Electric Guitar 101

Cafe Society
1

That was the name of the six-week, one hour per week, class. Only nobody showed up. It was just me and the instructor. Fine by me; private lessons at the group rate. And I can already play adequately. I just wanted to learn more than the basic chords and maybe Blues it up a bit.

We started out with a song everybody knows – except me. The Sunny Side Of The Street. (Not The Pogues’s version.) And barre chords, with which I’m also unfamiliar. I got the first half of the first verse down easily. But the Adim, Gm C7 Cm F7Bb F7 were tough because I didn’t know how the song went and there is much moving-around-of-fingers. And he moved along rather fast. I had to tell him to wait while I tried it slowly. That turned out to be a pattern.

We did Opal’s Northern Line. I’d figured out most of the chords on the acoustic, but got a couple wrong. I have the right ones now. Tonight (the last lesson) he showed me the chords to Crossroads, and showed me two positions to play them. We also went over AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long. He burned a CD for me to practice with. In addition to the chords, he showed me some note progressions.

Was it worth it?

The bad: I felt rushed through the lessons. Unfamiliar songs and unfamiliar chords, I have to have some time to adjust. The only hand-out was The Sunny Side Of The Street. While we did go over some theory, I didn’t have anything written down as an aid. And (my fault) my schedule suddenly became busy and I didn’t have enough time to practice.

The good: I gained a little familiarity with some barre chords. Crossroads and You Shook Me All Night Long are simple songs, and I did learn a little how to play them other than just strumming chords. (They probably would have been better choices to start with than to end with.) And I finally was shown how to do that classic Blues progression: duh-DUH-duh-duh Gonna make up some lyrics duh-DUH-duh-duh Gonna sing 'em right now duh-DUH-duh-duh…

And I have that Sunny Side sheet. And I can look up the other two songs and print them off. I’ve learned enough to get me started.

2

Barre chords are at least as much about finger and forearm strength as anything musical, my advice is to try and find some way to do some muscle pump at work or in the car or …

3

I’ve thought about playing on my 100+ mile commute to the office and steering with my knees. Only I didn’t want to get the guitar we with all of the rain and spray. :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Just hold the grip with your thumb and straight forefinger, you can work on stretching while your at it :stuck_out_tongue:

5

I’m sorry, I have to disagree here - barre chords are about using the weight of your arm efficiently so you don’t have to use muscle strength. Picture this - an umbrella (with the u-shaped handle; the other kind won’t work.) is hanging off the edge of a table. It doesn’t need to be clamped there and the curve of the handle is transferring the weight of the umbrella onto the tabletop.

Your fretboard should not be perpendicular to the floor - there should be a slight angle so that the 6th string is closer to your body. Your left arm should hang free so that the weight of the arm from the shoulder down gets transferred by the curve of your fingers onto the fretboard. The elbow of the fretting hand cannot rest on your knee, or the couch, or the chair, or the whatever.

Some tricks as you get used to barre chords

  • Work your barre chords around the Vth through Xth frets where the strings go down easier. F major at the Ist fret is actually harder than Bb major at the VIth.

  • Get used to fingering E, A, D, C and G (in the ‘campfire’ position - you know the ones I mean) with 2, 3 and 4. That makes the shift to the barred position much easier. Same with em, am, dm.

  • Lift the thumb of the fretting hand off the back of the neck and feel how the weight keeps the chord ringing true. This is to illustrate that you don’t need to grip. If you need to grip even with the weight of your arm going into the fingers which are going into the strings, then you need to examine the action of your guitar. It shouldn’t be that hard, especially on an electric.

Good luck with it.

6

I want to ditto everything Le Ministre said, and emphasise the above quote in particular. One of the things that I am eternally greatful to my old guitar teacher for forcing me to do, was to learn to play all the open chords with both sets of fingers when I was first starting out. Playing G in the “campfire posistion” (I have never hear it called that before, but I like it) is good for a whole host of things. There is all sorts of interesting quasi-lead fiddling around you can do with your first finger and your pinkie if you play the open G that way.

I would say for most barre chords you want to focus on playing E/Em, and A/Am in those positions. C is helpfull too, but I almost never use the other inversions in regular playing. That may have more to do with the style of guitar I play most often more than anything, but if you are playing rock it is unlikely that you will need to put a full barre on top of a D. Also, playing an open A chord with a single barred finger is a good tool, not only to get you used to barre chords but like with G, there is a whole bunch of stuff you can to with those now free fingers if you barre the A chord with your first finger. This will come in handy as you go further into blues playing.

Good luck and stick with it.

7

‘Campfire’ position? :confused:

Making the chords I mentioned for Sunny Side up near the 5th fret is not all that difficult – once I get my fingers in the right places. But they don’t know where to go yet. Bb is easy, as my fingers have learned it. The other two for that Blues progression are easy too. But the sequence in Sunny Side is a bit more difficult.

Question: Is the 6th string the bass E, or the high E? I’m assuming it’s the bass one.

As for practicing, I have my long commutes today and tomorrow and a video shoot this weekend. I need to finish modifying the Squier so that I can leave a guitar at the office. (BTW I took the new Epi to the lesson as well as my FrankenCaster and let the instructor play it. He liked it a lot.)

Thanks for the advice and encouragement.

8

Normally with an A I use my index, middle, and ring fingers (with my pinky to work the high E on a couple of things). Last night the instructor suggested I bar the A on Crossroads, and I found it was easier that way.

9

My old guitar teacher used to call it a “rock and roll A” It isn’t as clean, and if you are fingerpicking it isn’t really the way to go, but on a balls out rock song it’s good. It frees up a lot of your hand for other stuff and sounds a bit less open.

