Hi! How you doing, Justin here.

Welcome to Stage 8
of your guitar beginners course.

I'm sure 
you're gonna be enjoying this one,

cause, what we're gonna be checkin' out,
is a few variations of a G chord.

I've shown you one, kind of,
standard way of playing G chord,

but there's quite a few,
that are really, really useful

in specific circumstances.

And you'll find, as you play more
and learn more songs,

that you think: 
"I wish there was an easier way of doing this"

Now we are going to learn
easier ways of doing the G chord.

So let's go to a close up now,
and I'll show you these

other ways of doing this
very, very common chord.

Ok, here we are for our first G chord variation,

I call this a "big G".

And if you look,
there was our standard regular G chord

just using the three fingers.

All we've done here
is move the third finger

over on to the B string, the second string.

And the little finger
has gone where that third finger used to be.

So you see now, 
we're using all four fingers,

if I just give it a strum..

It's a really good sounding G chord.

All we've done in fact is
change the open B string,

obviously, the note B, into a D note.

Which is still keeping our G chord,
still named a regular G,

cause we're only using notes G, B and D.

This chord is particularly famous
in Guns'n'Roses, and Poison,

and Bon Jovi in the 80's.

All that acoustic guitar rock stuff 
all of the acoustic guitar songs

nearly always used this version of the G chord.

And it does sound a little bit bigger
and kind of more poppy or rocky

than the original G.

But there is one version
which is considered even rockier one.

Which we're gonna go to now.

So here is our big rock G.

All I've done is... The last one
that I just told you I called "Big G"

All I've done is
lifted of my first finger and now it's suddenly a rock G.

And the reason this sounds more rocky,
and I've actualy renamed it as being a G5,

It's because it now only
contains the notes G and D.

We don't have any more
the note B involved with this chord.

If we looked at the notes one at a time,
we've got a G here,

the A string is muted
by the underneath of that second finger.

That finger is muting that string.

Then we've got open D,
open G, then another D and another G.

And this is a big rock chord,
with distortion this chord sounds huge.

It's very, very cool, indeed.

There is another very common way of playing a G chord.

Which is a little bit more funky
than anything else.

You tend to use it

when you're changing from a C chord 
to a G chord very quickly.

Which is quite common,

because the C and the G chord
occur very regularly together.

There's your regular C chord.

If we want to go to this new G chord,
all you're doing is just splitting

your third and fourth fingers
on to the two outside strings.

This can be a little bit tricky,
especially when you're starting out.

But have a go, because it 
does make changing C to G a lot quicker

These two fingers I'm pointing out
just to keep them out of the way

but you would normally
just leave them hanging around.

I didn't want you to get confused
and think they were down.

What we've got here is 
the third finger over on the thickest string

and it's a lot flatter than normal
and that's deliberately

to make sure that that string there is muted.

The same as what we had 
at that rockin' G,

but this time 
we're getting rid of that A string there

It's muted by the third finger.

Open D string.
Open G, open B

and little finger down there 
playing the top note - G as well.

So this is a full G chord,
but you can see, if I'm changing from C to G

There's C. There's our new G.

C, G

And that used to be one of the hardest changes,
all fingers off.

Now it's a lot easier.

There's some people that put
actually that second finger

and play the same dots
as that initial G that we learned

just without the first finger.

That's ok,
a lot of people like that

and that's fine to play it that way, 
I just think that this note

is a little bit redundant
and if I play this one (strum)

and then without it (strum)
we hear very little difference,

but it's a hell of a lot easier
to play it like that.

Now the important thing 
with these new G chord variations,

is making sure, 
that you use them in the right circumstance.

Particularly the big G and the rock G
worked really, really well

doing chord changes
going from G to D.

But I'm gonna explain that a little bit better
in the one minute changes.

So just get your fingers around these chords

and I'll see you for another bit of a lesson
very soon.

Bye - bye!