Rob Schumann: The subject of this tutorial is drones and chord relations. When we are talking about drones, on guitar that's basically an open string that is going to ring throughout a chore progression and starts to bridge, chords together. So for the subject of this tutorial, we are dealing with drones on the first and second strings. So we have basically got an E and a B ringing on all the chords that we will be looking at. As far as chord relations, you can use drones to connect chords that you wouldn't normally think of going together in a chord progression. So that's something that can give your music kind of an interesting sound.
A lot of times some people start with a drone approach. It's because the guitar is really visually, pattern-based. A lot of times our chord fingerings are similar or even the same and we just sort of move them around. Especially, when people start playing the guitar and they don't know that many chords, they will experiment with just taking a shape and moving around the neck and see how that sounds.
There are some very successful bands that sell a lot of records and some of those bands will just take a shape and their entire song writing process revolves around taking a shape and moving it around and seeing what kinds of different sounds they get. So it's certainly a viable way to write songs and so there are some neat things you can do with that, I will just give you two examples of that.
If we take the E Major fingering we can just scoot those three fingers up the neck and they're certain frets, and get some neat sounds. We can also do that with like an Asus2 fingering, and that will sound fine. So those are some things you can do to take a fresh approach to song writing and chord forming. However, there is also the geek approach and that is actually figuring out how to use those drones to get different sounds with your chords, but figuring out what those chords are, what types of chords they form with the addition of those drones.
What that allows you to do is, make some intelligent choices about what kind of chord you are going to use, what its function should be. But also if you think about it, in a band situation or if you are cutting an instrumental CD or accompanying somebody, there are other instruments that are playing. If you are playing in an unusual shape, other instruments may very well need to know what chord you are playing, what notes you are adding to it and what they need to be playing.
A lot of times in situations like that there is a producer or arranger that has to make those decisions and they need to be aware of what that chord is and then what it needs over it. So somebody has got to do it and might as well be you or me if we come up with a part. So what we are going to do is we are going to do take that E and B and we are going to take just about every chord that within reason that can contain those two notes. We will look at it just going up the musical alphabet and see how many different chords we can find that we can add an E and a B to.
In some cases it will make some kind of unique and exotic chords, but the neat thing is we can do those chords without having to use really unusual just like jazz fingerings to do them. So that can be the real benefit of some of these open drone chords. Then we will look at a progression that we can add that to, to make a really interesting sound.
So the first chord that we can look at is just an E Major. So we have got an open first string and an open second string, which is the E and the because. So that's sort of our home bass here. Just going up the alphabet let's go to F. If I take a regular F kind of chord, adding an E and a B to it will make an F Major 7# 11. So I am just fretting the first fret on the sixth string, adding the third and fourth finger to the second fret of the third and fourth string. Then I am playing the two open strings and I am muting the fifth string.
So that gives me an F Major 7# 11. Going up to F# in the bass of the chord, I can replace this first finger with the second finger on the second fret or I can shift the fingering to 1, 2, 3. This will give me an F# Minor 11, which is sort of an extension of an F# Minor 7 chord, so that E serves as the Flat 7 of that chord.
If I extend this third string, if I take the third finger and move it to the third fret, that gives me an F# 7 Add 11, and that's basically related to a Dominant chord acting as an F# 7. Moving to the next note G, if I have a G in the bass, by putting the third fret of the sixth string and by putting the third finger on the fourth fret of the fourth string and the fourth finger on the fourth fret of the third string and still muting the fifth string and all of these. That gives me a G Major 13 kind of sound. But replacing the third finger with the second finger on the third fret of that fourth string, that gives me a G 13 sound. That chord is related to a dominant 7 chord so you can use that as a G 7.
As we get to the A chord, here is a really cool thing about these, we have got an open A on the fifth string. So rather than having to fret this at the fifth fret on the sixth string, we can just play the open fifth string that freeze up our fingers because that's one less finger that you need.
First, well, let's start with an A add 9, add 9 chord sounds very modern, has a very open sound. To do this, I can take the seventh fret on the fourth string. I can do this with my second finger or third finger, whatever you want, and the sixth fret on the third string, either with your first or second finger. So either one of these fingerings or this one. That will work just fine depending on the context. I am just going to play the top five strings. So that gives us an A add 9.
For an A Major 9 kind of sound, I can have the first finger on the sixth fret of the fourth string and the second finger on the sixth fret of the third string. That gives me an A Major 9. For an A9 sound and that's related to an A7 or a dominant chord, I can have the first finger on the fifth fret of the fourth string and the second finger on the sixth fret of the third string.
Next, let's apply this to an A Minor chord. This is a voicing that I really like. Take the third finger to the seventh fret of the fourth string and the first finger to the fifth fret of the third string. What I particularly like about this one is this third and second string, that's an interval because we've got a C and a B and the half step. When you play that by itself, it sounds like a mistake because they are so close together, but you could put that in the context of an arpeggio, sounds very melodic. That's a really cool one and it only needs two fingers.
Next, we have got an A Minor 9, which is also a very cool sounding chord. There we have got the first finger on the fifth fret of the fourth string and second finger on the fifth fret of the third string. Also, a very nice one. Moving on to B in the root, we can get a B Minor 11 chord, which is related to a B Minor 7. We will have the first finger on the seventh fret of the sixth finger, second finger on the seventh fret of the fourth string and third finger on the seventh fret of the third string, muting the fifth string.
So that's a B Minor 11. By taking this third finger up one fret to the eighth fret of the third string, I get a B 11, which is related to a dominant chord, dominant 7. Moving onto C, if I take a fingering like a C Major bar chord here at the eighth fret of the sixth string and leave the bar off of that, I get a C Major 7 because that open B adds a Major 7 to that chord.
Adding a C# on the bottom I can get a C# Minor 7. So I have got the first finger on the ninth fret, second finger and third finger on the ninth fret of the third and fourth string, muting the fifth string. Now there is an alternation I can make to this by using the second finger here on sixth string, ninth fret, and the third finger on the ninth fret, fourth string and taking the first finger to the eighth fret third string I get a C# minor 9. This is a really cool voicing here and we will use that one in the chord progression we will look at in a second.
Next, if we take basica
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services