Joan Baez and her guitar skills

Subject: RE: Joan Baez and her guitar skills
From: The Sandman
Date: 02 Nov 06 - 08:28 AM

ok .the only reason I thought to mention eaeaae and ebebbe, is that they are worth knowing, as they can be used instead of A major or A minor or E major or E minor [ IF DESIRED OR IF YOU WANT AN AMBIGUOuS SOUND], and that most guitar tutors are so bad, that they rarely show these options.
Neither do they show alternative inversions of major or minor chords, and in my opinion [modal chords as I describe them] are tastefully correct 50 percent of the time, sometimes of course you do want to establish whether something is major or minor,.
What I hope Megan does is draw a chart of the guitar fingerboard, so that she can see she has d major chords[ and other inversions of major or minor chords] in lots of different places.
RICHARD YATES has a very long pinky finger.

Subject: RE: Joan Baez and her guitar skills
From: Don Firth
Date: 02 Nov 06 - 02:02 PM

I just did another google search looking for a good "chord builder" site that I could recommend to Megan. Putting "guitar chord diagram" into the google search box can turn up a lot of stuff. I found a lot, but they all seemed pretty messy and possibly confusing. I was looking for one particular site that I'd seen before and thought was clear and concise, but I couldn't find it again. Anyway, some of these sites might be worth a look.

But better, I would recommend getting a good manual that gives chord diagrams all over the fingerboard (all the possible C chords, all the possible Am chords, etc.) and then take them one key at a time, one chord at a time. One of the books my first classic guitar teacher had me get was Fundamental Fingerboard Harmony for Guitar by Richard Pick (odd last name for a classic guitarist). It showed all possible chords on the guitar, major, minor, augmented, and diminished, including 6ths, 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths in all inversions, in both regular music notation and chord diagrams, along with just about all possible right-hand picking and arpeggio patterns. It was a fantastic book for both learning the fingerboard and turning the right hand into a little electric motor. Unfortunately, the manual is long out of print. My own copy is well worn and nearly falling apart. But there must be other good ones out there.

Another good way of exploring that terra incognita (here be dragons!) above the fourth fret is to take a simple tune, play it in first position, then play the same tune in the same key (exactly the same notes) everywhere you can on the fingerboard. I spotted this exercise in The Christopher Parkening Guitar Method, Vol. 2, page 40. Parkening takes a three note segment at the beginning of a French folk song, "Au Claire de la Lune," (using only E, F, and G) and puts it in three different places on the fingerboard, first string, second string, and third string, with a total of eight possible fingerings, some of them on only one string, some moving across strings. Trying this sort of thing with various familiar tunes is a great way to learn the fingerboard!

Don Firth

Subject: RE: Joan Baez and her guitar skills
From: GUEST,baez
Date: 23 Mar 07 - 11:25 AM