 Guitar and Excel. C major A minor scale fret number five targeting the D minor chord. Get ready and some coffee because grinding out chords in Excel without coffee is unacceptable. The term unacceptable, by the way, stemming from the sport of bowling. For like when someone steps over the line and you have to yell, that was an unacceptable. Huh? Over the line, market zero, unacceptable. Smoky, this is not nom. This is bowling. There are rules. It's similar to the term undeniable, also a bowling related term for when you have a strike. Because with a strike, nobody can be confused by the count of the pens that are still standing. They can't be like, there's three pens still standing because you just can't see that one because it's behind the other one. And it's like, no, with a strike, all the pens are down. That's why it's an undeniable. Don't give me that crap. It's a strike. It's an undeniable. And of course, unbelievable is when you have like three strikes in a row. It's like a bowling hat trick. That was an unbelievable. Anyways, onto the guitar. 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 did so in prior presentations. 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 notes to scale the chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though, we have a bunch of tabs down below. We've got these green example tabs and the OG orange tab representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. We're now acting as our starting point, mapping out the entire fretboard, giving us our entire musical alphabet in letter format, number format, combining letter and number format, providing a key that can be adjusted with this green cell, adjusting the worksheets on the right to the key that we selected, then providing us the notes and the scale and the chord constructions from the notes in the scale as well as interval information and more. We then wanted to look at the key of C and first started looking at the chord constructions in open positions. We went over here starting with the C chord. We mapped it out open positions, fret 1 through 3, discussed it in detail, went through all the chord constructions from the key of C, going then to the IV chord because it's a major chord construction, an F major chord, then the G major chord, then up to the minor chords, the D minor chord, the E minor chord, the A minor chord, the diminished chord, then we wanted to jump to the middle of the guitar and start learning it from a scale construction standpoint. So we went an overview of how all the scales fit together and then we started talking about linking the C and targeting that in our scale in position 5. Then we then went to the F in a similar way as our chord constructions in open position and then we went to the G and now we want to move back up to the minors. We're going to be going to the D minor. So I'm going to copy this over. We will get to the guitar, but I just want to show you how the worksheets are constructed in case you're following along with that. So I'm going to hold down control, left click the mouse and dragging it to the right. I'm going to double click down here and this time we're going to go to the D. So this is going to be the D minor fret number 5 that we're focused in on. Okay, so then I'm going to adjust it here. So here we talked about the pentatonic scale up top in the key of C. We're going to stay in the key of C now moving down to our major scale. So the thought process here is all of these notes are in the major scale. Then we put on top of them the green notes, which are the pentatonic notes. And then we put on top of that last time the G chord. We're going to move that up now and adjust these notes, which are the 135 to our D minor chord, which is still constructed from the notes in the key of C. So let's select this whole thing to do that. I can go up top home tab conditional formatting. I'm going to manage the rules and the rules are going to be managed here. And so we're going to double click on the green one. And I want to make it not there, but I want to make it the D. Okay, and then double click the red one and delete this and make it then the F. Okay, and then I'm double clicking the yellow one and removing this to make it the A, which I can't see it's right there the A. Okay, and then I should hit OK. And it should change automatically over here. Boom. And there's the shift. Let's move these out of the way. So that's no longer our point of focus. So we'll move them down here and then let's change the formatting here. Format paint. There's the green. There's the red on the F and there's the A is going to be the yellow. And then I'm going to change this one, bringing it down. Okay, that's the general idea. And so now we're looking at the D. So if I was to see the D in open position, this is a D minor. We constructed it over here in our open position. So this is the normal kind of fingering that we have over here. So let's readjust that. I'm going to say, well, there's the D fingering. Boom. Boom. And then we have this one should be on the D, the D and then the A. And then we have this D that is also ringing out. We could then ring out this A as well if we so choose, or we can basically mute this. Now remember this is a D minor because the D minor is what is in the key of C. So we built that out and got the D minor. So now what we want to do is think about how we can kind of connect that position up to our frets in fret five is going to be the general idea. Let's go ahead and make this full screen mode. And so there we have that. I'm going to make