Welcome back! In the past couple of lessons, we’ve been focusing on major open chords. If you have been practicing the chords in order that we taught them, meaning, A, D and E, and then we did C, F, and G, well you noticed that they sound pretty good with one another. In fact, if we bring our musical alphabet, which, remember, just goes: A, B, C, D, E, F, G... A, B, C... it just only goes up to G. If we bring up that musical alphabet, we know 6 out of the 7 chords. We know an A Chord, C chord, D, E, F, and G. Congratulations! That is awesome! We haven’t learned the B chord yet, we’ll learn that down the road, because technically it is a little bit more difficult. And of course, there is many other types of chords, minor chords and so on, and so forth. But, as far as major open chords are concerned, you know six out of seven. And you know probably the most commonly used major chords for Guitar. This is great! So, if you have also been experimenting practicing these chords in totally different combinations using all six, you can come up with some interesting results. For example, let’s say I am going to go: G, C, D, G.

• G [Strums once]
• C [Strums once]
• D [Strums once]
• G [Strums once]

Sounds great! What if we go: F, G, A.

• F [Strums once]
• G [Strums once]
• A [Strums once]
• We’ll go back to: F [Strums once]

I am going to try a: D [Strums once] Some chords, they just, they don’t sound so great together. What is going on here? Keys! Musical keys. A key in music is a collection of notes and chords, that sound good together. It is kind of like the family, they all sort of relate to one another. If you start using notes or chords, that are outside the key, it can sound weird. Or just sometimes bad. There are 12 keys in music. And four of the keys happen to be some of the most common keys for the guitar, and they all use chords that we already know. We are going to go over 4 different keys, and the major Chords for each of those keys. We are going to start out with the key of C. Three major chords in the Key of C are:

• C [Strums once]
• F [Strums once]
• G [Strums once]
• and we’ll take it back to C [Strums once].

That is the Key of C. Let’s go the key of G. We’ve got the G, C, D, and G.

• G [Strums once]
• C [Strums once]
• D [Strums once]
• G [Strums once]

That is the key of G. Key of D is D, G, A. And then we’ll bring it back to D.

• D [Strums once]
• G [Strums once]
• A [Strums once]
• D [Strums once]

And finally the key of A. The key of A has A, D, and E. And again I will bring it up to A.

• A [Strums once]
• D [Strums once]
• E [Strums once]
• A [Strums once]

When you practice these, remember that these are combinations that you are going to see over and over and over again. So they are really good for that reason. Also it becomes like a muscle memory thing. The more you train your hands to go to these chords, and these relationships, the better guitar player you are going to be. Finally, it helps your ears too. When I started out, I don’t know If I could hear all this stuff, the way I do now. I just took my teacher’s word for it. But it really is true. These chord progressions are some of the most time tested, oldest Chord progressions that we have in music. So, you are going to play them thousands of times. Remember to organize them, you might want to actually try writing them out. Memorizing them. You know, the key of C, that is C, F, and G. Those are my major chords in the key of C. And do that for all the keys. Every key has some other chords as well, there are some minor chords and so forth. We’ll get to that down the road.  This is some of the most commonly played material in music. Remember, when you practice, as always, good technique, try to get your chords to sound pretty, work on your chord transitions. And just have fun with it. Take your time, practice your four different major chords.  The key of C, key of G, key of D, key of A.