More Funk Chords (Guitar Lesson RH-024) How to Play

[Guitar funk music]

Hi, how you doing? Justin here!

This is now part four of my little series

on funk guitar and today we are going to be

looking at some more funk chords

Some new voicings for dominant 7th chord

that you might want to try using

in your funk play.

Hopefully you've been through the other

lessons already, cause these new chords are

a little bit harder to use. Well actually they're

not that much harder to use, but you'd be

better off getting the basic chords down first.

Go and check that out if you haven't already

So, basically we're looking now at more

E-dominant chords. So in the

E-dominant chord family we have

E7, E9, E11, E13, and E7 sus 4.

So what I'm going to do is show you some more

cool funky little chord rifts that you might

want to try out , so lets get to a closeup and

I'll show you some of these cool new chords.

K, the first chord that we're using here

This is a little E7 cord. [strums guitar]

and we're starting here with the first finger

on the root note, which is the note E,

second fret on the 4th string.

We're going 2nd fret, 4th fret, 3rd fret, 4th fret.

[strums guitar]

Very funky cool little chord this one.

Now another good chord within this sort of shape

is moving this little finger forward one fret

and you get an E7 sas 4

[plays guitar]

Very very cool little

[plays guitar]

nice little grip those 2 little E7 sus 4 and regular E7.

and regular E7

Now, we've already looked at E9

a couple different variations of that

E13, up here. So we've kind of

got a few in this rough area.

There's one that I really like [strums guitar]

This is an E13 chord. It's got a D in the base

It's got the flat 7 in the base there

So it's going 5, 6, 6, 5

You have to be a bit careful with this because

the lowest note, the base note is an E

It can sound a bit weird so it's quite common

to jump and go [strums guitar]

E9 is the main chord and just jumpin off

into this E13 chord. It does sound...

It's a lovely sounding chord. Remember because

we're in E, we can hit that low bass note there

as well if we want. Very groovy little chord.

[strums guitar] We've got those E9,

E13 that we looked at before.

The next one that I'm going to show you

This is a very cool little chord [strums guitar]

It's kind of a bluesy 7th chord

The root note is here on the 3rd string

And we just go this is our study on

the 4th string we've got 9, 9, 9, 10

[plays guitar]

Which of course works really well with

we've got our E9 down here

you can have like [plays guitar]

Lots of nice little ways of incorporating this

little 7th chord in

Now of course we've got these

other 2 little chord voicings up here

These are a little bit awkward for some

people to get to but they're not that hard

Just takes a little bit of getting your fingers

used to playing them

What we've got here is standing on the

4th string here with the 3rd finger

we've got 12th fret, 11th fret, 9th fret, 12th fret

[strums guitar]

Very very nice little grip this one

and that's a 9th chord that's an E9

Now you can also move the first

finger forward and you've kind of got

E9 sus or E11

[strums guitar]

So E9, E11

and again just to tie into the other ones

If you down here

[plays guitar]

Lots of different ways that you can start to

muck around with using this

E11, E9, E7, E13

Now actually I'll explain this one seperately

So in the last lesson we looked at E9

as being played like this or like this

Now another really common way of playing

it is just like this without the base notes

So the root note is here

just as we normally play it like that

But you can leave that out as well

and that can be quite funky

and also sometimes use your second finger

instead of your third finger

Which makes it easier to get that little

13th hold that way you can hit the low

E base not in the key of E but you

couldn't in other keys

You can now use this to get chord scales

For example, playing we're going up the

mixalidian mode on the thinner string

going [plays chord]

Which would be E7, E11, E9, E13, E7, E9*

and using that you can create little melodies

[plays guitar]

Like I just showed you at the end there

There are infinite number of ways of

putting these chords together

It's just something that's improvised

and you can learn set patterns and in

fact in the next lesson I'm gonna show you

a few more set grooves that i think kind of

work well. But a really big part of playing

in this style is you experimenting with how

you put those chords together

Experimenting with the rhythms we've

covered already and then just mucking

around with changing between the different

chords and seeing what ways you can try

and put them together

It's lost of fun and it means as well as a

lot of fun tunes, not just 1 chord for ages

If you got a lot of the James Brown songs

1 chord like E9 safe for the whole song

So if you've got a whole bunch of

different chords that you can use

It really opens up what you can play

Now in the little kind of demo I did

a minute ago or whatever, I was using

loads and loads of different chords

And you probably wouldn't want to do that

Because it just sounds a bit silly

It's too much, you don't need to use

so many colors all at the same time

It ends up just sounding messy

You're better off picking just a few

different chords and putting them together

in a group. Not tryna show off how

many chords you know

I was just tryna give you a bit of a look

into see some of the different ways

that you could use those chords

Check out those chords, get them

under your fingers and then when

you feel up for it join me

for the next part where we'll

look at some more proper funk grooves

See ya soon, take care, bye bye