it a little bit smaller so we could see maybe the circle on the right hand side. And that looks pretty good. And I don't know why this is stretching out over here. Let's get rid of that. Okay. So the general idea on this, this is our middle position. Let's rethink what all these colors mean again. All of these notes we can think about as the original base was blue and all of these colored ones are blue on the bottom you can imagine. And then we put on top of that the green ones which are the pentatonic scale but the pentatonic scale only fits directly over the C or the major scale the related minor scale. So those are the green ones. And then we put these on top of both the major and the pentatonic. It doesn't fit all the other chord constructions except for the, well, we know for sure the one and the six are going to fit within both the pentatonic and the major scales. The others may not because we're constructing them from seven notes and the pentatonic only has the five notes. So see this F right here is not going to be in the pentatonic. So that means that if you've learned the pentatonic, if you have a good idea of the pentatonic and you're playing like in the key of C up here and you switch then to a D minor, then you might then note that that F is also going to be there, right? So you're going and you might note that that F is something that you can kind of add. That's one way that people often think of things, right? I'm going to learn the pentatonic and then I'm going to adjust it. I'm going to adjust that very versatile shape to fit wherever I'm going. So to do that here, I'm going to add the F, which is in the major scale rather than the pentatonic. The other way you can think of it is, of course, that I'm just going to play the whole major scale in the key of C. And because we constructed basically this D minor from the key of C, all three of those notes will be in the full major scale. Okay, quick recap over here. If we were to say this is our D on the fingering over here, this is a D minor. So this string up top would be ringing out or this D would be ringing out. And then these strings ringing out down below. So that's going to be our finger position here. Now we're thinking of ourselves as using all the notes that are in the key of C. So you could make the C the tonic because that would, so you say C is the tonic going from a C to an F to a G. And then you might add like the D minor in there and go back to the C. That would make the C the home. Why is the C home? Because I'm centering around the C. However, we might try to make the D home, not go into a D minor scale, but rather be playing as though the two note of the C is home. And that's going to be a Dorian. And it's a really nice, that's fairly often used mode. So it's a often used thing to do. So now we're going to be, that's what we'll mainly be looking at here so we can practice the D minor and how to target the D minor notes and chords in our pentatonic and major scale. So in that case, you're starting with a D maybe. And then maybe going to an A to an F, back to a D. So I'm going to start and end it on the D minor in an attempt to make that feel like home. Okay. So that means we're basically playing in the Dorian mode. So just so we can see that if I go to the right here and I'm saying, I'm going to hide over to here, right click and hide. So now you can see this as though we are playing in like C major, but making the two note, the center point, or you can see it as though we are playing in the D Dorian, right, which is the related mode. And then I'll go ahead. I think I can just format paint these. Let's see if I can go here, format paint these to their boom. And so, so there we have it. Okay. So then the question over here is, well, how can I tie this in this shape into my pentatonic up here? So one way we can do that is to, of course, target the root note. So I can say I'm going to target, there's a D right there and there's a D right there. So if I look at my, my shape up top, I'm going to say, okay, there's a D and there's a D. So if I, if I follow my shape in and the easiest way to do that, oftentimes is to look at your pivoting pointer finger and I follow that into my shape here to right here. So now I'm going from this finger. I'm following, I'm following it in here and then maybe I noodle around until I get to this D up top, right? So I can be doing something and then maybe back. I'm following this finger in and then I'm ending right here and then I'm going back to my strumming pattern here. And then I could target this one up top. So, so we could be going up to here. So if I'm going to target that sometimes like you could try to follow this middle finger in, but you've got to be careful where, where you're going to end up in, right? So if I follow this middle finger in, I don't have my exact perfect positioning. It's not too bad because then I can jump back here. But if I follow, if I follow my ring finger in, then that will give me somewhere into my, into my positioning here. So if I follow like this ring finger, actually that's still not perfect because it's on this kink in the string, but usually you would be right there, but the ring finger would be going up to here. And then I just, and then I could try to put my pinky down and follow it in. So I could follow, you know, my pinky going up to here. Now note that if you, if you actually lift your fingers, you can do that. You can lift your fingers and then jump over here. But when you do that, you're probably going to end up playing the chord top to bottom. Cause