're willing to dig a tiny bit deeper into these five chords that every guitar player knows you'll discover that you instantly know how to play all of these others and more in this video I'm going to show you how learning two tiny extra things about these five Cowboy cords is the key to learning hundreds of other Chords it's also the key to making effective use of a capo it's the surprising secret behind acdc's iconic rhythm guitar sound this is not just another video explaining the Caged system or Triads I already have another video that does that but there are some connections to those topics that I will point out along the way including another mental model for playing Triads across the fretboard and definitely stick around to the end to learn about two ways to get a PDF download that covers all of the material in this lesson if you're new to the channel welcome my name is Keith and I've been playing guitar for over 30 years I have a solid background in music theory but at heart I'm a computer science nerd and I've spent the last few years looking at the guitar fretboard through that lens I've made some discoveries that have dramatically reduced how much memorization and practice time I've needed to learn fretboard Basics like scales cords and arpeggios and these videos are my way of sharing what I've learned with you if you like what you see please hit those like And subscribe buttons leave me a comment and check out the resources in the video description and in addition to downloadable PDFs for each video I've just launched a new patreon subscription with weekly lessons and a community of guitar players who are learning to understand the fretboard getting a deeper understanding of iconic solos and becoming stronger improvisers all right let's dive in almost all beginners learn at least 10 basic chords but five of those chords are more fundamental than the others they happen to be the only five major Triads you can play in first position using open strings c a g e and D they're called caged chords because the letter names spell that out and they're part of the Caged system which I do have another full video about in the intro I said that if you learn two extra things about each of these five chords you can easily use that knowledge to play hundreds of other chords so what are the two things you need to know basically just where the roots and thirds are inside these chord shapes and how to manipulate them to change the chord flavor let's do a quick aside with some basic music theory you don't need to remember any of these details but you might find them helpful any major chord or more specifically a major Triad has just three different notes in it the tri part of Triad literally means three if I play a C major scale on the B string the first note I played a c is the root of the scale and it's also the root of a C major chord next is the third of the chord it's called the third because it's the third note in the scale c d and e so here it's the E note at the fifth fret the final note's called The Fifth and again it's called the fifth because it's the fifth note of the major scale it starts on the root c d e f and g so G is the fifth of the c major Triad when you hear someone talk about how to spell a chord it's often in terms of intervals here a major Triad is always a root a major third and a perfect fifth you can also spell it in terms of the note names in this case c e and G for this lesson you don't need to know all the details about intervals but if you're interested I've got a whole video about them that you can check out okay now the cowboy chord voicings for c a g e and D are usually played with five or even all six strings and since there are only three notes in the chord some of those notes have to be doubled so let's look at the five chord voicings and label and color code the notes I've turned the chord diagrams to be horizontal so they'll line up better with the fretboard a moment in all the diagrams in this video I'll mark the roots as red circles in a number one the thirds as green diamonds with a number three and the fifth says blue squares with a number five the roots are the most important so let's start there as you can see in each of these chords there are two or three root locations and those locations within the chords are one of the rare things that I highly recommend that you just outright memorize they comeing useful a lot I don't want to dive too much into the cage system but it's worth knowing that the locations of these roots and these cords connect together and form something like a backbone across the entire fretboard it's by far the best framework to build your scale and arpeggio knowledge around it's all in the other video in most of these voicings there's only onethird and that's a good thing because chord voicing start sounding really muddy if you have too many voices playing the third it's one of the main reasons that when we play an open c chord we usually mute the low E string and sometimes we play a g at the third fret instead of the open e because thirds become especially muddy sounding when they're on the lower strings it's also worth watching out for the third on the D string and if you're playing with other people or playing with any Distortion it may sound better to mute that string so use your ears and do what sounds good it's also worth watching out for this in the open G voicing sometimes I mute the a string when I play it to make it a little bit more clear it's worth noticing that in the open caged chords the third is always one string higher than a root that makes them very easy to find my video on intervals covers this in more depth but there's always a third up one string and down one fret from any route unless you have to cross what I call the warp between the G and B strings in which case the two notes end up on the same fret I have a whole video on how to think about the warp and if you haven't seen that I highly recommend checking it out next now if you know the positions of the roots and thirds inside the cord shape it's very easy to modify those fingerings to produce other types of cords you just need to know the formula for changing one cord type into another in this video we'll look at the eight most commonly used chord types A major Triad is named after its root note so if we're playing a C major Triad we just call it C and as we just discussed a major Triad has a root a major third and a perfect fifth in this chart I'm also including what I'm calling the semitone spelling these numbers correspond to the intervals but the numbers of the distance in semmit tones or Frets from the root so