 Guitar and Excel, C major, A minor scale, fret number nine, focusing on the C note. Get ready and some coffee, because it's time to pick up our guitar skills. We haven't even picked up a guitar. No, Phil, picking up our guitar skills will not be as boring as picking up our room. That's boring. Honestly, aren't you supposed to be promoting these courses for crying out loud? Whatever. Anyways, the whole point of picking up our guitar skills is to avoid picking up our room. Because it's not the picking up part that matters. It's about what you're picking up that matters in life. It's about what you're picking up, man. Wow, that's deep. Yeah, and the more I think about it, it's actually backwards. It's not about what you pick up, but how you pick it up seems more correct. Because if you pick stuff up wrong, it doesn't sound good. So it is possible to make picking up the guitar as boring as picking up the room, or picking up the room as exciting as picking up the guitar. It is a game, isn't it, Mary Poppins? Well, it depends on your point of view. But hey, we're trying to do guitar courses here. So let's not get distracted by the sock that somehow got stuck to the ceiling. Plus, if we turn up the guitar amp to full blast, maybe we can even rock that sock down from the ceiling. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay. You could just follow along. But if you do have access, it's a great tool to run scenarios with. Quick recap of the project. Thus far, noting that you don't have to have watched all prior presentations to follow along with this one. But a general overview of the overall project can help to orientate us. So let's go back to the first tab to get that overview. We've been looking at the C major scale and related modes starting in open position, which we defined as frets 0 through 3. Remembering that this E represents the low or heavy string, the one closest to the ceiling. Funnest way to map out the notes in open position is to construct chords from the scale that we are in. Starting with the 1 chord, the C major chord, which we mapped out and discussed in detail. Then going to the 4 chord, because it also has a major chord construction, mapping it out in open position, discussing it in detail. Then going to the 5 chord, the same. Then going back to the 2 chord, because it has a minor chord construction and doing the similar process. And then the 3 chord same, 6 chord same. And then the 7 chord, which is the diminished chord, mapping it out. If we were to map out all of the notes in all those chords in open position, we would basically be mapping out the C major scale and or related modes in that position. As we can see here, it would look like basically this blue notes. We then wanted to move to the middle of the guitar, which I would call position 1, or a G shaped position, learning this area of the guitar, not first by learning it through the chord constructions, but rather learning the scaled constructions here and tying them into the chords that we learned in open position. We focused in on each of the notes in the scale. While we looked at that position, we then moved to position 7, or fret number 7 on the guitar, which I would call position 3, or a D shaped position, which we'll discuss more shortly, and did a similar process. And then we moved up to fret number 9, and we're going to do a similar scale shape process there. We discussed the fingering in a prior presentation. We discussed the intervals in a prior presentation in this position. And now we want to be focusing on each of these notes and the chords that we construct from them in this position, thinking about how we can also tie them into the prior shapes as well as the open chords that we learned in open position. So a quick recap of the color scheme here, because I know this is quite wild of a color scheme that we have. It's just the kind of wild, crazy people we are here. We've got this crazy stuff going on. This is our fret board. This E represents the low or heavy string, the one closest to the ceiling. All of the colored notes you can imagine on the bottom of them are the seven notes in the scale. All seven notes in the scale are, you can imagine, blue, basically on the bottom of all of the colored notes. And then on top of that, we put the five note pentatonic scale, which fits within the seven note major scale. That's the green notes that we put on top of it. And then on top of that, we put the three notes of the chord that we're focused in on, in this case the C major chord, which because it's the one, it fits perfectly within both the green pentatonic scale and the seven note major scale. So that's the color scheme, remembering that this chord, the chords of the one and the six are the two chords that will fit beautifully in the five note pentatonic scale. All of the other chord constructions will most likely have the four and the seven within them, and that's going to kind of mess up the pentatonic scale as we look at some of these other ones, and you'd have to augment it. But because we're on the one chord, then it fits beautifully both in the full major scale and the pentatonic scale. So then we have these color schemes here. So this red represents what I would call position one, and that's going to be in the middle of the guitar when we're looking at a C shape. So if we think about it in terms