that's how most people learn it, right? But you could try to, instead of following in my fingers, I could like mute it there and then play something up here. Notice that this, this anytime you see a note like this, you can always make a power chord, right? So I can play that D and I can play the A down here. And even if I don't know anything else, that's usually going to be a doable thing. This D down here, you could of course do the same thing, but because you have the kink in the, in the, in these two strings, the power chord looks a little bit different, a little bit more difficult to play up top, but you can still do it. So then the next thing we could do is we could say, well, can I build a D chord over here? So what is the D, the D minor chord, the D minor chord? And if I look at it, I'm going to say, okay, there it is, here, and that's part of it. And then like there, and then we have this. And if you look at that shape, if you look at this shape in particular, that part of it, it looks like an A minor, right? Because that's our classic minor bar chord that's starting on the second string down from the top. So let's just, we'll take a look at the cage system or later, but let's just think about how that works. If you had your A over here, this is an A minor shape. This was our six. So we've taken a look at it. It looks like this. If I turn that into a bar chord, I would have to switch these two fingers and then bar off like this up to the second string down generally. I could take the top string too, because it'll be in, but second string down will give me the root. And then if I move that up to my position here, there we have it, right? So there's my A minor bar chord. Now you can play it like that, and that's great. That's your standard, basically, bar chord. Just remember when you play the entire bar chord, you want to get down to this. You want to make sure that you pick up that F, which is on this finger, which isn't too difficult because it's pretty easy to finger that, because that's going to give you that third feel. All the other notes are duplicated. That's the only third that you have. So if you want to give it that minor feeling, then you've got to get down to that note. So also just realize from a caged system, a lot of times when we hear the caged system, we only hear it in terms of the major notes, but it basically works on the minor as well, so if you had the caged system here, we're on a D, right? And so the D would then go to a C. Now the problem with a C, when we look at the C's, we don't usually think of the C construction oftentimes in terms of a C minor in open position. That's why the caged system is a little bit weirder. But if you look at like a normal C like this and you flattened the third, then you'd have to pull this back, right? So it would look something like that. So the reason it's harder, one reason it's harder to see the caged system is because you don't see the minor. But if you follow the C up here, the minor would be going this way, on the C minor, going back. And then the next one up would be an A, which is what we're on now, an A shape, right? So this would be basically that A shape. We'll talk more about the caged system later. I just want to point out that because a lot of people don't, you don't see it mapped out in the minor in a lot of detail oftentimes, at least I haven't seen it. So then obviously if you're noodling around in the D back here, and I follow this in, you can end it with that shape. I didn't do that very smoothly, but you can end it of course with that full bar chord shape. And then you could use that shape to follow back the other way as well. The other thing you can do is take this shape apart though because you don't really need the whole shape oftentimes to play the D. So I could then remove this, I could remove this for example, and now I've got just this shape here which looks like the A shape that you finger, but those are the only three notes that you really need. So you could end it and try to mute the string above it, mute the string below it. You could mute the string above it with the meat of your finger or possibly your thumb below it with the meat of this finger and possibly your pinky. So if I'm playing back here, you can follow it in. And so I'm kind of ending it on more than just the D. There's the D right here, but I'm also kind of ending it with a full chord. And then you could start here and then go back and end it in open position. You could practice basically going back and forth that way and use the whole chord as kind of your ending position. Now you also have, if I was to go up here and I use this one, notice that this shape, I could take this and just put this finger down here. And that might be a little bit easier to play. So if you want a little bit larger chords, you could double up on that A like that. So that might be a nice way to get a touch on the top end of that as well. You can also play it like this. So I could play it like this. So now we have then these two that I'm grabbing here and then I could reach up and grab this one. And that's going to give you another F or another three. So you could use that as a little bit of an accent on it if you wanted to kind of switch back and forth possibly. So that's kind of a reach, however. So you could play it just this way as well. So you could play it with, now I'm picking up these two and I'm picking up this one. So now the root is on the bottom. And remember, the fifth is always, our fifth is always going to be above the root. And then the third, this