If you like to sing and play along on the guitar, or maybe if you’re accompanying another vocalist, this post can hopefully help you to easily find the right key to play your favourite songs, so that they’re right for your voice (or your singer’s voice).

Does this sound familiar? You find a song that you’d like to be able to sing along with on the guitar, so you get the chords or tab, and lyrics, then set to learning the song. But when you sing over the chords you have for that song, it just doesn’t seem quite right for your voice, and after a while, a bit frustrated, you move onto a different tune.

That scenario has definitely happened to me on several occasions. Often, even though I’ve played around with transposing the chords into other keys, the song just doesn’t seem to fit my voice or vocal range.

Recently, I was jamming some songs with a friend who’s got much more experience of singing and playing guitar. I was having a go at singing on one of the tunes, but it wasn’t going too well, and I was thinking of moving on to something else.

Then he grabbed a capo from the table, and put it on my guitar, about the 2nd or 3rd fret, and suggested I try again. Lo & behold, the song seemed much easier to sing, much more comfortable for my voice.

So yes, the ’simple gadget’ from the title is the guitar capo. Used effectively, this neat little device can quickly help you locate the right key to sing in.

I’d never really considered using a capo much before, preferring to try and transpose the chords into a different key, either by playing barre chords, or just changing the chords into different open shapes.

It probably didn’t help that the capo I had was a cheap version, basically a bit of elastic & plastic!

I think I got it free with a guitar mag ages ago. It was never particularly effective, and since there were only 2 tightness settings, there was usually a lot of string buzz going on.

The capo my friend used was a different thing altogether, solid, with a screw attachment on the back to control the tension.

After that, next chance I had, I went along to the music store to get a decent capo. This is the one I ended up getting:

It’s a model by Planet Waves, called the ‘Dual Action Capo‘. Here’s a picture of it attached to the guitar:

Although it looks heavy and bulky, it’s actually really light, and sits easily on the neck. The dual action ‘trigger’ mechanism makes it very easy to take on and off with one hand, and quickly change the fret it’s on. The adjustment screw on the rear is good for making sure there is no string buzz, especially at the lower frets, where more tension is needed.

Here’s a different view of it being used at the 2nd fret:

There are loads of other different capo models & designs, what I like about this one is that it’s quick & easy to attach, and has a mechanism to adjust the tension easily, to cope with the increasing thickness of the guitar neck as you go up the frets.

In case anyone’s not familiar with a capo and how it works, it basically acts like a movable ‘nut’ on your guitar neck. The ‘nut’ is the fixed white bar you can see on the left of the picture above, where the strings are held.

Without a capo attached, if you just play the following regular C Major chord, obviously it’s going to be a C Major chord, no surprises there. In the usual position, your first finger is right in front of the nut, on the 1st fret.

If you then attach a capo at the 2nd fret, as shown in the photo above, and play the same C Major chord shape, with your first finger right in front of the capo, as if the capo were the nut, then the chord that’s being played isn’t C Major any more, but D Major.

So with a capo attached, you just play the chords exactly as they’re written in the chord sheet, but the sound of the chords is transposed up by a number of frets (semitones) in terms of sound, i.e. the chords will have a higher pitch, and you will be playing the chords in a different key to that written on the chord sheet.

So how does this help with singing? Let’s go back to the scenario we had above, you have a particular song with the chords written out, and lyrics ready to sing, but when you play the chords as written, you find that singing along with those chord sounds is difficult, slightly out of your range (or maybe a lot out!).

If this happens, take your capo, and depending on how much out of your vocal range the chord sounds were, attach the capo at a particular fret, say fret 2 or 3 to start with. Then go back to your chord sheet, and play the chords exactly the same as before, except this time the chord sounds will be in a different (higher) key.

Try singing along with these chords. It may be more within your vocal range now, and so be easier to sing. If it’s still not right, nudge the capo up another fret or two, and try again.

You may have to repeat this process a few times before you find a position where the chord sounds fit your voice for this song. Be careful not to go too far up out of your vocal range though, as you could strain your voice, so use common sense!

One thing you sometimes find is that as you move the capo up & up the fretboard, the melody line which was an octave below the regular melody line in the original key starts to come up within your vocal range. So if you can’t go up with your voice, try taking the melody an octave lower, and continue moving the capo up.

The advantage of using a capo, especially one like the above model where it’s quick to switch it between frets, is that you can very easily & quickly locate the right sounding key for your voice, just by moving it up & down the neck - with the Planet Waves capo, it takes a second with your fretting hand to switch its position.

