Play Every Major Chord on Guitar With Backing Track
The goal of this episode is to explain the chord exercise that passes through every key following the Circle of 4ths using a I, IV, V (one four five) progression.
Play ANY Chord Podcast 5
Download the Backing Track File
Download the Podcast 5 Backing Track Files that runs inside of JjazzLab below. JjazzLab is free backing track software. For a tutorial in English on using JjazzLab, checkout THIS page.
Transcription
In this podcast we’re going to be looking at some exercises with some backing tracks. Now the backing tracks are going to be done on software called Jazz Lab.
Last week I didn’t create a podcast, I actually made a tutorial for this program called Jazz Lab.
I’m going to put a link to the file that we’re going to be using in this so that you’re able to install this on your own system. You can play through and you can set the speed and go along with it at your own pace.
Basically playing one, four, five chords, what’s called a one, four, five progression, going around the circle of fourths.
A one, four, five progression is playing chords built off the first, fourth and the fifth degree of a scale, like in the key of C.
That’s number four, and that’s five. So you’re basically building chords off one, four and five, which is going to be the chords of C, F and G.
And you can also find the same notes. You can find an F down there if you go down two frets and go onto a lower string.
And basically you recognize that these are the E-shaped chords, which you could play as a full six-string chord like that, or you can play it as a four-string chord like that.
What that means is that you can play different shapes based on these notes. So we’ve already looked at this C shape. You can also play the A shape like that.
And you could also play, take that note there and play this D shape like that. And if we find C down here on the sixth string, we can play it like this, using the E shape, the A shape, and A shape again.
And also using the same strings, we could use this G shape, or we could use the C shape. So, for this exercise, if you know the notes on the sixth string and the fifth string, then you can build that chord using the C chord shapes.
So I’m going to let you into a little secret here. If you haven’t taken my course, Guitar Fretboard Secrets, it’s very easy to find these chords.
If you tune your guitar using the fifth fret like this, then you should know that that’s an A and this is a D.
And also, if you’re ever played bass guitar for a little while, you probably know that if you play the open E string like that, you can find this octave on the seventh fret. So we know that note too, right? So that’s… That’s going to be E and that’s going to be A. Alright, so we’ve got quite a number of frets that we’ve already found right there.
So in this position, you also know that that’s a C chord. So that’s C. That’s G. And you probably know that that’s F. So E, F, G. You know that that’s A, the tuning place.
This note right here is B. C is right there on the eighth fret and right next to it, just like here, we’ve got C and F, right?
So if that’s F and this is A, we should know that that’s G.
And if we know that that’s C, this is E, we should know that that’s D.
So that’s basically it. That’s all your notes all the way up to the 12th fret.
What’s left for us now is to take a look at the exercise and let’s see if we can play.
I’m at the Jazz Lab screen right now and this is set to go, we’re going to go through this whole thing. I’m just going to play along with it so you can see me and you can see the chords that I’m using. Now the only other thing I didn’t mention before was that at the end of every line there are some seventh chords. So those are the chords that we’ve already been through in an earlier podcast if you want to take a look at that if you need to but basically you’ve got the seventh chords like that or
so at the end you’re going to have to put some seventh chords in. So I’m going to start this out and if you didn’t activate this already the way it works in Jazz Lab is there’s a little button on the top here that says off so we click on that one and that makes this particular tab active. So I’ve now got this circle of fourths, a great title, circle of fourths re-record here
make sure we’re at the beginning and let’s get ready. Here we go.
(Upbeat Music)
Back to C. And it keeps going on. Get the idea?
If you wanna slow this down, there’s the speed over here set for 80 right now. If you get the file, click on the download below to get the file.
You can play this at whatever speed you like, slower or faster, have some fun with that just to get around using those CAGED chord shapes all over the fretboard.
So that is the circle of fourths playing around the circle of fourths. You played all the notes on the fretboard, basically.
Congratulations. Give me the thumbs up if you like this and subscribe if you haven’t already and look out for the next podcast.
Coming soon.