is a minor third, is two above the root and one to the right. So this is inverted. So it gives you kind of a different feel for it. So if you were to play, I get that right. I think I did. And then you can kind of end it there versus gives you that lighter feel on it versus. And I'm just alternating from here, which is the inversion, which is a little bit heavier on these heavier strings, versus bringing that one down here to this shape, which is like the A type of shape. So you can, you can noodle in and you can, and you can as you're ending it or starting it, you can have your starting and ending in this position by, of course, playing the chord within this position. And you only really need three notes to play the chord. You only really need two notes to give you kind of that feeling or even one note to really end off on because that's going to be the root of what you are playing. Now also realize that you have this open D as well. So this, we have this open D string over here. It's the third one down from the ceiling. And I really like the minors that are constructed from the C major scale, which is the D, the E minor and then the A minor, the two, three and the six, because those are going to be your open strings and your low open strings that have kind of that base note. So you can use those low strings as kind of your base when you're on the D. So you can keep in mind, like if I play my D here, I'm playing that open string. And when I'm moving in here, I can keep in mind that this string I can basically ring it out if I want to. And I get a D. So if I hit something like this string, if I am holding down this string and then I'm letting this top string ring out, which is this open D and that D, you're getting like a double stop double D, which is kind of interesting of a sound. So if you want to close something out with just a hard D sound. So I'm hitting both of those D's at the same time, which is a kind of interesting sound. So you can kind of play around that. And then I can start to think that works well with like a shuffle pattern type of thing as well. So I like to move instead of playing this full D like this down here. Then I can say, well, I have this open D. Why don't I just hold down this A with this finger and just make a nice easy motion going from this A and then I can finger up to that G or that F and then I can let go and it'll be the D, right? So I can play the D and the A and mute everything else up to that F. And I can also from that position, I can reach with my pointer finger up to here to pick up that B, which is in the positions we're working with as well as the C. And I could if I want to reach down to that D and I can open up and reach to that G and I can always return to that open D as kind of my baseline. I can also follow this finger up until I get to the next D up here. So it's kind of fun, fairly easy little shuffle pattern that you can start practice around and learn your positions here. I'm just taking my fingers off now. And then I could reach up to this note up top if I wanted to here. And then I can follow this finger up, my pointer finger if I wanted to just follow it up until I get to the double stop D and then bring it back down. You know, you could do something like that, which is kind of fun because then you're only really needing two fingers to do that, right? And so that's kind of an interesting little shuffle pattern. So then, of course, we can target the D, we can target the whole chords, we can target other notes that are in the D minor. So we could target, then I could say, okay, I'm going to target the Fs, let's say. So there's an F here. Let's say we want the F there. Let's keep this one as my separate color. And so now I'm on my Ds. So I can kind of do around the Ds. And then as I move in here, I'm looking for the F. So if I was to go. So there's my F that kind of leaves you hanging a little bit back to here. I can close it out over here. I could close out the F while I'm in here. And now I closed and I went back from the F to this power chord from the D to the A. And then I could target the A, which isn't going to give you as much feeling, but it's going to be another note that could kind of lead you home to what we're thinking as home as the D minor. Now the A's, by the way, are here, here, here. So we could say, and there's an A. Closing it on a D right there. There's an A. There's an A. Closing it on the D minor. There's the full bar chord on the D minor. And then we could target something that's outside completely. So I could say, okay, we're on the D minor. I could target like a C again, which is going to be a whole step away. So our C's in this position are here, here, here. So if I have a D minor. Back to the D. There's a C. Back to the D. D minor there. So there's going to be, so you can target that in practice going back and forth on some of those. Okay, so the next question that's often going to come up would be, well, what if I wanted to play in a D minor instead of D Dorian? That would be a whole, then I'd switch my mind in terms of how I'm going to look at the fret board. And I'd say, okay, well if there's a D, if like this position is an A minor, the A's on this side, because I've been thinking of it as a C, a major, but the relative minor is that A. The position has an A on this side, or the major on this side, I'm sorry, the minor on this side and the major on this side. So if this is an A minor, I can look for where is a D on this top string, start it with that finger, and I can move that whole shape. So I could move that