of the major scale, which is the C, and we looked at this position, you can see that this kind of G shape fits within it. So I'm going to call this whole red box right here. I'm going to label it based on this shape. So you can either call it position one, which is kind of a generic label, or I can say this G shape fits within it. Now, this is a G shaped C major chord that fits within there. That will fit into the pentatonic shape, even though there's five notes and it's a three note chord. It will, however, be able to fit in multiple shapes when we add the seven note shapes in place. You have to kind of keep that in mind. We have the orange here, which represents what I would call position number two. You can also call it an E shaped position, because if I look at it in relation to the C major chord, and I made the shape here, it would look like an E shape, looking like that. So it's an E shape that you could see like that, that we're moving up here. So that's going to be our bar chord shape. That's going to be this whole orange position. And then we are currently working on, our focus is on what I would call position three, or the D shaped position. In other words, if you look at this C, and then that C is the octave. Here's your D shape, which most people see as like these three notes up top. So you can play like these three notes. But if you want the full shape, you'd pick that up. And most likely you'd be picking this, this, and that. That's the easiest way to basically finger it. So our point of focus is in this green area. And then I tried to add a little bit more detail on the colors to put like boxes around the major shapes. We'll talk about the caged system more later. But in open position, if we're looking at a C shape, it's going to be this C. So the green is the one, the three, and then here's the one, and then here's the five. So these are what we would basically be holding down in a C shape position in open position. And then I tried to put that blue outline, which is kind of hard to see. And then inside it, the linking one is then the purple. So within this purple shape, we have an A shape. So it's pivoting around this one. And you can see that you have an A shape. That's why the purple's inside the blue. And then I pivot around and you've got this A kind of shape. And then when I go to the red position, it's the G shape. So all of these notes, the red is inside the purple because you've got that A kind of shape that looks like that, that fits inside both of the A shape leaning back and the G shape leaning forward, which would look like this, right? There's the G shape leaning forward or like this. If you have the bottom of it, we'll talk more about the caged system later. But, and then up here, we've got then pivoting around this note. Then that's why the red is on the outside and on the inside. As we move forward, we've got this orange shape. So that's why the orange is leaning forward this way like that. And that's going to be our E shaped C. And then around here, we've got the green inside of this note because if we lean forward this way, that's going to be our D shaped position. And that's basically where we're focused on this time. I'm going to actually make this orange a little bit smaller so that we can really just see clearly this whole green shape. So I've now minimized shape number two so we can focus in here. Now as we focus in here, there's a couple of ways that we might do this. We might try to say I would like to play everything in this position. So you might kind of noodle around just in this position focusing in on the C so that we're making this basically a C major sound as opposed to playing around like a D or something which would make it sound more like a Dorian. So we want to make the C basically the central point. And we could switch between chords because we could construct all of our chords, all of these chord constructions within this shape. However, most people aren't probably as comfortable with that. We might talk about that more later. But that's one method that you can use to practice this shape up top because you should be able to play everything in one shape. The other thing we can do is say, well I know the shapes in open position so if I want to be playing in something, I can play an open position here and then I can jump up to this shape and focus in on possibly noodling around playing a little rip in between the shapes and that'll help me to kind of jump back and forth and practice within this shape. So that's another method that we could use. We could also think about how we can tie this shape into the prior shape. So we can look at the C that we worked on in the prior shape and then say, okay, how can I transition from that shape to this shape so that we can practice moving back and forth between the two shapes. And then we can also think about how could we start an open position and possibly find lines that we can follow so that we can go back up and back the neck of the guitar which is often an impressive thing to do when you're playing for people and whatnot if you can go up and down the guitar even though you can play everything in any one particular position but you get different voicings of it as you play up and down the guitar which is nice. All right, so the first thing we might want to note is just where our shapes are in this