Lauren Bateman shows how to play all major and minor chords with just two fingers by sliding the same shapes up and down the neck. Use the high E string as your guide, then move a two-finger minor shape or two-finger major shape to any fret to get any chord you need.
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, I'm going to show you how to play every single major and minor chord on the guitar with just two fingers. But the first thing we want to talk about is the name of the notes. Okay? So we're going to take two shapes on our guitar, and we're going to move it everywhere. But we need a guideline for where we're going, and that's going to be our high E string. All right, so if you already know the names of the notes on the high E string, feel free to fast forward. But if you don't, let's start with the open string. So that's E and right after E in the first fret. So the frets are these little blocks. The first fret is F. Then we have F sharp. Then we have G, and then we have G sharp. Now we go back to A and we have A sharp. Then we have B.
C.
C sharp, D, D sharp, and then we have e at the 12th fret. Now, the 12th fret is marked by a double dot on your guitar. So if you notice, in the musical Alphabet, we only have the letters A, B, C, D, E, F and G. And there's two notes that do not have what we call A sharp, which looks like a hashtag in music. And that is going to be the letters B and the letters E. Let's run through that one more time, and then we'll jump into the two shapes. So we have our open E string, F, F sharp, G, G sharp.
A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, and then E again at the 12th fret.
So now that we know the notes on our bottom string, we can use this as a guideline to play these two shapes. And we'll be able to say whether it's a G major chord or a G minor chord or a C major.
Chord or a C minor chord.
So what I'm going to show you is we're going to take the bottom.
Half of bar chords.
So if I want to play a G major bar chord, oh, I'd have to play this really, really hard chord. If I wanted to play a G minor bar chord, oh, I'd have to play this really, really hard chord. And I work with a lot of older learners. My name, if you don't know me.
My name is Lauren Bateman, and I.
Specialize helping older adults have fun playing the guitar. And a lot of my students suffer from arthritis, and they have a hard time playing barre chords, or sometimes they have a hard time playing full chords. And they always ask me, are There different ways to play these chords.
And the answer is absolutely. So I'm going to show you two shapes and we're going to start off first with, with the minor chord shape, okay? And it's going to be three notes on the bottom three strings all on top of each other. So remember I played that G minor bar chord. Okay, See? But I muted the bottom of my chord. We're just going to play the bottom three strings and we can just play all three of those with our first finger. Just like a little mini bar chord. And it's a little easier on the electric than the acoustic. But these bottom three strings are so much easier to press that I find most students can just play that with one finger. Now, a key note when we're playing this is make sure that your finger isn't on the back of the fret. You're going to have to push so much harder on the back of the fret than you are in the front, okay? So it's way easier and requires less pressure. So believe it or not, by going to the third fret. So remember we said this note is a G note and playing this straight shape, this is going to be a G minor chord. If I move up to the fifth fret, this is an A note. I now have an A minor chord. And if I move up to this next dot, that's going to be a C sharp. I lied. It's a B, B minor, C sharp, minor on the ninth fret. Okay, now students always ask Lauren, but you're only playing three notes. Isn't a C chord this? Doesn't the C chord have to be this? No, it does not have to be this. A C chord could easily be this, which I'm going to show you in two seconds. Okay, so all we need are three notes chords or these chords I'm showing you these major and minor chords are what we call triads. Tri three notes. And as long as we have three notes that make up the chord, we have A chord. So in the chord of C we have C, E and G are the notes that make up the chord. So we have a C note, an E note, a G note, a C note and another note. Okay, so just repeating notes of C, E and G. So when we play the notes here, we have C, G, E.
Which is a C chord. Alright, so this is now the shape for the major chords. Alright, so minor chords, just the bottom three strings all lined on top of each other. And now the major chords. If I want to play a G major chord, I'm going to find that third fret on the bottom string, and I'm going to have the first finger play the bottom two strings. And then depending on which is more comfortable, because like I said, some students have arthritis and they find using the second finger harder. So you can use the second or third finger, whichever you feel is most comfortable. Okay. And you're basically third fret, third fret, fourth fret.
And then if you move that up here to the fifth fret, we now have an A major chord. Move it up to the 7th.
B major.
8Th fret, C major.
10Th fret, D major.
So you can use different strumming patterns and anything to play along with these chords. So say you had a song that had the chords, A, D and E. You could simply find your notes, a fifth fret, D, which is going to be the 10th fret, and E, which would be your 12th fret. Okay. And you can just play this major shape, A, D, E.
So if you guys found this lesson super helpful and you're looking for more absolute beginner easy chords, I highly recommend you check out my lesson there, where I'll show you how to play three chords with just one finger.
