[Demonstration]
Hey! Welcome to guitarlessons.com.
In this section of the lesson, we’re going to be learning a little bit about bluegrass guitar and the basic fundamentals that are always popping out in this style of music. There are a couple of things you need to know bluegrass.
The first things are just the basic few shapes that are always in bluegrass music. I’ll show them to you right now. A lot of times you’re going to be use a G [Demonstration], C [Demonstration], D [Demonstration], E minor [Demonstration], A minor [Demonstration], and F this F right here. It’s kind of like a bar F, only it's just the top four strings [Demonstration]. So if you know those chords, you can pretty much get to any bluegrass song, because bluegrass music uses capos a lot. If you don’t know what a capo is, I will show you right now.
This is a capo. Basically, this is a $20.00 capo, really cheap, go and buy one. And what that does, is that a lot of you just use just those few chord shapes that we just went over and playing virtually any key. So, let's say you wanted to play the key of A, but you want to use this G shape right here, because you want that particular sound. What you have to do if you didn’t have a capo would be to move this G up a whole step to where your bottom finger is on an A note and then you have to bar it—
[Demonstration]
That’s just brittle. Nobody wants to do that. So, instead of barring this on the 2nd fret with our index finger, you can grab your capo and it makes the bar for you. You want to set it as close to the fret as you can without actually being on it. So, your G chord, your G shape would be actually an A [Demonstration]. Your C would actually be a D [Demonstration]. Your D will now be an E [Demonstration]. So, you can get the sound of a G shape and it don’t need to be in G though, you could be an A [Demonstration], or if you move it up another two frets, you would be in B.
So, that’s two things that are really important to remember about bluegrass are the basic shapes you need and to now how to use a capo. If you want to get into some bluegrass, and start listening to some, you might want to go and check out some Earl Scruggs or some Ricky Skaggs. If you like it a bit more modern really hot fast bluegrass.
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