Lauren Bateman shows a four-minute fix for muddy D and C chords: place a pen under the guitar neck to force your fingers to curl and play more perpendicular to the strings. She also covers thumb placement and wrist position, claiming the pen trick works about 9 out of 10 times.
Questions this video answers
March 31, 2020
Place a cylindrical object (pen/marker/pencil) under the fretboard near the low E string and form the chord around it to force finger curl and perpendicular finger placement.
"9 out of 10 times."
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts. Lauren. Here I have a really cool trick I want to show you on how to make your chords sound better. Now, a lot of people have written in to me, and they're like, lauren, my C chord sounds horrible. I'm getting muted strings. Or my D chord sounds really kind of crappy or clunky. And a lot of times what happens is it's the position of the fingers to the fretboard. A lot of times when people play, they don't play perpendicular to the fretboard. They're kind of playing flat. So. So what I'm going to do is show you a little trick, particularly for the D chord and the C chord on these bottom strings that I've used with my students. That really, really helps them get a clearer sound from their chord. And the key is to use a pen. So I have a pen back here. I grabbed the pen. You can use a marker, a pencil, a sharpie, whatever. It just needs to be something cylindrical. And what you do is you take the pen, I'm going to pup it so that I don't write on myself. And you're going to put the pen underneath the fretboard like this. So it's going to be underneath the E string but not touching the strings. And what we're going to do, so you're going to hold your cord, or, sorry, hold your pen, and I want you to form your cord around the pen. Okay. Because a lot of times we form our cords really flat with the fingers kind of like more on the pad versus the fingertip. So by putting this pen, it forces you to curl around the pen, and it creates space underneath the fretboard. Another thing a lot of guitarists do is their palm. This part of your palm is resting right on the bottom of the neck of the guitar, and it's kind of squeezing out.
I'm not doing it here. But it squeezes out that bottom string from sounding. So. So what we do is we put the pen underneath the fretboard and we form our chord around it, and it's going to make your fingers sit more perpendicular. We can do the same thing for a C chord, Any chord, actually. C chord. There you go. Because a lot of people, this third finger mutes the string below, and it's usually because it's resting flat, so we want the hand to curl. Another thing that happens just as a trick. You guys might be putting this here and feeling some tension. I felt it because my thumb was in the wrong spot. Which reminded me to remind you when we're doing this trick, you might feel a little pull on your wrist and it's telling you that your wrist is getting kinked. We want to make sure that the thumb is not up here. Did you see what happened to my wrist when my thumb went up? Lost. I lost all of the flexibility in my wrist. So keep your wrist neutral, lower your hand, bring it up to the guitar, form it around the pen, and then strum your chord. It should sound a lot better. Alright, so relax the thumb on the back of the guitar and form your chord around the pen with your D chord. And any chord that you're having trouble with, even a G chord, you can do it. It'll force you to create space around the neck of the guitar instead of you gripping up and holding onto it. So that's a really, really quick trick that I use with a lot of students, particularly those who have trouble with the D chord and getting it to sound good. I would say 9 out of 10 times. This pen trick fixes bad sounding D chords in C chords, so give it a try. Leave a comment and a like below. Let me know if this trick helped you out and I'll see you guys in the next lesson. Video.
