 Guitar and Excel, open chords, C major scale, D minor, two chord, fingering. Get ready because although it's not fun to either fret or B board, it is fun when you put them both together, giving you the fretboard. Because the fretboard gives you something to play with, which eliminates the boredom and distracts you from the stuff that you were fretting about. So let's do it. 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 build this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint, because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the scale and chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though, there's currently like five tabs down below. We've got four of these example tabs, an OG tab and a practice tab. The OG tab and OG orange over here representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. It now acting as the starting point going forward, mapping out the entire fretboard, giving us our entire musical alphabet, both in terms of letters, numbers, combining them together as well. We have a key that can be changed with this green cell, which will populate our worksheets on the right, giving us our scales that we're working on and the related chords constructed from them. We then wanted to focus on the key of C in the open position and build the chords that can be constructed in that key starting with the one chord, which is the C chord, and we have that on our first tab. So we then hit a bunch of cells, we then populated on our worksheet in frets one through three, which we are representing as the open position, the C major fingering position and the notes, which we could also see on our worksheet on the right hand side, and we analyzed this chord position. We did a similar thing for the F then, which is the four note. When I'm looking at the C major scale, we did not go to the two, but instead jumped to the four. Why? Because the one, the four and the five are going to have major chord constructions, just the way it works out. So it's useful to think of those things, the one four five together, because you'll see similarities in the construction between them. And we mapped it out on the fretboard in open position and analyzed it. We did a similar type of thing for the five chord, which is a G. And it also is a major chord construction. And now we're moving back to the minor chords. So we're going to go back to the two, which is here. This is our basically kind of completed worksheet, but we're continuing to work on this one. That's why we have the practice tab on the right side of the og tab. And that's where we are at this point in time. So now we've minimized a lot of the fretboard, we're looking at the fretboard in open position, which I'm defining as frets zero through threes. If you have the fretboard, we're talking the net up to three, we want to be able to finger within that open position. Remembering that the top string here that's represented on our worksheet is the heavy one, the string closest to the ceiling. Then we've mapped out the notes of the two chord, which is a D minor on our fretboard using these nice colors, where the one is green, the three is red, and the five is yellow. Now, what does it mean for it to be the one three five of the D minor, which is a two chord of the C major scale? Remember how we constructed these, we basically took our scale. This is the C major scale. And then on the two chord, we just started on that note. It's easy to see with a circle, which is a D over here. And then we skipped every other note from the D to the F to the A. So if I was to think about this in terms of its interval naming, you might say, Well, why don't I call this a two, three, four, five, six, rather than a one, three, five, because we're not naming it in relation to the scale that we constructed it from, we're naming it in relation to its own scale, which this happens to be a minor. How do we know it's a minor? Because the third is only three notes away, six, seven, eight, nine, instead of four, that's going to be the differentiating factor between a major and a minor. And so if I go to the OG tab over here, just to check that out, and I'm going to change my key up top to a six, which gives me the D. And then I have my D worksheet here, I'm going to go below it because this is the major worksheet D major underneath it. I have the related modes, including the minor mode. So here is the minor mode. And you can see if I took the, the one, the three, and the five. Now we've got the DFA. And if I go back over here, we have the DFA. So although we constructed this from the C major scale, and we it's the two note making it the two chord of the C major scale, we still call the positions 135 relative to the one note as if it's in its own scale. So we'll talk more about that later. But just to just to, we need to see that so we can recognize the 135 and what that means on the fretboard. So the one is going to be the root of the chord. And then the three is going to be now the minor third, instead of the major third, and then the five is going to be the fifth, which is the which is the same interval. So if we if we finger this, the most common fingering would look like this. Now this, this is going to be an open. So this is an open D notice in the key of C, that the minor chords are actually sometimes fun or more fun to play because you have these open notes with relation to the minors. So so here we have the open D. And for example, when we get to an E, you'll notice the open E is up top. And when we get to an A, you'll have this kind of open A up top. So it's actually the guitar is actually kind of nice to play in the minor position when you're looking at the C. And most of the time