In this Beginning Guitar 101 video I want to explain a little about a concept I deal with a lot in future videos of common chord patterns and specifically chord families. Now, common chord patterns are short little phrases of chords. You see three or four chords that are commonly used in popular music. It’s much more efficient to practice chord patterns than to just play one chord at a time.

Practice Chord Patterns – Not Individual Chords 

It’s more efficient to practice common chord patterns because those are the ones you’re going to use in popular songs, better than just randomly changing chords. The real key to learning chords is not learning one chord at a time but learning how to get from one chord to the other in time, smoothly without fumbling. Practice common chord patterns and the foundation of common chord patterns is chord families. I will explain more in a very practical sense and actually use them in future videos.

I – IV – V (1 – 4- 5)

We’re going to be using usually three chords. The one chord, the four chord and the five chord. The way I get the one, four and five is I just count the musical alphabet. For example, in the key of C one would be C, D, E, F would be four and five would be G. If you really want to know more about that, check out my blog and look for the entry, The Roman Numeral System Explained. It’s a free guitar post and it gets much more into that.

Real Guitar Awesomeness

If you really want to understand it, sign up for my course, the Real Guitar Awesomeness. I go through it in much more detail and put it in context with actually playing guitar. I’m not always open for enrollment so if it’s not open at the time you see this, just get on the waiting list and I’ll let you know when there’s space.

Thanks again, look forward to seeing you either on my blog http://www.starlandguitar.com or in our next lesson. Take care.