"Guitar: E Chord Variations Part 2" Video Transcription

Video Transcript: E Chord Variations Part 02

All right, we're going to look at the the E chord sound shape, we looked at a simple one. This one's a little more complicated. Although it's not that complicated, you go up to the fifth sixth, seventh fret, put your finger here, you can just follow the chord chart, you push basically these three strings down. This is an E two, it's missing the third, chords easily made up of one, three and five, in other words, Do Re Mi Fa So. those three chords, three notes make up a chord. And the second one Do Re Me the Me is the most important one, because if you, if you make it a half step low, the whole chord becomes minor, you know, like E minor if you make a half step, if you make the the third note or the second note in the chord, one half step higher, its sustained. Put it in the middle, Major, so you got major, minor, sustained, all because of that, that that middle note? Well, when we're playing an E two that, that middle note doesn't exist, playing the middle note, we're not playing it at all. And so this sound you know, is it minor, is it major, is it sustain, what is it? it's sort of ambiguous and as a kind of this Irish feel to it a lot of Irish music minor or major, it's just missing the third, and a lot of contemporary artists.

It's sort of contemporary thing. They're all using this E two kind of thing. It has a real contemporary nice sound to it. was real simple to play because you're just learning this one shape this is E. And then if you go down here all the way, and I'm running out of string to push down but it's still the same same shape. And if I go up, the only difficulty is here when I play the E, I play all six string. When I start going down the neck, I just put this finger right here just dead and this last string doesn't really fit. Real nice sound quality to it. Now this is the key of E. Let's say you wanted to play one step or half step up, that would be the key of F so all you do is put a capo which is raises everything a half step. And now I'm playing the same thing but I'm doing it all half step higher.

Let's say I wanted to play in the key of G. I just have to go two half steps up or a whole step up. I just follow the same pattern. if you wanted to go even higher A. But now we're gonna start sounding like a mandolin because there's so high up. Sometimes when you're playing with another guitar player and he's playing the regular chords, you put a capo on and just play this sort of a open tuning sound to it. And so you're not just playing the same thing, something a little bit higher and a little bit nicer. Makes it all just interesting. So that's kind of that shape. Then I have one more thing it's called, I just call it the sort of the rock E, if we're still in E. Over here is E, A, B minor seven. And E was probably the number one key that rock, rock people would play, because it has some certain qualities to it, and, and there's something called the 16 bar blues. 

Those are the easy chords that you already know. But to play a little variation on that, here's an E, that is playing this E, you can go. And part of the sound that I'm getting here is because of detonating these strings, see with this hand, playing this string, but my my hand is hitting all the strings right after I play it. So that's an E, then the play that A, I just got to play the same exact thing, same thing, just one string. Go back to the E, that way to B seven, then to A and back to the E, back to E minor seven. Play straighter, I can add those little notes.

And what's fun about this if you have two players, one person is doing this basic 16 bar blues it is what called, with E and A and the D minor seven. And then a lot of times you'll see guitar players, you know, like playing notes all over the neck. And then you see people jamming. And it's like how do they do that? How do they know what to do and how you know they haven't met each other before and they just start playing together. What they're really doing is someone's doing this sort of basic thing that taught you the 16 bar blues, and then they're playing a scale. They're up here this is an E and the scale that they're playing and I have this on your on your way you can download but the scale is starts out here.

If you started at the bottom, you go 1 2 3 sets up skipping two and then it skips only one so say what you learn this this scale. You know, the reality is it doesn't matter what note you play in the scale, it's going to sound the find with the other guys doing. See the other guy's going. He's just playing straight. The other guy is just going for a while it sounds fine. So that should keep you busy for a while trying a little. I think it's called the Dorian scale. All right, that's enough for now.