people think about the the mode of the minor mode or Aeolian playing in a minor, right, you play all the same notes in a minor. But you can also think about it as playing it with D being the root, which means you'd be playing a Dorian type of mode, which we'll talk about in a second. But the point is, you've got this open string, which is nice. So that now this is a classic open position. Not only because it's in the open notes here, but also because you're utilizing an open string and that open string is the lowest string that that is in the the fingering that you're that you're fingering. Now, some people would also say, Well, it's not it's not the coolest open position, because if you want this to be your lowest note, you're not really utilizing the top two strings, although you could put them in play, because you'll note that you can use this A and you can use this F. But oftentimes, you're going to want this string to ring out here. And then you're going to be fingering this string with your middle finger, and then this this D with your ring finger, and then this one with your pointer. So usually when you want to practice this, it's a little bit, it's a little bit tricky to get your fingering down for a while. I think it's easier to to practice by starting with your pointer, and then putting your middle and then your ring. So pointer, middle ring, pointer, middle ring, and you could just do that while you're watching TV or something. That's how most people finger it. Now some people like to use their pinky here. It's kind of comfortable to use the pinky here. But and there's pros and cons to it because if you use your pinky here, you have that you have your those fingers open to do something with and it's natural to put your finger right there. And so you have some flexibility to do that. If however you play it this way, then you can play it, you can put your finger down here, your pinky down here. And so it's kind of nice to be able to switch between either position. But this is probably the most used position. And then when you're ringing this out, you want this string to ring out. So that string needs to ring out. And then everything else is going to ring out. Now if you happen to hit this A, it's not a big deal, right? Because I'm because that A is still the fifth. But it will no longer be the lowest note. You doesn't need to be the lowest note. You don't have to have the lowest note in order to make it the chord. But if you ring this one out, you're pulling in a fifth. Let's make this one yellow. So oftentimes, you don't want to ring that out. So one way you can not ring it out is you can use your finger over the top, your thumb, and that'll mute here. And you can usually get it down to mute to here as well, depending how how big your hand is, right? So that means if you're strumming like crazy, even if you're hitting both of these strings, you won't be ringing that out. If you use it a finger style, usually not as big of a problem because you have more control on this hand. So you have to kind of determine how you want to be muting strings. I have less control on this hand because I use the pick a lot and I'm going kind of crazy with the pick, which means I spend a lot more time trying to mute with this hand. You can also try to spend time muting with your palm, which is often useful, possibly more so with an electric type of guitar. So that's going to be the normal fingering that for this position. Note, however, you still can break this up. I could pick up just the top bit right here if I wanted to. And when I do it that way, you'll note that so if I did that, that becomes a movable shape. So you can kind of imagine putting your two fingers here and then picking that up, right? And you're going, Okay, and then I can move that up. And it becomes a movable shape. Now you'd have to mute some of these strings below, which you can mute with this finger, or you can use this finger to grab some notes down here if they're going to be fittings. But that's a useful shape to see not so much in open position, but as something that would be movable. Notice that these three notes, of course, are generally movable notes as well. So if you're playing just these three, then when we start to think about moving this shape up, you can move that up. Now it's kind of, you might say, Well, if I, if I move this shape up, what about this string? I can't, I can't move up the open string. That's one of the detriments of having this open string. But I could mute it with the, with the meat of this finger, and then I can mute these two with this finger. And so even if I'm strumming a lot, that becomes a movable shape. We'll talk more about the movableness of them later. But just if you, just as a, as a general rule, you want to think about those kinds of things as we're learning the shapes. Now, if you were to take the entire shape moving up, notice you'd have to adjust the fingering. I could say, well, it looks like this, but if this open string needs to ring out, then I'd have to change to these three fingers and then pick up the open string like that. Right. And you could do that. And that would be great. If you were to move that shape up, it's a lot harder to play though. So, so don't feel bad or think that it's wrong to just move up this shape, because all you need are those three notes. Now also realize when you, if when you move up the shapes, you're looking at, at the string that has the root note in it usually as your focal point. And so if I'm up here, I'm looking at this string, but if I'm not using that string, here's my D right here. There's my D. So if I'm moving it up, I'm looking at that string to try to determine what I am playing. And