Introduction to Guitar Chord Voicing

Series Summary

Learning to play the guitar can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. Apart from well-worn fingertips and the initial struggle of a daily practice regimen, playing guitar—or any musical instrument for that matter—allows you to express yourself in ways that words fail to do. This ability comes, like anything worth doing, with a measure of patience, instruction, natural talent, and a commitment to excellence. If you want to get good, you have to play through the pain.

After a while, you may find that you’re getting bored with the normal chords you’ve been playing, that G, C, and D have long ago worn out their welcome. There are thousands of different chords, voicings, and combinations out there for you to try. Sometimes you just need to get the right sound for your song.

In these free guitar lessons on video, learn how to change chord voicings by playing moveable chords, barre chords, and using a capo. These three techniques will help you transcribe the music you have in your head just as you hear it. Moveable chords are such that keep their basic form, but can slide up and down the neck, changing degrees chromatically. Barre chords allow you to create movement in chord forms that would otherwise change dramatically when moved. Capos are ingenious tools that act as a third hand, barring the strings at any fret, creating a new framework to create melodies and harmonies within…or just helping change the key of a song.

So, let's get started.

Video Transcript

"So now that we've learned open chords and scales, we can put these two things together. We learned the step pattern of determining different notes up the neck on the guitar. We can figure out new chord patterns too. One method of creating new chord patterns is using a capo, which will clip onto the neck of your guitar and essentially go along a fret and shorten the length of every string across that fret. Then when you create your regular shapes, your open shapes beyond that capo, you have a new chord value even though you might have the shape of a C major for example you'll be playing an E major. We've also discussed the limitations of the capo and about using bar chords in turn instead of the capo. Without a capo we can use our first finger to act like a capo and create shapes of the E major and A major type that will create new chords for us. We'll learn how to use these in progressions, we'll learn how to manipulate the octaves and to play higher and new progressions also to figure out what key we're playing in based on what our base note is. "