 Guitar and Excel. Open chords C major scale E minor 3 chord on the C major scale. Get ready and don't fret because it's just a board with strings on it and Excel will tell 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 did so in a prior section 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 we're 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 seven tabs down below we've got like five of these example tabs in green one og orange tab and the practice tab the og orange tab representing the worksheet that we put together in a prior section it now acting as our starting point the baseline going forward mapping out the entire fretboard and then giving us our entire musical alphabet both letters and in numbers and combining them together having a key that can be adjusted with this green cell which will adjust the worksheets on the right hand side to the scale that we want to be in and construct the chords within that scale we wanted in this section to focus on the scale of the C major and then look at the chord constructions within it starting of course with the one chord which is the C major chord that's what we did over here on this first tab minimizing or hiding a bunch of cells so we can look at just the open position on the fretboard which i'm defining as uh frets zero through three remembering this top e is going to be the heavy string closest to the ceiling because i think that's actually the easiest way to visualize the fretboard we mapped out the uh c chord and then we discussed it in detail and then we did a similar process for the f skipping the two and the three chords in the key of c and moving to the four chord because that happens to have a major chord constructions the one four five are going to be the major chords therefore it'll have a similar a look and feel to the c chord in that the three will be a major third away as opposed to a minor third and then we talked about it in detail we then went to the five chord for the same reason it's going to be the major chord construction and therefore similar in many ways to the one chord we mapped it out and talked about it in detail then we went back to the minors so we went back to the two chord that's constructed from the c major scale and we mapped it out on the fretboard in open position talked about it in detail and now of course we are finally on the three chord the e minor chord so this is going to be a minor construction we can see that in our worksheet because the three over here has a small or lower case uh roman numeral in it remember how we construct this is we start with the e over here i'm constructing it from the c major scale starting on the three note and then skipping every other note that e the g and the b we don't actually name it however a three and then three four five and then six seven right instead we name it in relation to this e being the one within the chord and you can see that if you looked at it in relation to its uh to its actual chords if i go back to the og tab and i was to change this four to an eight which is an e and now i have the e major here if i scroll to the right i'll get to the relative minor so here's uh hold on a sec that's not the way i do it if i go down i'm going to get to the minor in e so here we have an e minor construction and the one the three and uh the five are going to be are going to be i'm sorry the one uh the three and the five that's right the one three five are going to be e g and b and if i go back on over here we've got the e the g and the b so now we're going to talk about these in terms of the one the three and the five we mapped out the one three fives in open position being defined as frets one through three and uh the the ones being the root note in green the threes being the the uh red note and then the fives being the yellow note and then we put these red markers around where our fingers would actually go or the strings that would be ringing out so it would of course look like this the fingers are going right here we discussed that in the prior section in open position you could play it like this a lot of people do that uh they think that that's easier to play but i actually like this position better as i say have in this finger kind of hanging out over here because a lot of the stuff that we're playing especially in the key of c has this finger hanging out over here including if we look at all these chords you have the c you've got the f you've got the g if you were to play it like this you still have this finger hanging out over here the d if you're playing it d minor and then so that kind of makes sense for the e to b over here it's also note i've i've heard people argue that this is a better way to play or that they like it because it converts to the g better and it and you could convert to the g like that nicely so it could be a good construction i've also heard people say that well you don't really play the the e minor and the e major together right because this looks this minor looks like the major which we'll talk about later which is you would have this thumb this finger down and then you take it off for the minor and they say well you're not going to play the major because it's not in the same key oftentimes but but note it actually yet you actually end up playing it a lot because like a lot of times i play a lot in the in the relative minor of a and when you're playing in a sometimes when you get to this e right here you give it a little bit more to get back to that a that's a common kind of thing to do so even even that argument i don't think is is exactly good because because sometimes you do play if you're playing in the relative minor which is which is another mode that we'll talk about later you take you play around this a just like we do with the e and if you take this is kind of a spanishy sounding riff that goes that plays in the basically a minor it goes like a minor and then it goes to a g and then f and then it doesn't go to an e like you would kind of think it would go it goes to that it doesn't go to an e minor like you would think it goes to the e major and again i think the reason for that is because that leads back to the to the a so the point of me all saying this is that i still think it's kind of nice to have to use these two fingers so that's why i'm just justifying my use of those two fingers anyway so then if i go down here