then I'm just building the chord around it. I also note that another interesting position here that I don't think people use as much is this shape, which is a nice movable shape as well. Right. So if you had, you know, you've got your A there, the downside with this one as a D minor chord is that the D is on the bottom again, instead of instead of voicing at the at the lowest, but it's still a D. It's just it's just that the D is not the lowest string. So it's an inversion. But it's, it's another very nice, easily movable shape, which is great because now you can easily mute the top string with this finger. You can mute the bottom string either with your palm or this or this so that so it mutes off, you can put your pinky there. And you can mute this string very easily with this right. So that becomes something that you can, you can move up as well. So notice when you're playing this, we've now learned, we've learned the C, the major positions, a C that was on this tab, an F. We learned the G in multiple different ways. And now we've learned a D. So now you can see those as things that are all mapping out basically the C major position, meaning all of these blue notes and the all the colored notes here are basically being mapped out. We're just now picking them apart in those shapes. So whatever you're playing now, notice anything that your finger is touching when you're using any of those chords, the C, the F, the G, the D minor, and all the open strings are all fair game, right? There are all things that you can, that you can play with. We'll talk more about that when we get to the scales later. But, but you'll start to visualize all these open positions because they're all being built from the key of C. And then you'll start to visualize if you put them all together, then you're going to be getting this shape, right? We're just breaking this shape out. And those are all become something that's that's kind of legal for you to basically play so that you're still sounding very much like it's musically correct or in the key of C. It's not going to clash entirely if you're playing in there. Now also note that the other really neat thing about the about about these positions, the minors in particular, is that is that you have that open string. So if I look at this, if I was to just hold down these two, like this string, and and that one string, the A, what do I have here? I've got the root, and I've got the fifth, I've got the root, and I've got the fifth. So it's kind of nice just to do that. That's like an easy thing to do. And I'm muting everything else. I'm muting these two with my thumb and all I'm ringing out is that open D and then the fifth. Now you can think about that as a major or a minor, because we don't have the third involved there, which is the differentiating factor. But you're probably if you're if you're thinking about yourself in the key of C, you're thinking about that as kind of a D minor, right? And then you can put your finger right there and you're picking up the F. So now if I if I put my finger up top, now I'm well, what am I doing? I'm removing from this D. And I'm picking up the F, which is which is basically a major F. And you can see it's a major F, because now you have the F, and you have down one back one. And we saw that that is usually a major third away if you're thinking about the F as the root. So that's a so that is a fun little shuffle pattern to be moving back and forth between the D minor holding down this A, and then the F. It's an easy little thing to to practice with your with different strumming patterns and just rhythm stuff and hammer-ons. It's really nice to have that open position. So for example, I usually think of myself in the key, you can think of yourself starting in the key of F or the key of D. I usually think more in minors, because that's what I first learned. I think a lot of people do on the guitar because of those open strings. But so then you can do something. And you can practice the hammer. And what I'm doing here is I'm also picking up my finger here and taking it back to the G. Why? Because that's a legal position in my mind, because I'm playing notes from the key of C. So it's a kind of a fun little shuffle pattern. And it works on all of these minors, right? You can. So now I'm just putting my finger off from here back on and then picking my finger off here and bringing everything else out and then back on. And you'll notice that little shuffle pattern works when you when you move it up to move it up here as well, which we'll talk about later. So where you have the A as the open string, it also works up here where you have the E is going to be the open string. So you're shuffling back and forth between the E. So so just a fun little shuffle type of thing that you can that you can play around with with those open with that open note. So I'm going to go back here and here. And you can also do that with your full position like this. So if I have this finger down here, I've got my finger on there and then here, then put it this way, boom, boom. Okay, I think I got it. Here's your normal position, right? So then you can you can move this finger up and you can replace this one with your pinky. And then you can do the same thing shuffling. It's a little bit more difficult to do though with this open finger now that your finger and this with your pinky. So so when you're just kind of messing around, it's kind of easier to put your finger here and do something like that. Now also just realize that we're in the key of C. So that means that I could work in the two chord as I'm playing something in the key of C, so that the C is the resolution. Or if I'm practicing my D minor and I