Rob Schumann: So now we will get to the last two chords in our set of major chords. We are going to get to the C chord. This one involves a little bit more of a stretch than some of the other ones. So it is very important once again to have that thumb down below the neck. We will start with the first finger on the first fret of the second string and we are going to have an open string on either side of this. We have the open third string and the open first string. So it's very important to have that arch so that those strings can ring freely.
We will then have the second finger on the second fret of the fourth string and the third finger on the third fret of the fifth string. Now if you have got kind of a bad hand position, this can be a hard stretch to do, so one thing as well as bringing the thumb down is, you can bring the hand around towards the third finger and favor that one a little bit more, so that it can just arch over there instead of having to stretch and do some weird double-jointed things.
So just rotate that hand around and this one would be five string, so we will start on the fifth string and strum downward. The last major chord that we will look at is the A major, there are several different ways to finger this and it just depends on the context and what you are comfortable with. If you have fairly small fingers, the A major can be played with just one finger, either your first, second or third. I am just covering three strings on the second fret.
So you will see some people doing that and it's a little bit difficult to make sure that you don't meet that open first string with that fingering, but that's one option. If you are just starting to play the guitar and don't really have the calluses built up yet, the easiest maybe to use three fingers on it. Take the first finger on the second fret of the fourth string, second finger on the second fret of third string and third finger on the second fret of the second string.
Notice that I am having to back up these two fingers a little bit to make room for the third string. As long as they are as close as possible to this side of the fret, you should be okay. I'm going to strum five strings on that. You can also do that with your last three fingers if you wanted to or another option as some people will use one finger to cover two strings and use an additional finger to cover that second string. You can do that with any combination of fingers, you just need to have those three strings covered on that second fret.
So that covers our major chords. In our segment we will be looking at three minor chords and if you have these eight chords down, you can literally play hundreds of songs. So you don't need to know a hundred chords to be a good player, you can do just fine with these eight and that will get you a great start and you will have quite a library of tunes that you will be able to play just with these chords that we have looked at. So that will get you the fastest result being able to play some songs. So we will look at the minor chords in the next segment.
Speaker: G chord, C chord, A minor and D chord make up this song. I could leave my first and second finger in place, my ring finger slides into the second fret of the third string.
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