Spytunes Guitar Blog Spytunes blog about acoustic and electric guitar lessons and music

How To Play Guitar part 1/4

How to play guitar, explained in 20 minutes, part 1

This first video in a series of 4 explain how all open position chords: the E, A, D, G and C can be turned into barred chords. Now referring to them as shapes; E shape, A shape, D shape etc. Similar phenomenon happens in minor; Em – Em shape, Am – Am shape.

Some of you may say; this is the CAGED system, and yes, to an extent it is.
The CAGED system says: you can build your barred chords and scales from the open position chords, but it doesn’t go very in depth of how you actually do it. SpyTunes takes it all the way, so read on!

Turn the chords into pentatonic scales

Once you can play your open position chords (minor and major) as barred chords, the next step is to make them pentatonic scales.

All major barred chords can be turned into major pentatonic scale shapes.
All minor barred chords can be turned into minor pentatonic scale shapes.

You still refer to these scales as shapes, examples would be: Am pentatonic, Em shape, or G pentatonic, D shape.

For the next step in this video series we shall see how you can actually use this system by thinking chord shapes, and then applying each pentatonic scale over each chord.

The song used in part 2 in this how to play guitar series is 'Little Wing', by Jimi Hendrix.

-Guru

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