How to Play an E7 Blues Guitar Chord

Video Transcript

"RICK TOBEY: I'm Rick Tobey and in this series, we will be learning how to play blues progressions and a blues song on behalf of Expert Village. Now, the first chord we're going to learn to play is the E chord; this is one of the most popular chords primarily because the guitar itself is basically tuned in E. The lowest string on the guitar is an E string and the highest string on the guitar is an E. So, an E chord is a very easy chord to play and a very popular chord. Now, the way you play this chord, the E natural we'll call it as opposed to the E7 is you would put your second finger on the A string on the second fret, your third finger on the second fret of the D string, and your first finger on the first fret of the G string and make sure you've got them close to the fret but of course this finger can't get that close but pressing down hard enough so that you'd get a good, clear sound. You might want to practice stroking it up and down like that and then also giving it just a nice strum, then back again. And then to play the 7th chord, you would add a D note and you can use your little finger for that. The other way to do it would be to simply lift up your third finger because this note is a D. See, there again, these are very, very popular, very important and very useful chords especially for playing blues. So, this is the first chord, it's an E or an E7. So, just practice that on your own and strum it a little bit, and then we'll go on to learn the next chord."