Also, you can focus purely on getting the vocals right, without worrying about changing the chords into a different key.

Once you have found the right spot for the capo, you might want to figure out the key that you’re now in, and the actual chords you’re playing, and write them out on a new chord sheet. That way, you have the option of playing the song without a capo if you like.

The other reason for doing this is that you might find you’ve ended up with the capo really high up the neck, say on fret 7 or even higher. This can sometimes sound a bit too high when strumming chords, so figuring out an alternative place to play the same chords lower down the neck might be useful here.

Using this technique, I went back to a few songs that I’d previously shelved, and found that by using a different key, I was able to sing them much more easily. I would say I’ve got a fairly average singing voice, but I’m always looking for songs that I can sing, to help me develop it more, and the capo is an extremely useful tool to use when singing with the guitar.

So there you have it - the guitar capo, a simple but very useful device and aid to singing on the guitar.

Chris

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If you’d like to build your repertoire of guitar pieces and expand your playing style to include fingerstyle guitar and even slide guitar, then it’d be worth having more of a look at this course.

Here’s a video preview of Jim giving an intro to the fingerpicking blues guitar style, including the intro and a verse of a song called ‘Truckin Little Baby‘ by Blind Boy Fuller:

The 16 video lessons in the course are in the same style, with full tab for the songs, and closeups of the left & right hand technique.

What’s good is that each video covers learning a particular song completely, taken a section at a time. So instead of just getting a general overview of the technique, you’ll get to learn to be able to play a whole song through by the end of the video.

One of the videos will teach you to play a version of ‘Crossroads‘, by Robert Johnson, with full details of the slide guitar technique you’ll need to play this song effectively.

So take a look at our in-depth review of Jim’s Acoustic Blues Guitar Lessons, or for more info on the course itself, click here.

Chris

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To recap, here are the C Major scale notes, with the 1, 3, 5 notes highlighted:

which leads to the regular C Major chord as played in open position on the guitar:

OK, so far so good, we have our basic C major chord, and can see where it came from.

Plain major chords are just the beginning however, which you will see if you look in any guitar chord book. There are loads of different variations on this basic chord.

In this post, we’re going to look at just one type of variation on the regular major chord, which are seventh chords.

We’ll start by taking our C Major scale, and in addition to the 1, 3, 5 notes that we already used for the basic major chord, also include the 7th note of the scale, which is the note ‘B’, the one ringed in dark blue here:

Just adding this 7th note of the scale to our existing 1, 3, 5 notes gives us a chord with 4 different sounding notes (remember that the number represents the scale degree of the note - that is, where that note comes in the scale). This chord is known as C Major Seventh, and is written in music/tab notation as:

where in the diagram on the left, we just show the 4 notes. In the diagram on the right, we’ve just added the 3rd note (E) on top of the others. In chord diagram terms, this is usually shown as:

You might also see it written as ‘C7M’ sometimes. Notice that since the top 3 strings are all open, this C Major seventh chord is even easier to play than the regular C Major chord!

To get the sound of adding this 7th note of the scale, try alternating between the regular C Major chord, and this C Maj 7th chord:

just by taking your first finger off the 2nd string to form C Maj 7th, then putting it back on to get regular C Major.

And that’s the reason why these chord variations exist - they give a slightly different sound to the plain old major chord, which can be useful in a particular setting.

A good example that comes to mind of a major 7th chord like this being used is in the RHCP song, ‘Under The Bridge‘. At the end of each of the main verse sections, there’s a chord that just seems to ‘hang there’ in the sound it creates. That’s a major 7th chord. Experiment with it, and incorporate it into your playing if it sounds right in a given situation.

So that was the major seventh chord. Quite often though, you’ll come across chords just written as C7 or G7. These are not major seventh chords, but ‘regular’ or ‘dominant’ seventh chords.

The difference between the major seventh chords we looked at above, and these ‘dominant’ seventh chords is that the 7th note that is included in the dominant 7th is a ‘flattened’ 7th. That means it’s the 7th note from the scale, but moved down by one semitone (one guitar fret).

