Hello, how are you doing? Justin here.
After my little wah-wah pedal reviews the other day,
a lot of people asked me to do some lessons on some funk guitar.
So, I'm going to do this little series now
This first lesson is going to show you some basic funk chords,
so it'll just be looking at six really common, cool,
fairly straight-forward, not-too-difficult to play, chords
that are good for doing funk.
Next lesson we're going to look at rhythm guitar, basic funk rhythm
then a few more fancy chords in the next lesson,
and then a few more complicated rhythm strumming patterns
that you might use in funk.
A lot of people asked that before I go and do the lesson
I show you what's gonna happen in practice
I'm going to play a little bit of the funk that you'll
hopefully be able to play at the end of the course after
you've done your practice
but don't expect to be able to do it straight away. So,
Take it away, Justin!
(jamming funkily)
(jamming intensifies)
That kind of thing.
There was a lot of chords going on there
more chords than you probably need to do
and I was just showing off how many... kind of the possibilities of it.
So, what we're gonna start off with is just looking at six really cool,
common chord grips.
These are going to be I'll do a close-up of these
E9,
another version of E9,
E13,
E7,
another version of E7,
and E7sus4, or E11.
Before I try and show you how to use any of these things,
we need to get close-up and make sure that you get the
finger right for each of the chords because it makes a big difference so
Let's go real close-up and check that out.
The first chord to look at today is this
E9 chord, which looks like this
I'll run it through with you, so it's
2nd finger on the 7th fret of the 5th string,
that's the root note, where we get the chord's name from.
Then the 1st finger going down on the 6th fret of the 4th string,
3rd finger going down on the 7th fret of the 3rd string,
little finger going down on the 7th fret of the 2nd string.
It's very important that you realize when you're playing this chord that
the second finger here is touching the thickest string and muting it,
and the little finger, the underneath of the little finger there,
is muting that 1st string, so that we should have
muted 6th string, then note...
...
and that thinner string is muted.
So that's the first E9 chord we're looking at.
Now, the second E9 chord we're looking at is very similar,
but all we're going to do is we're going to use our 3rd finger to make a little bar
on the thinnest three strings.
Now, make sure that you remember to get this knuckle further away from the neck
than this part of the hand, so it's really going out there towards you there.
So, just like when you're doing an A-shape barre chord it's the same kind of feeling.
Then we have 2nd finger reaching over the top of the 3rd finger there,
and 1st finger in the same place as it was for the other E9.
So this one's really similar...
but now we get this top note as well there
so the top note here is B, the thinnest string is being held down
so this is also an E9.
So we have that E9...
and now we've got this E9...
Now, a really funky little variation of this one is to use this 13th chord.
So, this is the same as our 9th chord here but we stretch out with the little finger
up two frets so this little finger is just going down here, this is in the 9th fret.
E9
E13
Very cool little chord, so that one there that's an E13.
Now, another really common chord that we can use here is little E7 chord here,
just shuffle my hand back a little bit, there we go.
So, now this one here we've got the root note here with the 3rd finger,
2nd finger is going on the 6th fret,
little finger is going on the 7th fret of the 3rd string,
1st finger is going on the 5th fret of the 2nd string
This is an E7, noting of course again that the 3rd finger is muting that
thicker string so that doesn't sound,
and the underneath of the 1st finger there right around at the back there,
is touching the 1st string, so we should have muted note,
note, note, note, note,
and thinnest string is muted again, so that one's an E7.
Now, there's another very common way to play an E7,
which is up here...
Now, this one's just kind of an A-shape barre chord.
There would be your regular like E chord, your barre chord,
notice I'm tucking that finger away so you get a good view,
you wouldn't normally play it like that.
So that would be your regular E chord.
Now, E7 is played like this,
so this is a full barre with the 1st finger at the 7th fret,
the root note being there,
and again making sure that the tip of the 1st finger is muting that thicker string.
Doesn't really matter when we play an E chord, but it matters
when we play other chords.
So, then, 3rd finger is going down in the 9th fret of the 4th string,
little finger is going down in the 9th fret of the 2nd string,
now...
that would be the whole chord, so we've got like
nothing on the thicker string, 7-9-7-9-7 would be the fret numbers.
Now I often don't like the sound of that thinnest... that B at the end
so a little trick for you sometimes is
I play a little barre there with the first finger,
but I'm lifting that knuckle up, this one here
I'm lifting that up a little bit so that the thinner string is actually muted,
so if I strum it we get...
and the thinner string is not there.
I quite like the sound of that, not having that B on the top,
the same with the E9 we had two types, so with the E7 we can have all the notes,
or we can stop it at the 2nd string...
and this leads us very nicely onto our last chord for this session, which is a
E11, or an E7sus4, depending on who... either one is correct really,
which is exactly the same as our E7 but we
just move our little finger forward one fret...
There's E7, so E7sus4 or E11...
and E7...
Now, if you put these in a particular order, you can end up with a really cool
chord scale, so if we had here E7... E9 (the first one I showed you)...
E7...
E11...
E9 (the second one)...
and the E13...
hopefully you can hear the top note is playing like a little scale...
Again...
And that's one of the big tricks to making melodies out of your funk chords is having
all of those melody notes available.
Before you get going and trying to learn the rhythm,
it's a really good idea to practice up those chords.
We're mainly gonna be using the 9th chord (the 2nd version of the 9th chord)
when we start learning our funk rhythm guitar,
but have a practice of all of them, practice between them,
it's quite challenging for these things, especially when you have to change them
quite fast, in a kind of a funky way, you don't have a lot of time so just
find a couple of 'em that you think sound good together
and practice moving one to the next, one to the next.
Use the one-minute changes, which I think is a video lesson here called
"How to Make Your Chord Changes Faster".
That would be a really good thing for you check out too.
So, have a bit of fun with those chords and I'll see you very soon for some
basic funk rhythm guitar.
Take care of yourselves.
(wombat noises)