here a major third is four semmit tones above the root and a perfect fifth is seven semitones above the root you can ignore the semitone spelling for now but if you watch my video on intervals you may find it useful later on A Minor triad is named similarly but we put a lowercase M after the root to denote minor if we compare the spellings of the two chords the only difference is that the major third is changed to a minor third so to change a major Triad into a Minor triad you need to lower all the thirds by one fret we can easily do this with the D A and E fingerings in open position to change D major to D Minor just lower the third on the high E string from the second fret to the [Music] first to change a major to a minor just drop the third on the B string from the second fret to the first to change E major to E minor just drop the third on the G string from the first fret to the open string this modification is a little less useful for the C and G chords an open position but hold on to that thought and we'll come back to it in a minute a minor 7th chord is written down as the root note name with a lowercase M and a number seven and it's spelled root minor 3r perfect fifth minor 7th if we compare that to the Minor triad we use the fact that a minor 7th is just two semmit tones or two Frets down from an octave so to change a Minor triad into a minor 7th chord we just lower one of the roots usually one of the higher ones in the voicing by two Frets so here we can turn a minor into a Minor 7 by lifting up our ring finger which drops the note on the G string from the A on the second fret to the G on the open string we can do the same thing with an E minor to E minor 7 by changing the root on the D string to the open D now this isn't a super common beginner voicing but you can also change D Minor D Minor 7 by dropping the root on the B string down two Frets the next chord type is a major 7th which is abbreviated maj7 and it's spelled root major 3D perfect 5ifth major 7th and this is very similar to the major Triad since a major 7th is One semmit Tone lower than an octave we can make a major 7 chord by dropping one of the root notes down by one fret again it sounds best if you do it with one of the higher Roots this works great for the C chord where we just lift up our index finger it also works well with the a chord where we can drop the middle note of the cluster down 1 [Music] fret in the G chord we can drop down the note on the high e by one fret for the D chord we can drop the root on the B string down by one fret kind of works for the E chord as well but that can sound a little bit muddy a dominant seven chord is spelled root major third perfect fifth minor 7th and as we saw with the minor 7th chord we can start with a major Triad and change roote to a minor 7th by dropping it down two Frets this works well for the a voicing where we can just lift up our middle finger to drop the A on the second fret of the G string down to an open [Music] G it also works for the E voicing where we can lift up our re ring finger which drops that e down to an open D string it works for the D voicing we can drop the D at the third fret of the B string down to the C at the first fret and finally it works for the G voicing where we can lower the G on the high E string to the F at the first [Music] fret a sus four chord is spelled root perfect fourth perfect fifth this is very similar to a major Triad so we can make a sus four chord by raising all the thirds by one fret this is very commonly done on the D voicing usually by adding your pinky finger on the high E string it also works well on the a voicing and the E voicing it's a little trickier on the G and C voicings because they have multiple thirds but we'll get back to that a suus two chord is spelled root major 2 perfect fifth which again is similar to a major Triad so we can make a sus two chord by dropping all the thirds by two Frets and again this works really well for the devoicing for the a voicing but not so much with the others the last chord we'll look at today is called a power chord or a five chord which is spelled root plus perfect fifth it's similar to the major Triad except that all the thirds are muted we usually think of power chords as using just two or three strings but you can definitely add more strings and get a lush thick tone this is actually a big part of acdc's rhythm guitar sound so let's add a little gain to this tone and switch to the bridge pickup okay so instead of playing a full G chord we can get rid of the thirds by muting the third on the D string and holding down the third fret of the B string which replaces that third with another fifth instead of playing the traditional C fingering we can mute the third on the D string and add the third fret on the high E string which replaces a third with another fifth for the E power chord we just mute the third on the G string [Music] with the D power chord we can just mute the third on the high E string you can add the the fifth on the open a string to thicken it up even further and if you really want to thicken it up you can stretch up to the fifth FR on the high E string to add another [Music] fifth for the a power chord just mute the third on the B string so you can see that especially with Distortion these modified chords can sound massive without sounding muddy they also have the interesting property that because there's no third it's ambiguous whether the chord is major or minor it turns out that your brain has heard so much music over time that it almost always fills in the blank for you so if you were to take an ACTC song and add back thirds into the chords if you chose wrong and put a minor third where a major should be you you'd hear it immediately is wrong okay so everything we've done so far has been an open position but it can be applied all over the fretboard to make full use of this knowledge you'll need to know the names of the notes and other locations on the fretboard I have a video that gives you three strategies for learning them efficiently and four ways to integrate them into your practice routine while you're working on other things so if you don't know the names of the fretboard yet I recommend checking that out let's take a minute to talk about capos Capo is basically a spare set of fingers that holds down all the strings at the same threet doesn't change the tuning of the strings at all so for for example the 12th fret of the E string it's always going to be an e no matter where you place the Capo on the neck primary purpose of the Capo is to allow you to use the shapes you know for the cowboy cords and their