up to the D, and the D is up here. So now I can take this whole shape up to this point in the fret board. Get into it in detail. And you can move this whole relative shape up there, and you can start to think about that as a minor, right, the D minor. You're not playing in Dorian now, now you're thinking of it as a minor. So if you're going from a C chord to the D chord, instead of thinking of the D chord here, which all the notes fit into the C shape that we've constructed, because we constructed it from the C shape, but all the notes around it would be the C notes. You can think of changing it so that you're building all the notes around it. You can noodle around it in the key of D minor. One way you could do that is, again, move it up to its relative position on the guitar. Another way you can think about it is you could say, how can I convert, in essence, somewhere around the shape that I'm in to something that's in the D minor? Now, one way you can do it is you can think like this. You can say, well, if this shape, my pentatonic shape, is basically an A major or C minor, and if that's an A minor, if it's an A minor or C major, I hope I said that right, and that's going to be the minor. What if I pick my D, there's a D close by, there's the D. What if I make that the top shape, right? And then I just play it down as if it's the top shape. In other words, I'm going to play starting on the second string as though it's this string, right? And then I'd be playing, okay. And then here would be like this string. And then here would be this string. And then here we'd have to go back to that string, but it gets messed up here because the kink is in a different place. So I don't want to go into that in detail right now, but just know that you can start thinking of it that way. You can say, well, the related shape would be the same if I moved the note down for all the strings until the kink happens, right? And then you'd have to, then you got to compensate from the kink and whatnot and do that. So let's also kind of map it out though. So I'm going to go down here and we'll map it out. So what did we, we mapped it out down here in the, this is what we did when we looked at it in the key of G. So let's unhide this now. I'm going to go into here, right click and unhide. Oh, now I hit it. I'm going to right click and unhide. I'm going to hit the dots up top and say that I want to see, always see the ribbon. And then we're going to say, okay. And then I have to unhide between here to right click and unhide. And now I'm going to switch the key. Now what I, what I'd like to do is see everything on this, on this row. So I could switch it to, I need to switch it to its relative major keys because I'm looking at the D minor. So the question is, well, what's the relative major of D minor? Now it's going to go into detail how we can figure that out. I mean, you can kind of figure that out on your, on your OG worksheet over here so that we can look at the circle of fifths and figure out where the related places are. If we don't, if we don't know it, but we're kind of running along on time here. So let's just say we're going to say it's a nine, which is going to be the F. So if I look at the F and then I'm going to unhide between these cells, right click and unhide. So now if I look at my F as the one, then you can see the six, then is the D and the D is constructed from the six notes. So that would be the relative minor. So let's go ahead and look at it in terms. So you could, so let's open both of those by the way. As long as we're doing this, I could say, okay, so now I'm going to, I'm going to bring this out from, let's say 10, let's bring it out to from 13 on back to the major and right click and hide. And then let's also look at the minor. So I'm going to bring it from AT to the minor right click and hide, and I'll hide this too. So it's right next to each other hide. And so now we have the majors and the minor next to each other. What did I just do? Okay. I don't think I need this right here. Let's think about it this way. And so we're going to say, okay, so now, so this would be the major. I'm looking at the six though. So let's redo this real quick so I can say, okay, let's just redo this. I'm going to remove the formatting rules. No rules for now. I'm going to redo the rules. Let's get these out of the way out of the way. Get out of here. You're in the way. You're in the way. This is just my, my head is always in the way of the way. Okay. So I'm going to say, okay, and then I'm going to color these ones. And then I'm going to take this whole thing and say this is going to be equal to let's make it all blue first. So I can take either one of these the major in F or the related minor, which is in D, right? So but I'll take it from the here. I'm going to make this blue, make it blue. Boom, boom. And then boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom. leave out the A okay and then the C is gonna be blue the C is blue you don't need to make it blue the C is already blue and then we're gonna say the D is blue and then we're gonna say that the E is blue too and then we'll change these ones to fit the D on top of it the D minor boom is gonna be this one and that's gonna be green and then this one is gonna be red and then this one is gonna be okay so there we have it and we can see our D shape over here is there there's a D minor shape by the way minor it's a key term you keep forgetting you're gonna confuse people you got to get it right you're you're just doing damage you're not even helping you're making