we're looking at it on top of the major scale now so now we have the same thing but in blue we have the major scale so we want to think about how we can kind of noodle around with these notes and and possibly give them a little bit more color by using the scale around it now we'll talk about the scale more in detail in a future section remember the general idea would be we want to learn this open space frets one through three with our chord positions because that's more fun and then well actually in the next section we'll learn our scale constructions starting on fret five with our with this scale construction you might recognize the very common construction and then we'll actually learn the fret board with scales going up this way and then back down this way so we'll relearn this part of the fret board with scale constructions later so that's not really our major focus right here and then and then after that we'll actually take our chord shapes used in the caged system and relearn the same thing again by moving those shapes up as we've kind of hinted to here while we talked about these kind of movable shapes so you can practice this as a scale construction which most people when you do that you just practice playing it up and down on the fret board and then you have to learn how to play it more musically when you get to the scales that's the problem with scales you play it up and down and then the question is well how do i play it more musically or uh you can learn this by saying well look all the notes that we have been playing are going to be constructed if i put them all in one spot they will be constructed to build this this colorful blob so everything that i'm playing if i play the c i know that these notes you know i can play those and all the open notes are good because i'm in the key of c so i can kind of look at it that way as putting all these together i know if i play an f then all these notes are good so whatever i'm playing if i'm playing an e i can pick up the notes that are in the f so that's one way that you might like look at it if i play the g i know all these notes are in the key of c so if i'm playing if i'm focused on my e minor i could still grab any of those notes from these other chords and we had the d minor down here and then now we're on the e minor i'm just these are our chords you can actually kind of look at them down here or you can find them here and look at the whether it's going to be a major construction or a minor minor construction with the roman numerals on the right side now just a quick reminder that if if i'm focusing in on practicing my e minor i could see it in relation to it being the three the three note the three chord of the c major scale construction and if i do that then i'm making the c the root so i'm going to be like playing something and c here's a c and then scooting to my e minor and then i'm going back to the c maybe an f back to a c or something what i'm trying to do is make the c the center so that it feels like home and i kind of brush over this a lot so maybe i should spend a little what you're trying to make it feel like home basically all of the music that you're usually trying to do is you're trying to say this is my home base and whenever i'm doing something else like an f is moving away from it a g you're moving away from home and that gives tension and then of course you want to resolve back to going home and that should be that should give you a feeling like oh now i'm coming back to home and the ear just knows that so when people listen to it they don't know that oh you're going back home to see they just know oh that sounds like it's resolved at this point in time so that's what we're always trying to do how do you do that well the easiest way to do that is you start on the on home and then you go somewhere else you create tension and then you go back home which so you start and you end on the home on the home note is is the general thing you don't have to end every every little little lick on the home note but you get back home enough to make it feel like that's the center so when we go to an or you can try to make the e the center how do you do that well we're just going to make it home so i'm going to start playing on the e and then i'm going to play some other stuff and then i'm going to go back to the e right i'm starting and ending everything that i'm going to play on the e minor which makes it feel more like home now this if we're thinking of it as the three chord and we're playing all the chords in the key of c but i'm making the e the home base remember that's basically like playing in the third mode of the c of of the c major which if i go to the right if i look at my modes on the right there's my minor mode there's my dorian and there's my uh fridgen so we're playing in the fridgen mode so if i was to hide from here on over to here we could see that right click and hide uh did i hide or hope i didn't delete it yeah i hid them okay and then i'll scroll down a bit and we can see that that basically this is just rearranging this so now that we have the e as the one but it's still the minor chord constructions represented by the small roman numerals or lower case are the one uh the four and the seven here which is an e and a and a d whereas over here it was the the three the six and the two or the two three six but you still have the e the a and the d so it's just kind of two ways basically to see it and so you might so if you if you just want to work on the one worksheet you you can look at it and just say well yeah i'm just playing the same thing now but i'm looking i'm trying to make this the root by starting on it and uh ending on it so so then when i so so when we look at the scale constructions you might want to think about it like like how can i pick up notes from other chords as i'm playing this so the first thing we would do most likely is lift our fingers up as we did last time if i wanted to if i wanted to noodle around in here let's make this uh outline yellow we can lift the fingers up so if i went from this finger and i lifted up to pick up this finger right so now we've got this so so and i don't really have to analyze right now exactly what i'm doing right now but i know that any that's a variant i'd still be seen it as an e because i'm i'm building that off like my e minor shape right and i and i and even if