Here are the notes from the C Major scale, but with the 7th note being ‘flattened’ like this, it’s the one in green, labelled ‘b7′ (note: a lower case ‘b’ indicates a note is flattened by one semitone/guitar fret):

This is the note ‘B flat’ (written Bb), which is found on the guitar at the 3rd fret on the 3rd string. Putting this flattened 7th note on top of our regular 1, 3, 5 scale tones gives us the following chord:

A word of warning - if you’re looking at the guitar tab in the above diagram, don’t try and play it - there’s too much of a stretch for your fingers! It’s just for illustration, to show that the chord is formed by adding the flattened 7th note on top of the other 3 notes.

This illustrates something that you run into on the guitar - due to the tunings of the strings in the regular guitar tuning, it’s sometimes not possible or convenient to play notes in a certain way.

With the major 7th chord, it was easy, just by playing the open 2nd string (B), we added the 7th note onto the regular major chord. However, flattening B by moving it down 1 fret (semitone) makes it become the 3rd fret note on the 3rd string. But the 3rd string is already being used for another note - the 5th, G - so we can’t play both.

The answer (at least for the open position chord), is to drop the 5th note from this chord, which leaves us with:

And, by just playing the top string, we add the 3rd note, E, to the chord again:

This is the usual form of the open C 7th chord, which you’ll see written in chord diagrams as:

and the fingering for this is much easier! So from this, you can see that this version of the C7 chord has no 5th note (G) present. This isn’t a big deal, as in this chord, it’s the flattened 7th note along with the root (1st) and 3rd notes that give it its distinctive sound.

As before, try alternating between playing the regular C Major chord and this C7th chord, listening for the difference in sound.

Switching between them is fairly easy, from the regular C Major chord, just drop your pinky finger in on the 3rd string to add the flattened 7th note (B flat - Bb) we saw above.

Knowing the difference between a C Maj 7th and C7 chord can also help when playing lead guitar. For example, if soloing over a C Maj 7th chord, any of the notes 1 (C), 3 (E), 5 (G) or 7 (B) are going to be useful for starting or ending lead licks.

Over a C7 chord though, the regular 7th note of the C major scale, B, isn’t going to sound so good, it would need to be B flat (Bb) to fit in with the chord’s sound.

In fact, the C major scale with the 7th note flattened to Bb is called C Mixolydian Mode, and is an important scale mode in rock lead guitar licks. But that’s a different post topic!

To get a much more in-depth understanding of how chords and scales relate, and how to take advantage of this in guitar solos, take a look at Guitar Scale Mastery, which covers this topic in much more detail.

Chris

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Just a quick post to say that there are a few Easter promotions going on at the moment for a few of the top learn to play guitar courses.

	Firstly, there’s a sale on for the Learn and Master Guitar course, that finishes today, Sun April 4th 2010. Click here to see details of the Learn and Master Guitar Easter sale, where you can get $100 off the cost of the highly rated, comprehensive Learn and Master Guitar DVD course.
	Next up is Jamorama, who are having an Easter Egg Hunt on their website. This is on until Mon 5th April 2010. If you visit the Jamorama Easter Egg Hunt page, there are special Easter Egg icons hidden throughout their site. If you find one of these icons, clicking on it leads to a discount off one of their Jamorama versions, and can be between 30% - 50% off.

Finally, Lick Library are having an Easter promotion on various Guitar Lesson DVDs, including their ‘Ultimate Guitar Techniques’, ‘Classic Rock Solos’, and ‘Learn To Play’ series (includes Metallica, AC/DC, Queen). Click here to see more details of this
Lick Library Easter Promotion.

I hope you can take advantage of some of these Easter promotions to get one of these top guitar courses at a reduced rate.

Chris

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Learn and Master Guitar is one of the most comprehensive courses on learning to play the guitar. Now, they’ve got together with Gibson guitars, to create an iPhone app you can download for free, which contains some sample lessons from the main Learn and Master guitar course.

The app will work both on an iPhone, and also an iPod Touch.

This is an extremely useful little app to have on your iPhone/iPod, as you can have this with you wherever you happen to be playing guitar.

With the app, you’ll be able to:

• Use a graphical tuner to help tune your guitar.
• Browse a library of chords to see full color chord chart images to help you learn the most common chords you’ll need. If you forget a chord, just open the chord chart on your iPhone or iPod
• See beginner, intermediate and advanced level lesson samples, taken from the full Learn and Master Guitar course. You can watch and rewind any section of the lesson samples, while you’re playing along on your guitar.

If you’re using an iPod Touch, you’ll need a microphone to be plugged in for one of the graphical tuners to work. If you haven’t got a mic, you can still use one of the other simpler tuner screens.

The tuner functionality and chord library are both extremely useful things to have on such a compact device, and the chord charts are clear, and show up well on the iPhone/iPod screen.

