So long, suckers!
Saturday 20 August 2011
Wednesday 3 August 2011
The Chord Guide: Pt I - Open Chords
THIS GUIDE HAS MOVED TO NEW SITE ENDOFTHEGAME.NET
Many musicians consider open chords to be nothing more than an initial learning hurdle for beginning guitarists. Often when a new guitarist has learnt how to finger and strum the basic open chords, they will quickly dump them for the more mobile barre chords. While barre chords sure are cool, they also lack the certain chimey quality that open chords produce, open chords also feel a lot more free compared to barre chords, which are quite dense sounding. Perhaps the main reason why open chords are quickly discarded, is that most guitarists only know at most 10 of them. Usually these are E, Em, maybe F, G, A, Am, C, D and Dm. That doesn't really open a lot of musical doors, where is the Fm, Gm, Cm, and all of the Bs!? What about the dominant 7ths, minor 7ths and major 7ths? Well, don't fret! Here is the definitive open chord guide, which accepts and welcomes all of the neglected open chords!
Practicing these chords will not only give you a massive edge over the average guitarist who only knows 5-10 open chords, it will also give you a much larger tonal range to tap into, and it will increase your finger dexterity and strumming ability! If you use these open chords to tackle my guide on chord progressions, then you will have the advantage of remembering the progressions faster than if you played barre chords. This is because all the open chords are closely clustered together, the changes are faster and easier, therefore your muscle memory for the progressions develops at a faster rate. I made these chords using the program QwikChord, which I think is excellent. They have a free version and a paid version, the free version is all you will ever need, and will be a great asset to you one day, maybe even today..?
Before I show you the chords, I will show you a chart which details the skeleton of each of the chords. With this simple little chart, you will have the power to construct your own chords, a lot of these open chords I actually constructed myself by using QwikChord as I couldn't find some of these open chords anywhere on the net, at least not accurate ones. It's a good excercise to try and construct your own chords from scratch, give it a shot!
Anyway, here are the chords!
I should be getting paid for this shit! Anyway I'll end this all with a quote from Andy Summer's autobiography, which I borrowed from the school library back in the day, and never returned:
"The standard barre chord of so much pop or rock guitar playing now appears dead to me, lacking even the slightest hint of ambiguity; the barre chord is the sound of a room with all the doors and windows shut. I want harmonies that burst like star clusters, intervals that whip cometlike across the corpus calossum, disdonant open-string clusters that make minor seconds beat against sevenths and ninths and elevenths to create a trembling beauty... It's not to everyone's taste. Pat Donaldson, our bass player, complains about my playing too many chords with open strings, as if these configurations represent beginner's guitar rather than the expressionistic little beauties they are. I see them as arrows to the edge, an escape from the guitar's imitation of the piano that has dominated since the forties. We are acid rockers, cosmic beings, avatars of the light - and this is our music'
What a dweeb.
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