position. So we said before that this is a D-shaped position. So if you know this C right here, possibly most people know this C and then we can look it for the octave. So here's the C there. There's the C there. That's my pivot point, this C between the two shapes typically. And if I lean forward, I would call this a leaning forward shape. You can pick up this C, this G, and this E. That's kind of like the default shape that's easy to play. If you have the full D, you can also, you try to pick up your pinky here and you can play this shape like that. That's hard to do to play this whole bar chord and pick up that full D triangle shape right here. So that's why to pick up the shape this way, the easiest ones to hit is this C, this G, and this E. And then you can actually pivot your pinky right here if you want to make it sound more heavy on the C. Move that pinky up to here and then you get a more heavy C sound versus... and then, whoops, that's not right. And then you kind of mute this string if you're playing this, this, and this. You want to mute this string, which is pretty easy to do so that you're not ringing out that B. So that's probably the easiest way to play it. Obviously you can play it here as well. When I'm playing it up there, I'm going to mute the string above it. You could play that D out if you wanted to, right, because that's going to be the 9, but it's going to be a lot different sounding in terms of register. So you want to kind of mute that. And you can play these three. You can also see that you have this position back here. So if I'm looking at this D shape, I can say, well, above it, I'm going to have the 5th. And then back here, you've got... Oops, what did I do here? And then back here, you've got the 3rd, right? And that's part of this full bar chord. So you can see the bar chord is up here. But if I just take a piece of that, this bit right here, then I'm in that chord. You can also think of that bar chord like this that you might play like this. And then the part that's fitting within inside this shape is just this part. Which you could play that way if you so choose. So that fits within our shape. And then we also have then the inverse, this C, this G, and then the E up there, which up top I can reach. So I kind of alter sometimes between using my ring finger here to reach this E. If you're using this shape, you can reach up there with the E. Or you can use your pinky. And so those are the major shapes that we can kind of basically focus in on. So then, so we'll go over some more of the chords when we go into future presentations as we focus in on each of the notes. But if you wanted to play within here, one of the chords that is usually often is useful to start playing is the 1, 4, 5 because those are the major chord constructions. So oftentimes people think of it as this kind of L shape. So if you were on this C right here, you can say, okay, I've got a C there. Below it is going to be the F and that's going to be the 4. And then up here, a whole step up is the 5. So you could look at those three notes and say, okay, is there a way I can build my major chords based on those notes, which is a little bit more difficult because we're on the bottom part of the guitar. So for example, if I look at this F right here, I could say, okay, what can I build from that? Well, I can see I have an F up top. So I could say, let's go from here. And you've got like a G shaped. This is a G shaped F major. So it's kind of a tricky one to play sometimes, but you have that. And then you also have then up top. If I go to that G, where's that G part of? Well, the G right there looks like it's part of the A shape. So you can kind of play around the 1, 4, 5, might be a place that you can kind of start, even though, again, reaching up that F is a little bit tricky. Most people are going to want to go back to this C, which is back behind our position, and then go to your standard L shape here, which is those three notes. But within our position up here, if we're playing off of this D shaped C, I can then go from there, and then I can go up to this F, a G shaped F, and then I can go to the A, A shaped G, and then I can go back to my D. So that's probably the first three like chords you can kind of mess around with, which are basically within this shape. And then as you're messing around with those chords, you could then do variations of the C shape within here as you're kind of altering through that, and you can do picking as you're basically switching between those chords. Now, some people might not feel fully comfortable here, and I haven't mapped out all of the different chords in this shape, we're just mapped out mainly the C. So most people probably know there are chords more clearly in open position. So another way you can kind of mess around is being in open position. You say, okay, I know my shape's from a C to an F shape to an A minor to an E, and then maybe I'm gonna say, okay, then I'm gonna jump up here and play something like in between focusing in on possibly this C up top. That way I can try to focus on what I want to practice while I still know what I'm doing in open position. So to do that, you might first say, okay, if I'm gonna jump up to this C, what do I have available to me around that C? So let's copy that and say, okay, well, if I'm on that C, I know I've got the, look right