There’s a really cool skill that pretty much all great guitarists have.
This includes the likes of Paul Simon, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Johnny Marr, James Taylor, Tommy Emmanuel, and more…
…And if you like the sound of jangly guitars as heard in tunes such as “Brown Eyed Girl”, “April Come She Will” (a song many of you have learnt from my tutorial), and many more, then you will love “triads”.
Yesterday I mentioned an exciting new lesson on “triads”.
It got many of you curious, so I thought I’d go into them in a little more detail today.
There’s a pretty special thing you can do with your playing and…
Once you can do this, you’ll have a great balance of melody and rhythm.
The Bb chord on guitar is definitely one of the hardest barre chords around and it is the one that gives a lot of beginners and intermediate guitarists a lot of bother. Today, I’ll show you some ways to simplify this, play it with better technique (which no one really teaches), how NOT to play it and even ways to “invert” it for a sophisticated take on the chord.
Johnny Marr at the AIM awards 2019 by Jwslubbock, licensed under (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Welcome to the final part of our Killer 3 String Chord Series. So far we have learned 4 variations of 1 killer 3 string chord, learned how to apply rhythm to them, created melodies while playing a chord to create the illusion of two guitars, applied the techniques to a super popular chord progression and learned 8 little ditties using the techniques.
Phew…If you missed Part 1, Part 2, part 3, check those out first as you are best to follow this series in order.
One of the secret but massive benefits to learning Killer 3 string chords is that they act as an amazing gateway between open chords and barre chords. This is a concept we have touched on briefly in the series, but will go into more detail on now.
Johnny Marr at the AIM awards 2019 by Jwslubbock, licensed under (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Welcome, dear Guitar Ninja, to Part 3 of our series of Killer 3 string chords. So far we have learned 4 variations of a killer 3 string chord, learned how to apply rhythm to them, created melodies while playing a chord to create the illusion of two guitars, applied the techniques to a super popular chord progression and learned 8 little ditties using the techniques.
Phew…If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, check them out as you are best to follow this series in order.
Now, it’s time to expand our repertoire and play the different chord types but now with 2 more shapes. This will allow us to truly free up the fretboard and save us from having to make big jumps up and down to play certain chords.
Efficiency as well as killer sounding chords is the name of the game.
Johnny Marr at the AIM awards 2019 by Jwslubbock, licensed under (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Welcome, Guitar Ninja, to part 2 of our series of Killer 3 string chords. So far, we have discovered how to play a bunch of Killer 3 string guitar chord triads – 4 different chords all based around G.
The four chords are G Major, G minor, G sus2 and G sus4. In this lesson we are going to step it up and add some interesting rhythm to the chords and change between the chords within in a bar as apposed to at the end of a bar.
This will add a sense of melody along with the chord and to the untrained listener will sound like two guitars going for it at the same time. Cool, don’t you think?
Johnny Marr at the AIM awards 2019 by Jwslubbock, licensed under (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A really simple way to spice up your chord based guitar playing is to learn alternate versions of the chords you already know and then get deep down and dirty with them. Learning alternate ways to play familiar chords will give you a huge amount more range and diversity to your playing that will help make you sound head and shoulders above pretty much 99% of guitarists out there.
During this series of lessons we are going to look at 12 killer 3 string chords – or to call them by their official name – triads. [Read more…]
