Video Transcript:

The concept of this lesson is to give basic open chords a whole new perspective in playing it. So when you practice on your guitar, instead of just forming the chords and then strum them, you can actually play it by learning to relax one of the fingers of the chord open and then strum one of the notes down after the other notes of the chord. So you can see that typically the lowest sounding note of the chord is not necessarily the best one to relax but either of the higher notes of the chord (any of the cowboy chords/ open chords). It has a really cool sound to it. Eventually as you get better, you can strum at first and hammer as well.

You’ll see that when you try to relax either of the fingers in the chord, they’ll have different “emotional qualities” in them as they sound different. A good start to practice on this trick is to take a look at the chords you are working on. So basically, what you will do is to look at the fingers already on the chord and then taking it off and putting it back on or hammering it or pulling it off.

Let’s take the F chord as an example. So when we form the F chord, we can use the middle finger release it and strum each chord and you should hear F chord beautifully. On the G chord, you can do the trick with the index finger, taking it off and putting it back on. My personal favorite is Open E and then doing the trick down on the 3^rd fret. You can try to practice on C, F and G chords. The D chord is obviously famous because you can add your pinky little to the 3^rd fret of the higher E and take the middle finger off. So with A minor chord, you can do the index, the ring finger, middle finger any of those are going to work well.

This is actually how songs end up getting that signature sound to them. As opposed to just someone strumming chords, you can start to develop a little inter-melody as you strum a chord progression. You can practice on any chord and do this trick and try to experiment on this concept. I think that the most famous things written on this style were just beautiful accidents or experiments.

There’s a whole lot of chords that you can work on and I will not go through every single one of them but the examples I have given should spark your imagination so that you can come up with you own little Riffs of notes based on this simple chords.

Another thing when doing this trick is to pick notes individually and experiment with taking your fingers off. Pink Floyds’ “Wish you Were Here” has used the elements of that. Watch as I’ll just pick each note but when I get to the D, I’m going to pull it off (index finger). Cool right?

So that’s the whole lesson. Practice on this trick and this is very good for a beginner. For Intermediate or the Advanced, you might have learned this before, so this should just be a review/reminder for you.

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