i analyze it i've got a lot of ease in there and i've got everything to still build an e minor so i'd still kind of think of it as an e minor obviously we can pick this one up because any of the open strings i'm just i've just know in my mind work right because i'm in the key of c so if i open this up i'm going back on over here and i can say okay well i can go i know that's fair game so if i'm just noodling around so i can see how those two will fit in in my construction and then i could look at the notes from other from i might think of it as well if this is my e construction i can pick up notes from my c chord right i might go over here to my c tab and i can look at the notes that are within the c and say what you know what of those can i borrow as i'm kind of noodling around my e minor up top so i you know i could be playing my e minor and i could say okay well i know that this note is good and that note is good and i know this note is good down here so i could be playing like my so here's the whole c chord notice now i'm playing the e like this because that makes it easier for me to grab this one here whereas if i was to play the c here the e i'd be playing it like this right so i am switching it up here for my little shuffle pattern so notice what i'm i'm not playing the whole chord i'm not thinking i have to play the whole chord i'm just trying to say how can i take some borrow some notes from this because i know all the notes in here are in the key of c as i kind of noodle around in in uh the the e minor i could do the same with the f right so that kind of completes this little box here so i could see this little box is good and i could see this is good to to to play in here so again that kind of fits with my little shuffle pattern so i can i can move this full finger up so i'm just kind of noodling around and borrowing notes from these other uh from these other chords and i'm not trying to say well what exactly am i playing because i'm just trying to i'm just trying to put some variance in here from starting up my position at the e minor and pulling in notes so i can kind of expand what i know i'm comfortable with and allow to kind of play within here so here we have our g so now i've kind of seen i can okay i had this i know i can play that and now i've got this note up here and then i know down here i've got these notes these notes out here on the g that i can play as well so so and i also happen to know that these are are good to play so i can then say okay so you're right i'm just trying to noodle around i know that's might not be the most musically fulfilling thing right there but but you see what i'm doing i'm just basically noodling around and building my c minor but thinking of it as all the notes from the chords that i know are in the key and so if i take my my d minor construction i'm saying okay now that now i know that these notes are legal so i know that was legal from the c i know these are legal from the g so i could do something i could play my e right here and then pick up and see what that sounds like because i'm just picking these up i'm not trying to think about how does that relate to my e minor i'm just saying well i know that's legal so i'm playing an e minor and i'm picking up that note i can analyze it later i just say does it sound good to my ear right and then i could i could play the different variants of the of the e so i'm just kind of noodling around thinking of it that way and then of course you can think of it as the scale as well so i can do the same kind of thing thinking of it as my scale construction but the problem here is oftentimes when you see this big blob you don't know where you want to focus so then you want to pick something like you know like down here what we were playing and say okay i'm gonna kind of focus in on the e and then maybe you shuffle between the e minor and the c because the c has and both of those are are going to be common to both of those they're they're good on either one you're playing because every note's in the key of c so i can so i'm just doing double stops or whatever i can do with that within that little space and then of course you can play this is this is the little space we were playing before with our shuffle pattern up here and i'm not going to play the whole i'm not going to play the whole e chord but out but then we can do that little thing right here little rhythm thing and now i can see that i can see that all these notes are good i've got this i've got this i've got this i've got this and all the open notes are good so i can go like from up here i can move this down here basically playing an a minor right so i'm just kind of shuffling around and saying okay all all those notes are good and you can see that open note too it's kind of interesting up here you have your e and we saw before you can play that open string down here with the d and you can play it with the a so you can so it's kind of an interesting little fun little shuffle i'm just kind of playing the open note there's a basically power chords that you're playing kind of like uh in in the open and the open position and then and then so then you can pick you can pick whatever you're whatever you want to focus in on and kind of noodle around with that's how i would think about playing it and then when you're doing that you're not trying to think about all these things as basically being separate when you're kind of noodling you're basically thinking i'm going to blend i'm going to blend this stuff together because i know all the notes are good so i'm going to be picking my fingers up putting my fingers down and kind of blending those chords together i'm not trying and when you're doing this i would suggest not thinking about having everything separate like everything's in its own place like you can't mix the peas on the plates with the potatoes or anything you're trying to mix it all together but in some way that you're still keeping your center focus around something right so i'm kind of like uh that's like a that's like an e minor but then like a g but like a kind of shuffling back between trying to keep the feel like the e minor basically an a minor but i want to get back to the e because that's like my home so back to my e you know i'm just trying to you're just trying to blend it together using all these notes and noting that they're not all separate