don't want to switch to a whole D minor scale, I can still stay in the key of C and make the D minor my home base, which is kind of what I'm doing when I'm doing this little shuffle pattern, right? And then I end on the full D minor. Put a C in there, back to a D minor, back to a D minor. So I'm always going back to a D minor and I'm just shuffling in this other stuff, but I'm hovering around the D minor and therefore it's going to sound like that is the focal point and because all the other chords I'm playing are in the key of C, then you're basically playing the Dorian. Now remember if I was to think about that, the Dorian, here's my circle, the Dorian, I'm taking the one to the right, which is my D and I can construct a Dorian from it. So if I go to the right, I can think about it this way. Here's my Dorian construction with the D. I'm going to hide from here on over to, let's see, I want to see the circle too. I'm going to hide from here to here, right click and hide. And then I can go, okay, so let's bring this down a bit. And so now you've got your Dorian, which just starts, it's the same thing, right? So now the Dorian, it's the one, but it's still a minor, which you can see with the lower case Roman number here. And so now you've got the one, the two, and the six are going to be your minors if you think about just converting everything to be in Dorian, but you still have the minors being the D, the E, and I'm sorry, not the six and the five and the A, which is the same here, which is the D is the minor, the E, and then the A. So this is, so we can, and then you come up with the same construction D, F, A, right? D, F, A is the construction that we're playing. But I think a lot of people when you first are kind of starting this out, you're just saying, well, I'm just going to play the two chord as my root from the scale of the key of C. And then I'm just going to jam around with that as my root. C, F. Now we'll talk about like moving these things around in future presentations, but just realize just like for now, just to just to get an intro into it, notice that just like we talked about with the majors, the one, four, five are all major constructions. With the minor constructions, you've got the two, three and the six are going to be the minor construction. So you can start to say, well, what if I wanted to move this shape around, I can move it up to the three, and I can move it up to the six. And that that's where I can move them here, or I can switch my key to be in the key of D minor instead of the C major. So let's see what that would look like. So if I scroll down, let's go down to here, and I'm going to unhide some cells from D to AK, right click and unhide, and then I'm going to hide from 12 on over to our, our chords over here, right click and hide. So, so now if I looked at my, my two in my open position, so I'm looking here first, we have that same kind of construction, right? I've got my construction that looks like this. Now notice when I'm looking at it like this, you have to figure out where's the root that I'm looking at it. If I want to move this up, the root is actually this open note. So if I wanted to move this up, like I say, you'd have to say, well, I'd have to re-finger it like this, and then hold down the root, and then I'm finding where this D converts to an E, which is, is only a whole step up, right? So I can say, okay, I can move this whole thing to right there, and I can play it like that. However, that's kind of a difficult fingering to do. And you don't always need all of the fingers down, right? So, so what I could do is I could say, look, look, I'm just going to move this bit up. I'm just going to move this bit up. And then I'm going to kind of mute these two with my finger here and mute this one. And that this way, I'm no longer thinking of that as the root, you could, but I'm going to think of where's my root, it's this one, it's my lead finger. So I have to find where this one gets up to an E, which in this case is just one whole step up, or two notes up, right? So it goes from a D, I move this whole shape up to where that's an E, and then boom. And now I'm, I'm muting this with this with this thing. So I could be gone. And that's legal within, within the C major scale, because now I'm playing an E minor. So that's your C. Now you could use your other, your other formats of, of that to move it up this way. Remember these three notes, if I played it like this, then here's my D down here. So again, if I played this position, I can move that up to here. And if I saw it as these three, like this, so now I'd be imagining that I'm holding these two down. And then like, and then this F. And then I can move that this is now my position that that's D down here. So if I, if I was to hold those two down, and move that up to an E, it would look like that, right? So I can move that position up. And you could see that right here in the blue. So the blue is my moved up position here. Here's my moved up position, my normal position, which most people would probably think of as moving up. And we have the E on the fifth, right? And then here's that position that if I was to play it this way, that you can move up. And I'm trying to follow this, I'm looking at that as my E now that I moved up. So you can kind of look at, look at the notes that you're moving up to. And you can also look at the relative space. It's going from the two to the three, which is a whole step up from a D to an E. And so so you can start to see where that relative position would be. And then we can go from the three. So if I moved it up from here to here, I can or I can go from here all the way up to on a. So if I'm looking at this position, that