 Guitar and Excel, open chords, C major scale, C major chord fingering. Get ready and don't fret, because it's just a board with strings on it. And Excel will show us how it works. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay, because we basically built this from a blank worksheet, but we started in a prior presentation. So if you want to construct this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need the workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint, because we will simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the scale, as well as the related chord that we're focused in on. If you do have this workbook, there's three tabs down below. Example, OG, and the open chords, C tab. The OG tab representing the worksheet we put together in a prior section, that now being our starting point. The example tab represents us copying over that OG tab and making the adjustments to it. And then the open chords, C tab, represents the worksheet that we copied over in a prior presentation and will be continuing on at this point in time. Quick recap of what we did last time. We have the OG tab. This gives us our fretboard two times over. It gives us all the notes in the musical alphabet, the related numbers, and then our scale. And then we have our worksheet that are mapping out the scale and the chords. And then we copy that over so that we can hide all a lot of information and focus on a specific area. So we hid a lot of the fretboard so we can just see the zero to three frets on the fretboard because we're focusing in on the open positions of the key of C. We then also hid some cells here so that we can see this worksheet, which gives us our scale and it gives us the chord that we're working on which is going to be the key of C right here. That's going to be our point of focus. Now then we color coded the information on the fretboard so that we can see the root is green, the third is going to be the red, and then the fifth is going to be in the yellow. Then we went down and we copied this over and we added the green notes which are going to be the pentatonic scale. We copied it down, added the blue notes which are the major scale, and then we put both of those together which is kind of chaotic. We'll talk about that stuff in a future presentation. Right now we want to look mainly just at the fingering. So we'll talk in the future presentations about more of the intervals and whatnot, but right now we just want to look at the fingering positions and see how we can kind of play with the different types of fingering positions. So remember that we're looking at the C major scale. These are the notes in the scale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then when we look at each of those notes we can build a chord on it. So the first chord being built is going to be the C major, and we're looking at just three note chords, that's the foundation of the chords generally. So we're looking at the C major chord, which is going to be a C, an E, and a G. Now we'll talk more about the intervals and whatnot in a future presentation, because that'll help us to map it out on the fretboard, but right now we just need to know, well I can just find each of those notes here, and if I'm holding down each of those notes, then I am in essence playing a C. Now note that you might have this thing in your head that you have to play a particular shape to play a C, or you might have something in your head saying that the C needs to be the lowest note, or it's not a C. But you can invert, it doesn't necessarily need to be the lowest note to still see it as a C. You can have basically inversions. And on the guitar you have a little bit less flexibility than you might have on a piano, more flexibility than you might have on other instruments. So oftentimes, when you're playing the guitar, you're basically saying, where can I get some kind of voicing of this chord, right? I'm not worried so much about the different kind of inversions and being able to play every different kind of inversion, because I'm trying to worry about what I have available to me in a particular position on the fretboard. Alright, so that being said, if I look at this, the standard C, I'm going to use these little things down here, it's going to be here, here, and here. That's where our fingers are going to go, and then you are ringing out the open positions here and here. So if we pulled out the trusty fret, the trusty guitar here, it's going to look something like this, right? So that's going to be our fingering position. Now, obviously, you could strum out this fingering position and you can just, it's pretty comfortable fingering position. But if you've never played before, because it naturally aligns to your fingers grip, so it's a pretty comfortable position for most people, but if you've never played it before, it's going to feel really weird, just like anything, any position you'll play on the guitar. So you just want to keep on practice putting the fingers down on it, noting that when you do this, there's different things you can practice as you're working on your fingering. One is just going to be laying your fingers down on the guitar and the other is going to be looking at the notes and where the shape is, and if you know the shape, you'll be able to move it up as we'll talk about in future presentations. So this right here is the main root that you would be thinking that's going to be the lowest note here and it is the root. Notice that this one up top, I don't currently have, we're not holding it down. You could play it open because then you'd have an E, that would be an open E, but then the lowest note is an E. It's still a C chord, even though the lowest note would be ringing out, but if you want to keep the lowest note as a C, which makes it really C-ish, then you can mute that. I usually mute it with my thumb, but you can mute it like this as well. So you want to kind of practice muting with your finger, poking up here so that that string doesn't play out and notice that I usually do a lot of stuff with my thumb over the neck and I like to mute these top two strings like that, which isn't as much a classical guitar kind of component. A