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and that's the C# has been replaced by the note C in Amin.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