The full sample lessons cover all levels of ability, from beginner players to advanced. I particularly liked the sample lesson on creating more varied rhythm guitar parts, which shows you how you can move on from basic strumming rhythms to more complicated riffs, and guides you through how to create these for yourself.

To find out more details on this extremely useful iPhone/iPod app, visit the Learn and Master Guitar app page, or click on one of the images above. The app is free to download.

So if you have an iPhone or iPod touch, have a go at downloading this app now, it’s a great tool to help with your guitar playing.

Chris

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As I finished fitting the last new string, and then tuned them up properly, my guitar seemed to have a refreshed sound, from these zingy new strings. It struck me that I should probably change the strings a bit more often, just to get that feeling of refreshing the sound once in a while.

More than just the sound though, it seemed to refresh my playing a bit also, as I tried out playing lots of different tunes on the new strings. So fitting new strings every so often could be good from that point of view, almost helping to renew your enthusiasm for playing the guitar.

The other thing with changing strings is that it’s good sometimes to experiment with different thicknesses. For example, the previous set of strings on my acoustic was a ‘light’ gauge, with the top E string being 0.012in (0.3mm). These had seemed fine, but this time I went for some ‘custom light’ strings, with a slightly lighter gauge, the top E is now 0.011in (0.28mm).

This small change in string thickness has quite a big effect on how the guitar feels when you play it, and the overall sound. I find that the lighter strings make it a bit easier to fret certain chords, and make some fingerstyle passages more manageable.

There’s also much less wear on your fingers with lighter strings, so especially if you’re just starting out with a steel string acoustic, I would recommend going for lighter strings, until your fingers toughen up enough for heavier strings.

The downside of lighter strings though is that they don’t quite have the same volume as heavier ones, which was something I noticed soon after fitting them. So it’s pros & cons as usual.

The main thing is to experiment until you find the ones that suit your playing style the best.

I also came across this video, which shows how to change guitar strings, which you might find useful. I definitely recommend using one of those string winder tools, like the one shown in the video.

Chris

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In this series of posts, I’m going to look at some aspects of guitar chord theory, namely how guitar chords are constructed using the notes of various scales. This will hopefully give you an insight into where guitar chords come from, and some idea of how to create chord shapes on the guitar fretboard.

In this post, I’ll talk about how basic chord construction works for guitar chords. Later posts will cover how more complex guitar chords are created, using the same principles.

When you first start learning the guitar, pretty much one of the first things you learn to play are the basic major guitar chords, such as C-major, G-major, etc, and you learn to read guitar chord diagrams like this one:

which shows an open C-major chord. That’s all well and good, and if you learn a few of these different chord shapes, you’ll be able to play a range of songs. Where though, do these shapes come from?

As you progress on the guitar, it becomes very useful to know something about how chords are constructed. This will let you find chord shapes anywhere on the fretboard. Also, if you want to play lead guitar, then having some understanding of how chords are built from scales will let you create much better sounding solos.

Guitar chords, or more generally any chords in music are created by choosing certain notes from a particular scale. Here, we’re going to look at chords created from the major scale.

Here are the notes & guitar tab for the C-major guitar scale:

The top section shows the regular musical notation, with the names of the notes next to each one. The lower section shows the guitar tab for these notes.

The colored numbers in the middle are important. These are known the scale degrees, which is a fancy way of saying “the note’s number within the scale”. The notes marked in blue are the root notes of the scale, since this is the C-major scale, the root note is the note ‘C’ (3rd fret, 5th string on the fretboard). The notes marked in yellow are the other (non-root) notes of the scale.

To build a basic major chord, we just take the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes from the major scale, and play them together at the same time. Here is the same diagram as above, but now the notes that will form the C-major chord are highlighted:

So the basic major chord consists only of these scale notes 1, 3, 5, and none of the others. If we play these 3 notes together, we get the basic C-major chord, also known as the C-major triad:

Play all the scale notes on your guitar, then only the 1, 3, 5 notes shown, to get an idea of the sound of the basic major chord.

These 3 notes form the bottom part of the C-major chord in the chord chart shown above. To get the other 2 notes, we just repeat the scale notes 1 & 3 (notes C and E), and stack these on top, to get the full C-major chord:

All basic major chords consist only of these 3 scale degrees, 1 (root), 3 and 5 taken from the major scale. The above example used the scale of C-major to create the C-major chord.

