Lauren Bateman shows how to play full G and C chords on guitar. She explains why you need three fingers for G to strum all six strings, fixes common muting problems, and shares a trick for C: place your third finger first because of the stretch.
Welcome back. Hopefully at this point you've memorized your E minor, C, G and D chords and your chord changes are close or at 100 beats per minute. Once you do that, I usually teach my students the full three fingered versions of the C chord and the G chord and that's exactly what we're going to learn in this lesson. So so far we've started with the G chord that has our second finger on the third fret top string and our first finger on the second fret of the fifth string. So we need to add the third finger into the mix and the third finger goes all the way to the bottom string third fret. We get to strum all six strings with this wonderful and beautiful sounding G chord. Now I usually don't have two many students that have an issue with muting on the G chord. But sometimes, sometimes this first finger mutes, or, sorry, the second finger mutes this fifth string. That can sometimes be an issue for students. And a lot of times I'll tell them, especially if you have fatter fingers, you might want to move this finger up above so that it might be playing a little bit on the pad of the finger and it'll get you out of the way of that straight below. But for most people, if you just play on your fingertips, it should come through nice. So let me do that again. So we have our regular G chord, the two fingered one we've been learning and we're going to add the third finger to the bottom string third fret.
And that is our beautiful G chord. Now the full C chord if we go to what we've already learned. So we have our two fingered version right now where you need to add the third finger and we're going to add the third finger by stretching it up to the fifth string and over to the third fret.
Now for a lot of people, D or sorry, the C chord is the bane of their existence for quite some time, mainly because it usually sounds like this.
And the reason is because of the stretch on the third finger. It's tough for people in the beginning to bend this knuckle and play on the fingertip for the C chord. It's one of our first chords that we have where we're stretching over three frets. That's a big stretch. And another reason why I don't give you this right from the get go. And what I would recommend is so right now you've learned it with the first finger and second finger and you're adding the third finger as you're going through and trying to learn this full version, I would try learning it the opposite way. Getting the third finger to come down first, the second and then the first finger. The third finger for most people is a treble finger. All right. It's the hardest one to move just because of the way the tendons and everything are in the hand. So if you get the third finger down first on that fifth string third fret, you can get the other two fingers down much easier than if you go first, second and third. You're really going to feel a stretch in here if you do it the other way. So if you do it with the third finger first. So third fret, fifth string, and then put your second and first fingers down, it's going to be much easier and it's going to be a lot less stretch stress on that, on those tendons and in your wrist. So I'm going to go in for a close up just to show you this quickly where to add that extra finger and then we'll move on to our next chords. All right, here's the close up for the full C and G chord. So if we start at our lovely G chord, we're going to add the third finger right here, this bottom string third fret.
And that is our G chord. So we started with our G chord that we know so far. We took this third finger, we added it to the bottom string third fret on our C chord. Now we've got our normal C chord that we've been playing the two fingered version. And what we're going to do is we're going to add the third finger.
On the fifth string third fret. So that might be a little stretch for you, but do as best you can. So we got our original C. We're going to add the third finger to the fifth string third fret. You'll strum the bottom five strings. The hardest part in the C chord is that this third finger here tends to lie flat and mutes the bottom string. So try as best you can. This is quite a stretch on this chord as best you can, try and bend that knuckle, but the tendency in the beginning is to flatten it because it's such a stretch. But. Or this finger ends up so far back in the back part of the fret that you have to push harder to make it sound. So try and get that finger to stretch all the way forward and try and keep it on the knuckles. So we have our G chord adding here and we have our C chord adding here. So G. We added this finger C. We added the third finger here as well. Those are your full C N G chords. Practice hard.