it worse people are more confused okay whatever I'm trying so then so there we have it so there's gonna be our D and then and then up here we can see our D basically bar shape right so there's their bar shape boom boom boom boom but you can see everything around it is is different than before even though the shape fits into it so let's go ahead and check that out by hiding let's hide from here to here hide right click and hide that stuff okay so now we can see that the shape fits in both of these so here's like shape if I oh what what what happened holding down control selecting these copy paste and I'll bring them up here so boom that shape and we might not have that top a any case so there's our shape fits in both of them but you can see the notes around them are are different right so the notes around it are going to be different so that's the point so remember that that these shapes might fit into that they're gonna fit into this shape which is the C because these three notes fit into it but we can also shift it to think about it as we're constructing it into the D minor or the related major or F and that same shift shape will fit because those three notes are in both of those scales so also just realize when we name these these positions then you might call this position I would call it position one which has that classic pentatonic in it you also could call it the G shape position because it had that G shape in it even though this isn't a G but it's a G shape that's that's in there that G shape will be in multiple major shapes but unique the pentatonic shape so in other words we can use these chord shapes to help us to label the larger scale shapes on the fretboard but we have to be careful when doing that now you might also ask since we're on a minor chord down here why don't we label these five shapes with the minor chords and we don't typically do that for a few different reasons one it's just a convention to use the major chord shapes to basically label them and two it gets a little bit tricky when doing the minor so we'll talk more about that in the future you can think about the cage system from a minor kind of construction because you can imagine building these chords to see the A the G the E the D in a major chord construction and then flattening the third to see basically a minor chord construction but we'll talk more about that in the future so in this shape down here notice we've been thinking about it as something that's in the D minor but in order to construct this fretboard that's mapped out in D minor we basically looked at its relative major which is going to be the F and if I look at this as we saw in the past because we did look at the F the F in this position on fret 5 of the fretboard you can see it has a C shape right it's got a similar C shape here for that F for that F position and we actually did that over here so you could see here's that C shape for the F position and so we noted that then if you're labeling this position you can basically label all the notes around it as basically a C type shape in you know a key of F right that's gonna one way that you can label this shape now that shape of course looks like the position one that we had up here when we were focusing in on this this is a construction of the C major chord so you can see the C shape obviously fits in here so we got the C shape fits in that position as you can see on that fret so then I would call it basically position 4 because if I looked over here we'll talk more about this later I know I'm getting in the weeds here but if we're looking at this middle position or rock and roll position as the first position and then the second position here the third position and then the fourth position here's gonna be position number four that's moving past the fret the end of the fretboard where you can see that C shape which also if I went back from position number one here's position one number one and if I go if I go back to position number five then I go back to position number four that numbering system might seem funny because you might say why don't I start on position number one and then go up from there one reason is that people generally use this mainly this pentatonic position it's so popular and whatnot that it's basically what people usually start learning and it's also kind of nice to think of that as your main home base so most people if they use a numbering system will call that position number one which is which is if you're playing in the key of C in the middle of the fretboard or the C of and the key of a minor so we'll get into more of that later just want to point that out now because that's often something of confusion that if you want to dig into it dig into it anytime that that you want so I'm going to go ahead and hide some of this stuff again to prep for next time so let's go ahead and hide this I'm going to unhide some of this right click and unhide some of that and then I'm going to make this full screen just so we can show the ribbon and then bring this on back over and then let's see if I can just that looks good that looks good I don't need the number ones because no one wants to see that right click hide that and then the number ones I'm going to hide right click and hide that and then the number ones right click and hide that although look how easy it would be to to read that number ones anyways no one cares how easy it would be if we can do that but here it is so then we'll continue on next time and then we'll continue to the next minors which is going to be the e and then the a