What is a Short-Cut Capo? And How Do I Tune the Guitar and Read a Chord Chart?
All of these questions are going to get you ready for your adventure in playing the guitar!!
Quick Success! Quick Fun!
Let's get familiar with our main chords and fingerings. From here you will be able to play 4 songs quickly!! In other words, you should be up and playing these 4 songs within the first 30 minutes!
We will look at some more popular/familiar songs to use your new chords with, as well as a few new chords. Including touching base on playing using tablature.
So far most of our songs have been in 4/4 timing. What does that mean? It means when you tap your foot you count in 4's....1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4....or in musical terms, we have 4 beats in a measure. Now we're going to look at another common time signature that we hear called "Waltz Time", which is 3/4 timing. Instead of counting 1-2-3-4, we're now going to count and tap, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. An example of this would be the song Amazing Grace, Down in the Valley, Home on the Range, On Top of Old Smoky (Or On Top of Spaghetti if you learned it in school that way) amongst others listed in your book.
There are only two places on the guitar neck that we can place the short-cut capo as a stand alone capo. So far we have used it on the 2nd fret of the guitar and the new stand alone position will be on the 4th fret. We will still be in the key of E, however, our chords will change fingerings just slightly, but they are still easy in comparison to standard guitar chords without a short-cut capo.
At this point, everything we have played has been in the key of E. As you probably have realized, the key of E doesn't always fit our voices when we want to sing along. Another problem would be, not all songs are written or played in the key of E. We have many other keys to choose from. In order to change to other keys and be able to play songs with others or sing in keys better suited for our voices we will need to not only have the short-cut capo, but we will be adding a regular guitar capo (that covers all 6 strings).
This lessons is going to open your world up to playing many more songs, but without ever changing your chord shapes.
The open sound the short-cut capo gives us is a beautiful, big sound. But that sound can also get muddy and cover the beauty of this huge sound. We will be adding bass notes, followed by a strum, that will give our songs more clarity and personality.
Let's look at the keys you will be able to play in using the long and the short capo together, yet never changing the chords you have learned from the get go.
The right hand of your playing will really make a difference in how your songs moves and flows. By changing up strum patterns and changing them up within the song as you play, your songs will come to life even more. Let's look at a few of these patterns and which ones are more popular to use in playing guitar.
In this section we will look at a variety of songs that will give you an idea of all that you can play and do with your capos.