lot of times if you put your thumb behind the neck, then you have a more reach with your fingers, but when I strum with a pick, that also makes it harder for me to mute strings sometimes I find. So if you do finger style, that's not a problem as much because then you don't have to hit those strings with your finger. So then it might be more better to put your thumb behind. So you can kind of practice how your muting style is going to be and then you can try to ring each of these out. I should be able to ring each of these out and then you can practice just the grip. Once you can ring everything out, when you put your fingers down, if this is a new fingering, it's always useful to try to put it down in order. So I would put the pointer finger down, the middle finger and then the ring finger and then take it off and put it back down and then take it off and put it back down and you could do that while watching TV or something and you could just keep on doing that. You don't even have to play anything to just practice putting that finger position in position. So there's the major, the normal fingering that would be used most of the time. Now, note that it's also common to hold this one down as well, this G up top and that's a really useful finger position because that makes it a little bit more movable because now I can, when I get to the moving stuff, we'll do that later. You can see this whole thing moves and the open strings are this one and this one which you can easily mute with your, so you want to mute those strings. So that is quite common to hold it this way. You'll note when you do that, then you have the G so some people might call that G on top of C or something like that because the lowest note is a G but it's still a C if you look at it from the standpoint of a C chord because it has the notes of a C in it. So then you can kind of practice playing in that position and there's actually a lot you can do just with this fingering as well because once you have that position down, you'll note that we're in the key of C. That means that all of the open strings will be good, will be okay to play in the key of C that we're in. So you could start practicing lifting up some fingers. So if I was playing like this and you're strumming and you lift up this ring finger, then you have an open note. So what would happen, I mean what does that look like? I'm going to take this off. If I remove this, let's make this one, this is my point of focus, let's make this a different color. Let's make it green. I'm going to say this is going to be an outline of green. If I take my finger off of this one, then I've revealed this note which is a D and you're going to say, D is not in here. That's true, but it happens to be the 9. So we'll talk about things outside of the key in future presentations, but just note when you're kind of just messing around, all of the open strings are okay. So you can kind of epigiate this, meaning you hit them one at a time. You can pick around in it. You can lift a finger up in it and then put that finger back down and any of the fingers that you lift up, that would be generally okay, right? You can lift this finger up and you can say, okay, I'm going to pull that finger up and play and so then if I pull that finger up, I'm revealing the B. Well, the B isn't in here, but it happens to be the 7, which we'll talk about later, but if you're just playing, if you're just looking at this position, you're like, okay, I'm going to lift that finger up and say if that sounds cool with what I'm playing, it should fit because it's in the key of C and we'll talk about the intervals a little bit later, but you can start to epigiate kind of and put that in place as well when you're kind of just practicing your fingering positions. So there's going to be that one and then, of course, if you're just holding down this, you might notice that this one here is another G. So you could, of course, put your finger down there so I can be playing this and I could put my finger down there. I could pick up even the root if I wanted to and then put my finger down there. I might not be playing a C anymore, but I'm playing like the shape of the C and I'm ringing things out that are in, that are going to be okay in the major chord. So there's that one and then, of course, this one up top means that I can put my finger up here and I can practice putting my finger up there and then revealing the E if I want and then putting my finger down. I can reveal the E, meaning I don't mute it. I don't mute it with my thumb or this finger and I play the E on top so I could, when I'm jamming around, I can try to play with that. So you have a whole lot of variance just with this fingering position. What I do a lot of times is I, you don't even need to play the whole position, right? So then the next thing you might want to do is take this thing apart a bit and say, well, what if I just played like two notes? Because this is kind of the root of the C because if you play just those two notes, you've got the one and you've got the three. You've got the one and the three. So, and then if I reveal this one, I'm going back to an A, which isn't, it's not in the C but I know all the open notes are okay in the open position because I'm playing in the key of C. So I like to do some kind of rhythm stuff just with these two notes where you can, you know, you could just, I'm muting everything. I'm muting this with my thumb. I'm muting this with this finger, the bottom of this finger and then you could just do some rhythm stuff. You could just put your finger on and off and you could do a lot of stuff with just that. And then play the whole chord if you want to give it the more full body but don't feel like you can't just take pieces of this chord together as well and just play pieces of it as well. Then, when you're thinking about the whole, when you're thinking about the whole chord, we could say, well, how can, what are the other shapes that we can do here? Well, notice if I play these three up top, then that is, in and of itself, is a C chord. I don't need all of the chords. I don't need all six strings to ring out. It's cool if I can get all six strings to ring out because