D, I'm looking for where's where's the A on this string? I'm going to go, okay, it's up here on the 10th 12345678910. So I can move it all the way up here. So if you were strumming around and you wanted to practice moving the positions up, those are the positions that you can basically move them up to and still be strumming around in the key of C or possibly in the D Dorian. And again, you can use the variants of these shapes, like this top shape to move it up or this shape, you can see those shapes here. And then there's your standard shape. Now, now, the other, the other way you might see this and say, well, what if I thought of this as the D minor? So remember, if I'm going from a C, I'm playing a C chord, and then I go to like a D minor, I could think about it as being constructed from the C major stuff, because those three notes are in the C scale, or I could say I want to convert entirely to the scale of the D minor. And so if you if you think about it in terms of the scale of D minor, you'd have to say, okay, the one way I can construct that is I could go to my worksheet over here. And I could say, okay, I'm going to change this to a six, which is a D, right? And I can scroll down and I can say, okay, the minor is down below. So here's my D minor. But I wanted to construct it over here in such a way that I can see the fretboard on top of each other. And therefore I needed to find the relative major. So the relative major of D minor is F. So if this is an F, I'm going to hide some cells to get to the minor or hold on a second. What did I do here? I'm going to unhide all these cells. I'm going to unhide from here to here unhide. Oh, now I hid them again, I'm going to right click and unhide. So then I have the major and next to the major, I hid some cells here. That's why from B. So I'm going to hide unhide from here, unhide. And so now I should have the minor next to it. So here's the minor. All right, so now I'm going to hide all these over to F or the 12th fret and hide all of that. And so so now just to note that if you were looking at this now in the key of D minor, then now the minor chord would be the one similar to the Dorian that we talked about. But now we're not talking Dorian. These are going to be different what's constructed from a different key, right? So different notes are in it. But if you wanted to move this around, thinking of it as the D minor, which is a quite common thing to be playing in, then you'd have a similar kind of process. You can think about the one still fits in here. So here's your your one. Here's your construction right here would still fit the same. And then when I'm moving it up, I'm looking at that D again, I'm looking at this string and I'm going to move it up till I get to the G. So the G happens on fret eight, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I'd move that up to I'm pointing to there, right? And then when I when I move it up again, now I'm only going to that half step up. I mean, I'm sorry, one whole step up from a G to an A. And so I'm looking at that that string again, there's the G, there's the A on 10. So eight, nine, 10. And so there we have it. So if you wanted to strum around in the key of D minor, you can look at that position and start moving, moving up and back. We'll talk about the movability of this of the scales and more depth later. But I just want to point that out now just to get just to plant the seed. But I also just want to show that the chords around this and we'll talk more about this later. If I hide if I right click and hide this stuff, notice that this blue area all the stuff here is from the C major. And although this chord fits in it, we have a different construction than we have down here, right? It looks similar. But see, this is different, this top one is the same, but the second one is different, right? Because these are different sets of notes, even though both of them, this is constructed from a C major, this is constructed from a D minor, which is relative to the F major, right? You can think of everything as kind of constructed from the related majors, right? This is the mode, this is a mode of F rather than modes of the C. So so so you just want to kind of so that means that if when you move the shape up and down, you can move the shape up and down, but you want to have an idea of what key you're playing in. And then when you start to add stuff around it in, you have to start thinking, am I playing in the key of C? Or am I playing in the key of D minor to think about what other things that you can kind of embellish your playing with around it? Alright, so I'm gonna we'll talk more about that later, though, so I'm gonna unhide this and see if I can get back to where I was for the next presentation, right click, unhide. You've made an aww, now you hit it again. You've made a mess of things. Unhide that, I'm gonna hold control and scroll down a bit and I don't, I'm gonna hide this down to here, right click and hide that and then I'm gonna hide from here down to here, right click and hide that and then I'm gonna hide from here down to here, right click and hide that and then that's good and then I'm gonna unhide all of this stuff, right click, unhide and I'm gonna go back to the starting point where I'm hiding just from fret, I'm gonna hide from fret four over to our major scale over here, right click, right click and hide so that we have that lined up and I'll scroll in a bit so our worksheet is back to where it should be for next time. So next time we'll talk more about the how this fits on top of the pentatonic scale and the major scale in the key of C and contrast that to its related minor and then we'll talk about the intervals.