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Rhythm Trainer (Keeping Better Time)
In this lesson, you’ll discover some of the ways you can improve your rhythm or, in other words, your sense of time. When you’re first starting to learn how to play, common problems arise when you’re playing along with a beat. For example, when trying to strum along with a beat, many tend to drag…
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Alternating Bass In Four Easy Steps
Exercise 1 Getting the hang of playing an alternating bass line while strumming takes a little practice. It’s well worth the effort! In this lesson, we’ll take our first small step towards this goal. Below is the tab for our first alternating bass exercise. Use your thumb to pick each note. You should also count…
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Common Open Chords Recap
Open chords are guitar chords that utilize open strings. They are usually considered the best sounding chords on the guitar. That is because the guitar’s strings sound best when played open. They are also considered the “beginner” chords, because of the relative ease of learning them (as opposed to other chord forms such as barre…
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The A Chord Group
Congratulations! You’ve made it to our last chord group. We still have more chords to learn later in the course, but we’re going to take a break from that. Once you are done with this lesson we’ll begin working on changing and strumming the chord we’ve learned. The A Chord We’ve already seen the A chord…
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The G Chord Group
In this lesson, we’ll learn 3 new chords: G, G7, and GM7. Some beginners find the G chord hard to form, so if you find it difficult, realize you’re not the only one. The G Chord We’ll strum all six strings for all 3 of our G chords. The G chord is formed like this:…
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The D Chord Group
In this lesson, you’ll learn 5 new chords in the D chord group. Take your time with each of these chords. Soon, you’ll need to play these chords on demand. You’ll want to instantly be able to recall them by name- as with all the chords we have learned or will learn. That means a…
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The C Chord Group
The C Chord Here’s how to form the open C chord: Place your 3rd finger on the 3rd fret of the A string Place your 2nd finger on the 2nd fret of the D string Leave the G string open Place your 1st finger on the 1st fret of the B string Leave the high…
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The E Chord Group
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to play 3 more chords that are almost just like the E chord shape we’ve already worked with. These new chords have fancy sounding names, but don’t let them scare you. To play them requires you to take a finger away. In that sense, they are easier to play…
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The Five Basic Chord Shapes
There are 5 basic chord shapes on the guitar. These basic chord patterns are the C, A, G, E, and D major chords. In the next few lessons, we’ll take a closer look at these shape. You should already know the A major chord from our previous lesson. These are ‘major chords’ which are a…
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How To Read Chord Diagrams
Your first step in learning how to play chords is learning how to read chord diagrams. Chord diagrams are a neat way to show us a graphical representation of the guitar’s fretboard. Visualizing The Fretboard Below is a blank chord diagram. Think of it as a picture of your guitar sitting in front of you.…