variance to change the root to another note but keep the fingering and the chord flavor exactly the same if I place my Capo here at the fifth fret I can play a C major Cowboy chord but because these roots at the sixth fret of the B string and the eighth fret of the a string are F notes it's an F major chord similarly if I play an E major shape Bel lower the third to make it minor it's a minor chord because of the shape that I'm playing and The Roots at the fifth fret of both e strings and the seventh fret of the D string are all a notes so this is now an A minor chord in retrospect it seems super obvious that it works this way but I have to admit I played guitar for a long time before it really clicked for me probably because I didn't learn the names of all the notes for way too many years incidentally if you don't already have a capo that you're happy with I use and recommend the g7th performance Capo 3 it's about 40 bucks so it's not cheap but one of the big problems with many capos is that they squeeze too hard on the strings and mess up your tuning this one presses down only as as hard as you squeeze it so it's easy to keep things more in tune again this video is not sponsored but you can find a Sweetwater affiliate Link in the video description if you purchase anything through one of my affiliate links I'll get a small commission no extra cost to you so that's a great way to support the channel oh and if your C does throw things Out Of Tune it will usually make one or more of the strings go a little bit sharp so you can sometimes just pull a little on those specific strings and get them to go back down to pitch without touching the tuning heads while I'm talking about gear and I don't want to turn this into a gear review Channel but I do like to mention gear that I use and like so I wanted to mention that I'm using x5's u4 Wireless inar monitoring system while recording this I've also used their U2 wireless guitar system off and on for several years and I found that their gear has super low latency with high quality sound so if you're looking for a relatively inexpensive Wireless solution you might want to check them out links are in the video description okay we haven't talked about bar chords yet a bar chord is basically just using your index finger instead of a capo you'll usually need to reinger the rest of the notes because your index finger isn't available to play them but all five of the Caged chords more or less work as bar chords the E and the a shapes are the most common ones to use in this way if I start with a a bar at the fifth fret and play the e shape it makes an a major Triad and I can make the same modifications as we did before to make a minor a minor 7 A7 a major 7 and [Music] aus4 and if I switch to the a shape at the fifth fret I'm playing a D major Triad which I can then easily modify to make D minor E minor 7 D7 D major 7 if we reach up another fret um we can make a d sus 4 then finally D sus 2 I've been showing all of these at the fifth thre but of course you can move these anywhere and some of the most common chords we learn are nothing more than that this common F major chord it's just a piece of the E shape moved up to the first fret and the B minor C Shar minor chords that pop up in a million songs are just the a shape converted to minor and moved up to the second and fourth Frets it's a little harder to make a full bar chord with the C G and D shapes in practice these are hardly ever used as full six string shapes but we do use fragments of them all the time in fact this is where all the three string Triad voicings come from so thinking about it this way is an easy way to learn your Triads across the fretboard on strings 1 to three you can get a major Triad from the C E and A shapes if you want to play G major we can play the E shape at the third fret the C shape rooted at the eighth fret also think of this as the D shape they're identical on the top three strings then we can also play the a shape rooted at the 10th fret we get these three Triads on strings 2 to four we can do the same thing here's the e-shape at the third fret c-shape rooted at the eighth fret and the the a shape at the 10th fret which we can also think of as the G shape at the 12th fret again three Triad shapes on strings three to five we can play the E shape at the third fret C- shape at the um the eighth fret and the g shape at the 12th fret and then finally on strings four to six this boing at the fifth fret comes from an extended D shape the one with the root at the 10th fret comes from the c-shape and the one up at the 15th fret is from the G shape and every one of those three string voicings can be easily modified to make a Minor triad by moving the third down a fret or sus four chord by moving it up one fret my video on the cage system covers all of that as well as how to make diminished and augmented Triads so I won't repeat that here so if you combine the eight flavors of chords we talked about times five basic shapes times 12 possible Keys you get almost 500 theoretical combinations now not all of them are practical to play with our clumsy human fingers and it's certainly true that there are lots of cord voicings and even chord types that aren't covered by this approach but thinking about chords this way is a huge win in the sense of the par principle think of it as the 10% of the effort that's going to get you 90% of the results and you can go a whole career playing guitar using only these chords back at the beginning of this video I mentioned that you can get a cheat sheet with all the key information I just talked about and there are nowc two ways you can get it paid members of my patreon receive all new cheat sheets for free along with new lessons weekly check out the link in the video description if a subscription is not your thing and I totally understand you can purchase individual cheat sheets at fret science.com if you sign up from my mailing list there you'll get a free ebook and one free pdf cheat sheet currently also selling a discounted bundle of the cheat sheets that go with my first 12 videos and for a limited time you can get an extra discount using the code Cowboy C b y and checkout finally if you're looking for what to watch next and you're new to the channel definitely check out my guitar scales Made Easy playlist see you next time [Music]

Channel: Fret Science

Views: 76,521

Keywords: seventh chords, guitar tutorial, guitar lessons, intervals, intervals music theory, cowboy chords, caged system, how to use a capo

Id: qC3nLJXxr3I

Length: 20min 13sec (1213 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 05 2024