A Sus2/4, D Sus2/4 & Esus4 Chords (Guitar Lesson BC-173) Guitar for Beginners stage 7

This is Stage 7, Lesson 3 of Justin's Beginner Guitar Course.

This video teaches you a bunch of suspended chords that are great for spicing up your playing!

The Justinguitar Beginners Guitar Course, a series of over 100 lessons on guitar for beginners. Text support is on the web site and also in a proper old skool paper book which can be ordered from the web site of your local music store :)

Taught by Justin Sandercoe.

Full support at the justinguitar web site where you will find hundreds of lessons on a wide range of subjects, and all the scales and chords that you will ever need! There is a great forum too to get help, no matter what the problem.

And it is all totally free, no bull. No sample lessons, no memberships, no free ebook. Just tons of great lessons :)

To get help with this lesson (and for further info and tabs), find the Lesson ID in the video title (like ST-667 or whatever) and then look it up on the Lesson Index page of justinguitar.com

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Have fun :)

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Hey, how're you doing? Justin here.

In this lesson today

we're going to be checking out suspended chords,

which are very, very cool little chords

that float around in the air all by themselves.

No, seriously, so, suspended chords,

what they really mean - the technical term,

for any of you that know a bit of your music theory,

'suspended' means: take away the third
and replace with.

Now chords are usually made up of

a root, a third and a fifth

and it's the third of the chord that dictates

whether a chord is considered major or minor.

So, those of you that have done your exercise

working out what the notes are
of your different chords

will know, let's say for an A chord,

there's only one note different between A and Amin

and that's the C# has been replaced by the note C in Amin.

Just an interesting little bit of food

for you theory monsters out there.

So, what we're going for now

is using these suspended chords

and we're gonna start off with Asus4 and Asus2.

Okey-dokey, here we are looking at -

this is an A chord traditional style

with the fingers 1, 2, 3 all in a row.

Now, if we are looking at a regular A

and we wanna play an Asus4

we simply add our little finger

on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string.

. . .

Asus4, then we go back to regular A

and if we lift off our second finger

we get our Asus2

and back to A.

A, Asus 4, regular A, Asus2.

If you have been doing this playing the A

with your first and second fingers swapped over,

there's your regular A, Asus4,

just as easy to do it that way,

here, and then lifting that same finger off for Asus2.

. . .

Maybe, for you guys it feels the same,

for me this one feels a lot more comfortable,

probably 'cause that's the way I learned A

but just doing that there

. . .

feels pretty comfortable to me.

OK, the next chord we're gonna check out

after our Asus chord is a Dsus4 and Dsus2.

Very, very simple chords again

and you wait until we're finished doing this lesson

you know what the chords are,

I'll show you some really wicked way to use them.

So, let's go to a close-up now

and look at our Dsus4 and our Dsus2.

So, here's our D chord, our regular old D.

Now, if we wanna play Dsus4, all we do is

add our little finger to the 3rd fret
of the thinnest string.

So there's D, here's Dsus4,

lift it off, we're back at regular D,

lift off the second finger,
we got Dsus2 and back to D.

So, good finger practice here,

we're doing D, sus4, regular D, sus2
and back to D again.

Now, the next chord we're gonna look at is Esus4.

Now, it's a kind of a bit of a funny situation here

because there's not actually a good way of playing

Esus2 as an open chord, just Esus4.

So that's the one we're gonna look at.

Of course it is possible
but it's definitely not in the scope

of doing things in a beginner's guitar course

because it's quite difficult to change to.

So, we're just gonna be checking out Esus4.

So, here we are. There's the regular E chord

and if we wanna go to an Esus4 all we're doing:

adding little finger underneath there

. . .

There's your regular E, little finger: Esus4, back to E.

. . .

Now, suspended chords, as you can hear,

a kind of floaty sounding.

So first I go to a regular D chord

. . .

and now if I go to a Dsus4

. . .

they hover around a bit.

They're a little bit strange sounding chords.

. . .

and they wanna resolve,

so you can hear Dsus4, they're really pulling to D

. . .

So, the first way that they're used is their own,
you know,

they can be a chord onto itself.

If you wanna use it as part of your chord sequence

Bands like U2 and that sort of thing,

they use a lot of suspended chords in their sound.

They're really quite a hip sound, you know.

Crowded House, another one of my favourite bands,

they use sus chords all the time as well

'cause they're really airy and open sounding

because they're not considered either major or minor.

Now one of the things that you can

also experiment with these ones is playing

just then I was doing the major chords

and going to the minor chords

but you can just, sorry!

the major chords, then going to the sus chords

but you can do it just as easily with the minor chords.

So, if we look at a close up, now here of D minor.

There's Dmin chord,

if we add our little finger there, there's Dsus4.

Same dots, different fingers.

There's back to Dmin, there's Dsus2, and Dmin again.

Well it's exactly the same for Amin.

There's Amin, there's Asus4, back to Amin,

lift off first finger, there's Asus2.

We got a Emin, there's Emin,

add little finger, there's Esus4, back to Emin.

Now, suspended chords are very often used

to embellish a regular chord sequence

So, if you are stuck on the one chord for ages

and you kind of get bored,

you can start to add in your sus chords.

So let's have a bit of a sequence that
stays on D for a while

And after I'm starting to get a little bit bored
with my D chord

and I'm looking to do something little different

I can start adding a sus4 and sus2

whenever I feel like it

. . .

Sometimes they get used quite quickly like

Sometimes you play and leave them for ages.

. . .

Some people kind of make little riffs out of them.

. . .

Loads and loads of different ways of using
these little suspended chords.

That was with the Dmajor

that I've just experimented
with the Dsus4 and the Dsus2

But I could have done it with the Dminor

and go on like this : here's D minor

to Aminor

back to Dminor

You can really experiment with these sus chords a whole lot

They're a really, really useful chord.

They're good ones to know unto themselves,

but they're even better adding a little bit of embellishment

and you can pretty much use them whenever you like.

The big judge, of course, is use your ears.

If it sounds good, it is good
and if it sounds bad, it is bad.

You thought i was gonna say something else
didn't you?

So that's something really, really cool

to add to your repertoire.

Try sticking with it to any of the songs
that you've learned so far

and have fun!

That's what they're about.

See you for another lesson sometime very soon!

Bye, bye.