You can then do things like hit the 5th fret on the high E string with your pinky (Lennon used this one ALL the time, sounds great with almost any Beatles song), or reach up and tap the 4th fret on the G for some bluesy riffs, bend up some notes in the A major pentatonic for a little rythm lead, etc. Lots of good stuff in there.
The campfire position Le Ministre mentioned is playing open chords without using your first finger, but insead using your second third and pinky to create the chords. It’s a good thing to know how to do, particularly with the open G, E/Em, and A/Am.

10

Hmm, I bow to your expertise, but if I play a bar chord (say A major, fifth fret), and let go with my thumb, I need to “pull” on the neck and balance that with my right elbow on the guitar body. I’m playing a telecaster sitting down with 10s on reasonably low action. I don’t find that the weight of my arm makes much difference, I still need to pull the neck to get the barre chord to sound properly. The thumb does a lot of the work for me - though not all of it, certainly; gravity does help somewhat.

11

Yes, you’re right - the highest string gets the lowest number, so the high ‘e’ is 1st, the low ‘e’ is 6th.

Sorry, Johnny L.A., I use ‘campfire chords’ to refer to the standard version of the easiest chords for the guitar. Ten yard penalty for using personal jargon as if it’s universal. It works out to 16 of them -

Majors - E, A, D, G, C
Minors - em, am, dm and [bm]. Technically, bm ( fingered 2nd fret of the 1st string, 3rd fret of the 2nd string, 4th fret of the 3rd string and open fourth string. It’s an oddball because it sounds more like D6 than bm, and that’s because there are more ‘d’ notes than 'b’s or 'f#'s, but I’m getting into harmony now.) is an E-Z chord rather than a standard shape.
7ths - F#7, B7, E7, A7, D7, G7, C7

These form the basic finger shapes upon which later chords are built, and if you compare the most common F major chord to the E major chord, you’ll notice that the F is an E major chord shape (fingered with 2, 3 and 4 rather than the standard 1, 2 and 3) shifted up the neck one fret and with the barre covering what were open strings in the E position of the E shape.

Using the acronym CAGED, you can see the pattern as you shift the same chord up the neck - C major in the campfire shape is followed by an A shape barred at the IIIrd fret, followed by a G shape barred at the Vth fret, followed by an E shape barred at the VIIIth fret, followed at last by a D shape barred at the Xth fret. They all follow that order, eg. AGEDC, GEDCA, etc.

NAF1138 is bang on about the usefulness of being able to barre the ‘A’ shape in other positions, but I try to save that for when students are really comfortable with barres formed with the first finger. Being able to barre at least two strings with 2nd, 3rd or 4th is incredibly useful for jazz, rock, blues and folk.

12

Yes, you’re right - the right elbow will have to counteract the weight of the arm, but it shouldn’t be that much. I’m assuming the fingered 3rd, 4th and 5th strings are sounding okay, it’s the 1st, 2nd and/or 6th that don’t sound properly, am I right? The other thing is, you don’t need to barre all 6 strings, you just need to barre 1, 2 and 6. 3, 4 and 5 are covered already. This trick is so much easier to describe in person, but you can arch your 1st finger so that the 1st and 2nd are played by the phalange closest to your palm and the 6th is played by the pad or the tip of that finger. Ergonomically more efficient, is the idea, which I may not have conveyed well in words. Can I come down there and show you sometime?

Hoping all is well with you, squeegee - I have to go pretend I’ve practiced this past week.

13

I don’t know if my fingers can learn how to do that! :eek:

14

Sure they can. Start with working on the G. It will make changes from C to G much smoother if you finger the G this way. Plus you can play around with open stings in the G chord like you can with the single finger A.

Chords are fun. :smiley:

15

It’s been so long playing the normal way that I’ll have to re-learn how to make the chords with different fingers.

16

Its not that hard, Johnny, although the G sans index finger feels weird to me, but not difficult to finger. Major/Minor E and A not using the index finger are required for moving up the neck with barres. G, not so much, but its good exercise. For fun, try open Dmaj with only two fingers, barring the 3 strings on the second fret, and pick your ring or pinkie fingers on the third fret.

17

If it helps, think of it this way - the chords are actually made up of the notes, both open and fingered. It doesn’t matter to the sound of the chord which finger ‘stops’ the string (fingers, frets, makes the note, however you like to call it) as long as the same notes are fingered.

Picture the following - G major,
(1) - 3;
(2) - 0;
(3) - 0;
(4) - 0;
(5) - 2;
(6) - 3
{the number in brackets is the string, the number which follows is the fret, 0 = open string) can be fingered about 4 different ways - 1, 2 and 3; 1, 2 and 4; 1, 3, and 4 (uncommon, but possible and included for completeness); 2, 3 and 4. You can change the fingering depending on where you’re coming from and where you’re going - the shape remains the same, and the notes remain the same.

Muck about with it - if it doesn’t help, forget I said anything.

18

Right. What I was getting at is that I’ve been a strummer since the '80s, playing up near the head, and my fingers are used to making the notes the way they’re making them. I know it makes no difference which finger presses a string. It’s just that right now my fingers go automatically to the strings and if I shift the fingers ‘down’ it will be like starting over.

Not that I don’t appreciate any tips and advice! Keep them coming! But at the moment I think it might be better to learn new chords and new songs so that I don’t get into the habit of playing the same old stuff. (Which is how I’ve found myself 25 years on trying to learn.)

19

Fair enough. I don’t think it will be as hard as you think it will be, but forget it for now. Just know that it’s an option.

20

Wait a sec. That doesn’t look fingerable. Did you mean 3, 1, 4?

What I think you said:


  EADGBE
1 ||||||
2 |3||||
3 1||||4

I can’t finger this, I don’t see how anyone could, so I must be misunderstanding. Did you mean:


  EADGBE
1 ||||||
2 |1||||
3 3||||4

?