To apply this for a different chord, you would start off with the major scale (e.g. the G-major scale), and take notes 1, 3 & 5 from it.

How can this help when playing lead guitar? Say the rhythm chords are C-major followed by F-major, and you’re playing a solo over these. As we’ve seen from above, the notes in the C-major chord are C, E, G. While the rhythm is playing the C-major chord, then lead licks and phrases that start or end on one of these notes, will overall, tend to sound a better ‘fit’ with this chord than other notes from the C-major scale.

When the rhythm changes to the F-major chord, the notes in this chord are the 1, 3 & 5 scale degrees of the F-major scale, which are the notes F, A & C. You would change your licks & phrases to start or end on these notes while the rhythm is playing this chord.

That’s not to say that you have to play licks/phrases that start or end on those 1, 3, 5 notes. Doing so though, is a way to learn how to make your licks & lead lines match the underlying chords, and will seem to blend in better with them than playing just any notes from the scale.

With lead guitar, one aspect is understanding the chord construction from scales, which we’ve introduced above. The other aspect though, is knowing where these particular notes are on the fretboard, which is a different thing to learn & practise. These two aspects together though, can really improve your guitar soloing ability.

Next time, we’ll look at extensions of the basic major chord, and use this same approach to see how these chord variations work.

Chris

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I’ve just completed a review of Dan Denley’s Lead Guitar Secrets course, which is a great course for intermediate / advanced guitarists wanting to get a good understanding of how to play lead guitar solos.

I’ve worked through the DVD video sessions from the course, and what stood out for me as the most useful parts of the course were the 50 lead guitar licks, and the 14 different lead guitar solos, that Dan presents in detail in the videos.

Obviously, while it’s good to learn a particular solo, you can’t just play this exact solo in your own scenarios. That’s why the jam tracks which go along with the course are extremely useful, as they are full band backing tracks with both rhythm and lead versions. That way, you can start off by playing the solo as written, then start improvising your own lead lines from there.

Overall, a great course if you’re looking to learn to play lead guitar. You can find the full Lead Guitar Secrets review on the main review site here.

Chris

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There are a few ways to get jam tracks - many guitar courses come with a sample, or you can buy them ready made, or you can record your own from scratch.

One thing I realised recently though, is that you can create your own jam tracks, not by recording them from scratch, but by extracting sections from existing tracks.

To do this, you’ll need some audio editing software, either Transcribe or Audacity can be used for this purpose:

With this method, you first start with an audio track (either MP3 or WAV) that you’d like to use. The only real requirement on the track is that there should be a short section of the track, that if you looped over this section continuously, would be good to jam over.

Many songs have an intro or other section where there’s no solo or vocals, that you could use. For example, I used this technique with Lenny Kravitz’ song ‘Are U Gonna Go My Way’. In that song, there’s a short section just before the solo starts, which has exactly the chords used in the solo. By extracting just that section, and repeating it, I was able to create a jam track to play my own version of the solo over.

To create the jam track, load it up into the editing software, the picture above shows a track loaded into Transcribe. Find and select the section which will form the basis of the jam track. Then you need to export just the selected part of the track, but specify that it’s repeated several times (e.g. here I chose it to be repeated 10 times, but this could be 100 times).

The resulting audio file will be your own jam track that you can use when practising.

The tricky part about this technique is that you need to get the timing on the start/end of the looped selection just right, if it’s to flow properly when looped over and over again.

For this reason, I prefer to use Transcribe rather than Audacity, as Transcribe lets you dynamically adjust the start or end of the selected region (using the shift key), as it’s looping round, so you can make sure you get the selection start/end points that sound right. It’s also easy to create as many repetitions as you like of the selected part of the track.

I find this is a good technique for creating a library of my own jam tracks. You can also use this technique to double or triple the length of any existing jam tracks you have.

Give it a try - you can download a free trial of Transcribe and test it out for yourself.

Chris

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Here’s a sample lesson from instructor Kris Norris, which discusses the use of counterpoint in rock guitar riffs. Watch out for the ’subliminal’ section in this clip!

The video has several scenes, use the forward/back controls to switch between these.

This is a good example of how some ideas from classical music can be applied to rock guitar.

For more details, check out our Jamplay review.

If you enjoyed this video lesson, you can get access to some more video guitar lessons like this, by subscribing to our email list of sample video lessons. Use the form on the right here, or one of the forms on the main site to subscribe.

The Jamplay review page has a link to their site, or you can find it here.

Chris

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