then you've got a really bold chord but you don't really always need a really bold chord, especially if you're playing on top of something else. A lot of times you don't want the boldest of chords because you're trying to play with something else on top of it or something like that. So really you only need three notes to make the chord. So it's really useful to have different voicings. Now, this voicing is a very heavy voicing because it's inverted with the G is on top but you can still see it as a C chord because you have the C, the G and the E. So you have all the notes in a C chord. So you can start playing this one, right? And you can put that. Now, if I ring all this stuff out down here, if I play these three and I keep this open, I can try to mute that. I can mute that with this finger. This finger can mute it a bit and I can just try to play those top three and I can mute the bottom string with my palm. But if I do play it out, it's kind of okay because this is going to be a G that's going to play out and that's in the fifth and then you'll have a B that'll ring out. That's the seven, right? Because again, all the open notes work as long as you're playing in the open position. But that little bit right there is something that is movable. It's something that we can see that because we don't have any open things in it, it's an easily movable position. But note, it's also a little heavier as well so if you're playing with some other band or something, playing the top or heavy strings can be a little bit hard on it because you're trying to mix in with what other people are doing and that's going to be a heavier kind of sound. You could do just these three down here so I could say now I've got this one, this one and this one is going to ring out open. So that's going to be this and this one, this and... Now this is something you're probably not going to do as much in the open position because you're like, well why wouldn't I put this finger down right here and play this? But all you really need are these three notes and you still have the C. Now the reason this is useful as well is that notice that those three notes are movable because I don't have any open notes so when we get into moving that position becomes useful because I can move it up and I don't have the open notes and I'm going to have to mute and stuff to get in the way. And then of course you note that down here if I play it this way I can just hold the C down and I get that one. So that's the bottom of my C. So if I play my C like this and I just play these three notes that's still just a C down there. Now again you're probably not going to do that all the time in open position although it could be useful again if you're playing on top of something else because you have the lighter strings down here which aren't going to be as heavy if you're playing over something else. But that position also you can see it looks if you note your D position it looks kind of like a D and that's another movable position because there's no open strings so when we start to kind of try to move these positions up that can be a useful position. So when you're kind of playing so when you're kind of jamming around you can play the open position you can lift up fingers you can play different rhythms and then you can play different variants of this. You can always lift up fingers because it should be okay to play in the open positions here and you can do different arpeggiating and you can practice just getting your fingers in that particular position. Now let's try to think about well what if we moved this up just to see what would happen if I just think about this as a shape and I moved that shape up notice the shape could move up four five most easily. So let me do a quick check on that I'm going to unhide some cells put in my cursor on D and then over to AK right click and I'm going to unhide and then I'm going to scroll all the way down to the bottom where we have another tab open here and now let's say I'm going to select actually let's hide to 12 this time so I'm going to go up top I'm going to go from M over to our worksheet over here right click and hide and so then so now I'm going to say I want to look at I want to look at the four the four because that's going to be another major so it's often useful to play the one four five together because those are the three majors so let's build out same it's going to be the same worksheet but now I'm going to take a look at it from the four note so I'm going to select this whole thing and I'm going to go to the insert tab up top we'll go not insert home tab conditional formatting I want to make it equal to and I'm going to pick up this one and I'm going to make that let's make that that's the green this time and then I'm going to say okay and then conditional formatting and I'm going to say this is going to be equal to this one I'll keep that as red and then another one conditional formatting this one and I'm going to make that yellow okay so there we have it and so now if I copy this and put it here I'm going to say alright there's there's our C position that's basically moving up right and then if I do it down here and I say okay now I want to do the same thing but I'm going to look at I'm going to look at the five and do the same thing let me color code this one too I'm going to say that this is now the F is now format paint the green one and then this is going to be format paint this one and then this is going to be the C format paint this one and then let's do the same thing with with this one on the five so I'm going to say home tab conditional formatting I got to highlight it first conditional formatting is equal to and this time I'm going to pick up this one and make it the green and then I'm going to say okay and then conditional formatting equal to this one and I'm going to make it red and then that's not red and then conditional formatting this one and let's make that the yellow and okay and then let's do this I'm going to format paint this one and then take this and format paint this one and then take this and format paint this one and I'll copy this and we'll put that here so we can see the position again and then let's hide