Lauren Bateman (YouTube, Dec 21, 2022) teaches how nine beginner guitar chords can be grouped into common keys so a player can play hundreds or thousands of songs. She reviews nine essential chords (A minor, A major, C, D, E, E minor, F sharp minor, F, and G), explains the concept of a "home" chord (the key center), and demonstrates four popular keys—A, C, D, and G—listing the chords that belong to each and giving song examples (e.g., "Stand By Me," "Let It Be,"). Short strummed demos show how the chords sound together.
Questions this video answers
A minor, A major, C, D, E, E minor, F sharp minor, F, and G.
Chapters
I'm going to show you how to take nine beginner guitar chords and put them together so that you guys can play thousands of songs by your favorite artists. Let's get into it.
So hopefully you've already watched my video on the nine essential guitar chords you need to know to play songs by your favorite artist. If not, I'll put a link up to that video. You can go watch that right now. But to briefly review what those chords are, they are A minor, A major, C, D, E, E minor, F sharp, minor, F and G. And if you did go watch that video, you would see that I showed you very easy versions of those F chords so that you don't have to play bar chords. Now, some of us think that songwriting is super complicated and that some of our favorite artists are absolute geniuses when it comes to songwriting. And while lyrically that might be correct, sometimes with the chords, not so much. There's only so many chords that are available to us on the guitar. And especially in pop music and popular music, they tend to use the same chords over and over again. And guess what those chords are? They're the nine, or mostly the nine I showed you. There's a few other common ones. But honestly, if you only learned those nine chords, you could play so much on the guitar and never get tired of playing. So what we're going to do is we're going to group those chords and into what we call keys. Now, just think of keys as a family of chords that sound very good together. All right? And by grouping these chords together, you should be able to play hundreds or even thousands of song for each chord grouping. All right, so I'm going to show you four of the most popular keys that songs are written in using just the nine chords I talked about earlier. So let's talk about the first key, and that's going to be the key of A and the chords that go really well together. Here we have a F sharp, minor, D and E. And with those chords, you can play lots of songs. Some examples are Stand By Me, Leaving on a Jet Plane, Three Little Birds. All of those songs just use those four chords. And just so you guys can hear how these chords sound together, we're going to start with an A chord followed by a D chord, easy, F sharp, minor, and an E chord. Let's listen again.
And you can hear when I play that A chord, it sounds like we're done. We call that the home chord. That's kind of the name of the key. It's in the key of A. And that's where we feel like we're done, we're home when we get back to that A chord. So another very popular key songs are written in is the key of song C. So that would be the chords C, G, F, A Minor and E minor. Okay. And this is what that's going to sound like. So if I played all of them together, C, E minor.
G.
A minor and F.
So see again, when I get to that C chord, sounds like we're done. Sounds like we're finished. So some great songs written in the key of C. Down on the Corner by ccr, Let It Be by the Beatles, which is one of my all time favorite songs, is my favorite Beatles song, as well as Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. Moving on to our fourth popular key, we have the key of D. Okay, so you'd have your D chord here and the other chords that go with that are going to be an E minor chord, a G chord and an A major chord. All right, so we put those all together. That's what it sounds like.
Another chord that might pop up occasionally will be that F sharp minor chord. Okay. That's also a chord that belongs in the key of D. Some popular songs that you might know of written in the key of D would be Blowin in the Wind by Bob Dylan, Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett, as well as island in the sun by the band Weezer. And the final key I'm going to talk about, probably one of the most popular keys that you can find songs written in is the key of G. And this is why I start all of my students. The first four chords we learn the are G, E minor, C and D. And I do show them some, some easy versions to get them started, especially if they're older learners. But with those four chords alone, there's so many songs you can play. And if you throw an A minor into the mix, it expands it even more. So let's see what this key is going to sound like again. We're going to start with G.
See every time we come back so that home chord, we feel like we are done. But you can see all these chords together. So what are some great songs written in the key of G? Well, we have Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison. Sweet Home Alabama, another fantastic song, Heart of Gold by Neil Young. And then we have Knocking on Heaven's Door, another Dylan song. So many great songs. So if you want to see how easy it really is to play in the key of G, then go check out this video over here where I'm going to show you how to play finger. 15 songs using only four chords in the key of G with just a couple simple strumming patterns. Go check that out right now.
