There is something awesome about fingerstyle guitar. For me, the power and beauty of this style lies in the fact that it is largely a solo-guitar genre. Many fingerstyle pieces are designed to be played by one guitarist only.
Although it is often referred to as ‘Classical Guitar’, I think this name sells it short and connotes a style that is old and boring. In reality, classical guitar is simply about playing pieces of music, by yourself, using your fingers. There’s nothing boring about that!
If you’ve never used the fingerstyle technique before, you’re missing out. A lot of guitarists decide early on when learning, whether they’ll be a ‘picking guitarist’ or a ‘fingerpicking guitarist’. The truth is, you don’t have to limit yourself to one or the other. Both techniques have unique benefits and advantages and you can easily develop both of them at the same time.
So what is fingerpicking? Well firstly, most guitarists play the guitar by using a pick. It’s pretty simple – the right hand (assuming we’re talking about a right-handed guitarist) holds a pick and every note is played with a stroke of the pick. Fingerpicking, on the other hand does away with the pick and uses the right-hand thumb as well as three fingers, to strike the strings.
This lesson is a follow up to the lesson on figuring out the seven chords in any key. In that lesson, we took the major scale and stacked 3rds on each degree of the scale, to produce seven chords that could be transposed in any key.
Here is a brief summary of the lesson.
The Major scale has seven notes. If we build triads on each note of the major scale, by stacking them in 3rds, we get the following seven chords:
Maj – min – min – Maj – Maj – min – dim
Here is an example in the key of C:
How many chords do you need to know? That’s sort of a ‘how long is a piece of string?’ question, but in this case there is an answer, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
There are 15 chords that when mastered, will allow you to play thousands upon thousands of songs. These 15 chords are ‘open chords’, which means they’re played in the first position, and use at least some open strings. There are 15 open chords that just happen to get used more than the others. It’s basically the 80/20 rule – most of the time, we use a small percentage of available chords.
Because these 15 chords are relatively easy to play, and because the open strings give them a beautiful, resonating character, they get used most often, which makes them more popular. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Why is a chord a chord? It’s a question philosophers have grappled with since the beginning of time. Ok, not really, but it is the subject of this lesson. Guitarists have a great dependence on chords. Many guitarists put themselves into the ‘rhythm-guitarist’ category and decide that that’s all they’ll ever learn. But for all the …
Most guitarists play chords by learning shapes. By learning commonly used shapes, you have the tools to play thousands of songs. This is a great way to enter the world of chords and start playing music.
One of the downfalls of this is that it is very easy to learn how to play chords, without knowing exactly what chords are. In this lesson, we are going to break down exactly what chords are, by exploring triads.