here, I've got a whole step up there, there's the D, and then down below it, I've got that G. That G's gonna be important because that's my fifth, that's my power chord, that's C, and the G is my power chord. I know that if I reach up here, I'll have the third. That's outside my shape, that would be basically out here, but that's kind of useful and it's kind of easy to reach up in this higher register of the guitar. So then we've got that G. I know that right above it, I've got my fifth as well. If I'm playing here, this whole bar, I know that I can basically play this whole thing. But right above it is another fifth, so I can double stop that fifth fairly easily, and I know I can also hit below it that F down below it fairly easily. And then I can reach up to that third, which again is outside of my shape, but I know it's out there. Now we're short on thirds here, often times with the major, and that's because it's back behind here, which is kind of uncomfortable, right? So we have to actually go back this way to pick up the third. So sometimes it's useful with the major shapes to use this kind of fingering where you're gonna have your finger below it on the third, and then reaching up to the fifth so you're getting the flavor of it, and if you wanted to play the whole chord, you can pick up these three, but it would be inverted. But if you're playing this, then you can alter as well between this E and this G, so I can do something like... See, because then I'm getting all three notes that are in the scale, but I'm kind of doing it by alternating between this E and this G, so we have that available to us. Now note that we could play open notes as well, because we're in the key of C, although the open notes are gonna sound quite different because they're in such a different register. So we don't have any C's for our open notes, but we have the open E over here, and we've got our open G that you could kind of work into your fingering as well. So for example, if I'm up here and I'm going, okay, I'm gonna put my fingers here and here, and then I'm gonna take my finger off of that E and reveal this G way back here, right? You can kind of play with that. And then this whole box is available to me in this particular shape, so when I'm thinking about this box right here, I could be doing double stops and then kind of finish off on this shape, which I think of as kind of a power chord, but then I pick up that E on the bottom. All right, so then if I focus on that and say, okay, there's the note, it's boom, boom, and then I'm down here. So we can play our chords in open positions. We have C, we have like an A minor, an E minor, a G and so on and so forth. And then as I'm playing, say a C, I might jump up here and then try to noodle around in between the playing of the C. In between playing the other chords, like an F, for example, I could still jump up here and noodle around in between playing an F, but my point of focus right now is on the C. So if I want to noodle around in between the F, I'll probably just do that basically in open position would be the idea. So first I might just start off with a C and then say, okay, if I jumped up here, I could do something like that back to the C in open position and then I could add something else in my strumming from a C to an F. Kind of mess that up. You know, something like that and we could just keep on noodleing around that way and try to work that within. Now if I focused on this C up top, I could do the same thing and say I have this C and I have this C up in this register so I could jump up to that one if I so choose and say, well, what do I have around that? If I'm leaning back here, so I have this whole box right here if I was to look at that one. I've got this box so I could do double stops here. Reach up to that to finish it. I've got these three. I've got this whole bar that I can play in here. So if I played that one in here, I could say, okay, if I was going to C, I'm going to jump up to like this C right there. You can kind of noodle around with that one. So then the next thing would be, okay, well, what if I want to try to blend and practice these two shapes that I played that I had connected so I had this shape that I was playing before, which is not that one. This is the orange shape. So the orange shape has the full bar in it, which looks like this. So now I'm looking at this orange C. So that's an E-shaped C because if I was to back here to have an E-shaped, put it up here. That's our standard bar. That's where people are probably going to want to naturally go to play a C up in this position. Comfortable to play it that way. It's also comfortable to put your finger down here instead and play it like many people would play like an F in open position, but it's really like an E-shaped bar. So you could play that one up here. That's quite a comfortable way to play it within this position. And then we're pivoting on this C. So the octave from here to here. So that's the C that we're pivoting on. So if I can get into this shape, then I can pivot into this shape. And then I can turn around and be playing it this way. So then the question we might have is say, okay, well if I play this full bar chord like this, then I basically want to get to this shape up top. So we could say, okay, if I'm playing this full bar chord, I'm in position number two and