I'm going to hide everything above this one let's hide all this stuff up to this one right click and hide okay so now hold on a sec I hid too much let's try it again I undid that and then I want to hide up to here and then right click and hide okay so now if I go up top I'm going to say this is the open position with the C D D D and so we have that it could be held like this and then I'm looking at this note because that's what I see as the root when I'm envisioning this and I'm going to move it all the way up to here on the eighth fret so I'm going to say up to here so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 I'm on the eighth fret that happens to be now an F so now notice that this same shape which is pretty much universally called a C shape is now still a C shape because it's a C shape in open position but now if I was to strum this I would be playing an F now notice the problems that you have when I move this up here that I'm only holding down the fingers of here here and here which means I can't really ring out I could ring out the open E and the open G because again if I'm playing this four chord and I'm still playing in the key of C the open notes will still ring out and sound okay but the octave will be lower a lot lower compared to where my relative position is so when you move this up generally if you play the same position it still works but now you just need to mute the strings so I'm going to mute the top string either with my thumb or with the point of this finger and then I'm going to mute this string with the flat of this finger and then the bottom string is muted with my palm so that means like if you're a finger stylist that might not matter as much but if you're just going crazy with the pick you can still play that out and it's fine now also note that these two I don't have the I only have the one and the three I don't have the fifth which in this case is the C when I'm playing relative to the F that's okay it still sounds good right because you're still really playing a pretty heavy F sounding thing and which we'll talk about later we've got the third which is the differentiating factor between a major and a minor and you've got two of the roots played over so that's fine to play even though you're kind of missing the other note but if you wanted to pick it up it would be right here so if you augmented that a little bit then I can play like this and that's when we'll get into like that right and then and then that you can play it like that way and we'll talk more about that later but for right now just note that you can move that shape from here when you're just kind of jingling around you're like okay I can move it up to here and just mute everything and that'll still sound cool and then when I go down here we can do the same thing but now we're moving it up to the fifth and so I'm still looking at that finger I'm looking up to where it's going to be a G which happens on the what is that the 10th fret so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 right so now you can play this one up here and you can start to move between that position the 1, 4, 5 and you'll start to see that there's symmetrical positions because you're playing all of the major notes and do the same thing and mute the strings and then you can go from here to here to here now you can do the you can do the same thing with the top notes so if you're playing just this copy and paste this and this then again you can play that's going to be right here right so now I'm playing just this and that's also movable so I can play and that's playing the entire thing right there so I can move that up to the 8th I'm still kind of looking at this string because that's my root so when I'm saying I'm in the key of C and I'm moving up to the 4 to the F I'm going to move from here to here and then I can still play that and I can kind of mute the strings underneath or at least one string underneath with this finger and if you wanted to mute you could mute like with your pinky so that you could still go crazy play everything out and not having those other ones ring out but again if you did have them ring out it might sound okay even though they're not in the same key because you're still kind of playing in the key of C and then again you can move that full shape up to here which would be on the 10th fret so you could go and you could play it up here so you can move that shape kind of around and if you're working in the 1,4,5 it becomes a movable shape now you can also see this shape down here is kind of a movable shape so if you're playing down here that's going to be kind of that D shape you can't really see it right here because you're not fingering the other two notes but if you move that up if you move that full shape up to here then there's your shape and so we'll talk more about that moving of the positions later but I just want to mention it now because if you're new to learning the C shape you want to learn it as the C shape because everybody does but just remember that it's as long as you're playing a major chord you're going to have the same relative positions up top which will be great for reference points then you can kind of augment or change a little bit you change your finger positioning so that the open strings you can accommodate for the open strings when you move your fingers up you don't have to move everything up the same you don't have to move everything up and I have to play it correctly meaning all the fingers need to be hitting the same strings no you can play whatever you want you can play just two strings of the position I can move just this up if I wanted to that will move up relative to the one four five I can play just these two strings that will move up relative to the one four five and that would be fine next time we'll see how this is going to fit into the pentatonic scale so that we can kind of pick around in the pentatonic scale and move back and forth from it as well as with the major scale so let's unhide some cells before I stop let's unhide the and then I'll go back down to where we were so that we have our same starting point next time and hide all of this and so now we're back to where we started I think