Now, what I'd like to talk you through next is some options for making these chords a little bit more musical.
Giving your right hand some more options with how you play or accompany something else.
Remember when we first started learning chords we had this strumming and we talked about how quickly that gets old, it drives you crazy after a while.
So we broke it up a little bit and started doing bass, strum, bass, strum. Then we added an upstroke.
So we have some options now but there are even more and there are options for every one of these chords you know now
and that's what's called an alternating bass.
If you're still in the stage of getting comfortable with these shapes and transitioning, this next little phase in here might throw you.
But you might find that you like it and it might push you to practice more so at least have a look. Here's what we're going to do.
Starting with the C chord playing a C bass note…
We're use to this but what if we could do something different on the bottom, I don't know if you notice but this starts to get old again.
We don't want old in our music. We want variety, we want some control over what it sounds like.
Does this sound better to you if we do this? A little bit more variety. We call that an alternating bass.
So what we're doing is we're allowing our left hand to make a slight modification to the chord shape that we know.
It's still the same chord but we're going to pick up first a C bass and a G down here.
This doesn't work to play…
That's not quite what we want at the bottom all of the time but when it's alternating like this that makes musical sense.
It's like you have a bass player in the background helping you out.
In 3/4 time you can do this…
So there's some options there also.
So what I'm going to walk you through now is what modifications do we need to make to the chords we already know to setup an alternating bass.
The one beat, for now, we will always still keep on the root of a chord. So in what I just showed you, C will always be…
You want to keep the start note with and make the root note the one beat.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
So for C we're allowing the third finger to alternate back and forth between these two.
There's another way to get this done and actually if you've been watching you've seen me sneak it in here once in a while out of habit.
You can actually fret a full six string C chord.
We don't teach it that way initially for strumming because it isn't quite what you want to hear.
Having the G on the bottom and all the time, you don't want that there. Sometimes it's ok but not all the time so we want to alternate.
By doing all of them at once you're not having to do this. This requires left hand movement to get that pace, this is rock steady.
Why wouldn't you want to do this all the time, right?
The reason is because we are all headed towards finger style guitar right? Everybody wants to do that.
You need melody notes. The only finger that is really freed up much to do that is your pinky.
So by getting the ring finger to do double duty on the bass, the pinky is freed up. You know this song, that's how he does it.
But we need the bass down here doing this, that's the train. So that's why we want the option of doing both.
If I'm trying to drown out noisy banjo players in a bluegrass jam session, I want to be as loud as possible.
Alright. That's a big sound but be careful what you're letting ring down here.
So there you go. This is alternating bass for the C shape chord.
Let's go somewhere else. Next in the cage is the A chord.
This one is nice and easy because we don't have to do anything left hand movement at all.
This is an A bass, A chord. The other bass note that works, right there on the bottom, that's easy.
The hardest job is getting the right hand to hit the right string on the bottom.
You don't even need tablature for that one. You already know your A shape, get the bottom one.
We don't want the bottom note ringing all the time but it's a fine bass note to alternate into.
Ok. Next in the cage is G.
Now we have a problem here if you see that coming.
That's our root note, that's the one we start with, there's nothing lower than that and we're already at the bottom.
This is where we change our right hand pattern and we alternate the other way.
We alternate up on the three beat.
It goes one, two, we're still holding to that rule. One beat is still on the root note.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
Ok, it still works. If you're doing this…
It's a rhythmic thing and it's a bass note thing and the fact that you’ve changed directions, it still works musically.
Again, no left hand movement is required to pull that one off.
Ok.
Next after the G in the cage is the E chord and this one is going to do the exact same thing.
This is the sixth string is our root note, since we're doing our one beat on the bottom already
we don't have anywhere to go except for up to hit a different string
Happens that this B note that is already there underneath it works fine. It's E, B, E, B.
The same exercise for the right hand which is bass note, strum, bass note, strum and then changing strings on the one and the three beats.
Ok, next is the D chord.
Now we're going to do something a little bit different.
We're going to start where we always did but clear down here on the fourth string you're going to want to alternate back down again
but not all the way to the bottom, only to the fifth.
On our fourth string, here's the alternating pattern right here… So in strumming, let's do it with a flat pick here for just a minute…
That has a really nice sweet sound to it, the D chord is really nice.
It has a lot of ring to it, it's a very bright, clear, light tone, there's no big notes in this one.
Practice that alternating bass and again, on this one, no movement on the left hand.
It's all up to the right hand to hit the right strings.
What other chords do we have down here? We just learned the F chord.
What you do down here depends on whether you're playing half of an F chord or the full thing, we'll start with the three finger version.
Here is our F root for this version, if you want to do an alternating bass down here you can with the same movement trick we did on the C chord.
Here's our alternating bass. Down to a C note. F, C, F, C…
Now, things that you have to pay attention to when you're lifting and moving the finger like that on either the C chord or the F chord.
You have to be careful of what your right hand is doing.
If you notice right now the way we started out with our C note in the root we could strum everything else.
So it's almost a lazy right hand job. Once you get this one right everything else is easy.
Once you lift this finger and go down here though that's not true anymore because then you've got an open A string underneath that.
If you strum all six chords you are going to have a bit of an oddball in there. That is not even quite jazz.
So this one can be lazy and full. Five, Fifth string, all the rest of them
Now sixth string you just got to skip that five because we are not fretting it.
Alright. Same thing applies on the F chord when we're doing this one.
When this guy is pulling out of position and going up here we are leaving an open string over here that is not happiness.
So don't strum that new string that you've just opened up.
It may help you on your strumming pattern to have, to actually lift your hand just a little bit. It's almost a…
This one, drop it that's fine but here get a little bounce in your right hand if that helps you think of it that way.
You can see what my right hand is doing here, it's lifting rather than just falling through because we're very likely to hit a wrong note there.
Same on the C chord.
There's no substitute for practice and repetition, you're just going to have to get used to this.
Unless you've got a strong left hand, you've got them all down here. All six strings in which case, this is exactly the same as the E chord.
Remember we are doing a six string bass and a fifth string alternate. Same thing here.
How long can you hold that?
What you just saw me do is what I'd like you to work on next.