then I can kind of walk my way up to this shape here and try to blend those two things together. So we might say something like, okay, if I was here, I could go like going back. I'm going boom, boom, back to here. And so, and that takes me up to that C right there. So now I'm turning it forward this way. I might focus on playing this chord this way with this one down here. So if I look at it that way, then my pointer finger is now kind of on the bottom so I can work my way up from there. So I know I have, I can kind of work in this shape. I know this whole shape basically fits. So if I work in this shape, I know I have this box down here. So I can... And now I'm just basically reaching in playing within my shape and then I can turn it forward this way, just twisting it back the other way, walking back the other way. So here's my pointer back to my position and then I could follow that up this way. We could find different kind of avenues going from one to the other. Now we could do the same kind of thing going back to the last position. So here's my orange position. If I go back to the prior position, it was a C-shaped... I'm sorry, an A-shape. What am I doing? No, it's a G-shape, which looks like this. There's my yellow. I'm trying to grab the yellow one. I can't do it. So it's going to look like that. So if I was to say, okay, if I'm on... There's my C here, which I can also see basically this way. My pivot point I can imagine is this C up top or this C down here. And that's going to connect to this one, which is like, you can see the A part of it. But if I lean it forward, then it's that G-shape. So if I started in this position, which I would call the G-shape position or position number one, focusing in on this C, then I could say, okay, well, how can I pivot around that C? I could start here. And that takes me to this E, which I can then switch to this C. And then that pivots on that C, which I'm turning around this way. Then I'm going to follow this pointer back. So I'm just trying to find lines that I can go from one position to the other, looking at my pivot points so that I can basically end up and arrive at those shapes, giving myself leeway starting an ending point. And I'm doing this kind of quick because we're running long. So the next one is my A-shape back here. So if I look at that one, I could say, okay, well, if I'm going from this shape, which is kind of like an A-shape C major, then the pivot point is this C right here. So then I can say, okay, if I'm going from this shape, then I might want to pivot up to this C, something like that, or like that. And then I can go from that C up if I want, to this C right here. So now I'm on this shape, which is going to be my forward facing bar chord, E major bar chord. And then I can go up from there to this shape. And there's my D. Go back the other way. And then back to my A-shape. So it starts to get, so you can go through one of these transitions at a time. And then once we have the idea of it, I can pivot on this C. And there's my normal C-shape here. So obviously my C-shape here. I can pivot on this note to my A-shape. Pivot into my G-shape here. Go into my D-shape. So now I'm just trying to find lines that I can go back and forward from this shape, looking at my major pivot points, which is going to be basically like this C, and then possibly like this C, and then either this C or this C as I then twist my shapes around. So let's try that again and let's think of it try to follow my fingers and slide into the proper position. So if I think about this C-shape here, then I could slide in to this D or this E. So I could say let's take this C-shape and I'm sliding into basically this shape. I've got too many things. Hold on. And then I slid into basically this shape here and then I'm going from this shape and say, okay, how can I reach up to that shape? So I've got my pointer finger on this shape right here. So now I'm reaching up here with my pinky and so now I have my pinky up there. My pointer is down here. So if I want to keep on with the pointer, the easiest thing might be to move slide it up. So now my pointer is on this G. So now I'm here and from this A I have and I could slide this up to my C here which basically gets me to my C-shape which I could then walk up and do my that's my D-shape C, like so. So I know that was a little bit sloppy to try to point everything out as I'm going here, but I think the idea now that we're way up here is to basically say can I get one transition at a time connecting the shapes together and then look at these pivot points where you can be in one position noodling around in one position and then alter it to the next position and what will help with that as well will of course be the caged system which we're clearly touching in on right here but we'll discuss in more detail later. So in other words if you can basically map out your caged system which we'll talk about in more detail later then that's going to help you but you also want to be able to see the shapes within side of it so that you're not just playing chords, different chord shapes up the neck but using those chord shapes as anchors to add a little bit more detail in there if you're trying to noodle around as you're going up and down the neck what are smooth pathways, transitions that you can make as you're moving up and down the neck.