now they're not all separate in their own little houses and their own little chords because all of them fit together and if you if you add if you play these three notes and you add any of these other blue notes you're basically adding the seven nine eleven or thirteen the ones that we skipped that's legal you can do that or if you if you move if you if you don't select all of these notes and you pick up one of these notes that are in the scale that's still okay because you're still gonna have the feel of the root note if that's what you're trying to basically hover around and then you get something that's a little a little more wonky sounding which might be what you're going for it kind of depends what you're doing so then so that's the the major now remember the the pentatonic is taking that major scale and just removing the four and the seven so because we're playing the pentatonic in the key of c then all the notes in this chord aren't going to be in it right so that that b isn't there the pentatonic is not you might just memorize this shape you can play it up and down and play that shape we'll talk again more about the shapes themselves directly later because again not all the not all the chord shapes that we thought about the other way will fit into the pentatonic shape for the key of c because we constructed all the chords using all seven notes not just five notes but the pentatonic is usually an easier scale progression to learn and then if you are blending things across like you're you're switching keys from or you're going from one chord to another chord or playing over something else or something like that oftentimes the pentatonic scale is the safer scale to use you're less likely to clash sometimes so then we can learn you can learn the same type of things here and be noodling around basically with just the pentatonic scale and try to separate in your mind where's the pentatonic scale versus the major scale versus the the chords that are within it and and this one if you're playing the three chord of the c major scale you can have that extra note so we'll talk more about scales later so i won't go into that in a lot of detail here but then i just want to note that if you had all three of them this is all the all the colored stuff is everything that's in the major scale the green ones are the ones that are the pentatonic scale and these colored ones are the are the chord that is on top of this one this might look and then of course the this is the fingering of the chord right so this might look quite messy but when we built it you might it might make more sense when we built it layer by layer you can kind of see how they all basically fit together and then down here we talked about the movableness so we're really focusing in on the open position but remember that we want to kind of introduce the idea that you could move up move up these shapes and that's going to help you to kind of expand out out on the neck so if you're thinking about this on as the two note let's unhide here i'm going to right click and unhide and then i'm going to hide from 14 over right click and hide so so now i can start saying okay well i can play this e position here and i remember that i can when i'm thinking about moving it i'm taking this bar chord and thinking about the pieces of it that might be movable so in open position it seems like well you just play it like that but if i barred it off it would look like that and then if i'm trying to move something i could move that entire bar say up to a right and it would look like this okay but but then it might be easier to move shapes of it as well so if you move the whole bar chord you know you can move it up to a and you can kind of practice that and then you can move this shape up here now what i want to point out in this one that's different is that all all of the the chord shapes around it will not move up in the same pattern so you can arpeggiate this shape up here so you don't have to move the whole shape up you don't have to play it like a bar chord you can arpeggiate it right something like that and all those notes are good if you're kind of like noodling around so if i'm noodling around over here and and i'm making this e minor my center point then i can i can move up to here and i can play that whole bar shape or i can noodle within basically that bar shape and so i might move something else up too i might say well i can move these three notes up here so those these three and now i'm looking at this e that's going to move to that a right that e i'm going to say where does that that's right here i'm going to go up to that a so that's a legal kind of chord position right and then i could say well i can move the middle bit this is this bit right there which looks like this but i'm picking up that open string so it would look like that and i'm going to move it up and now i'm looking at this e that's moving to that a so i know that's illegal and i know that this shape where i have these three the bottom three strings can move up so if i move this up again i'm looking now at the at my root which is the bottom note and i can move that up to here which is just the bottom of my bar chord so right if i take this bar chord here i could say okay i'm going to take this finger and move it down here and that's my like middle position of the bar chord that still has everything i need to play the related chord which is an a minor and i have this that i can play down here which is basically the bottom of the bar chord now i also note that all i know that all those notes are are basically legal to play so if i'm noodling down here i could start to come up here and say right i know that these notes are kind of legal and then i could end on that on that note which is going to be our a and then get back to my basically my e over here so that and so we also learned before that some of these movable shapes you're starting to kind of learn this this is kind of like the cage system up the neck right because we learned that this c shape for example can move up to the one the four and the five we learned that this f shape for example which i'm calling it f shape in open position it's actually you know an e shape but you can play it like this so you can play it this is our our bar chord the major bar chord we saw that that can move up to to here f to a g which i usually see it like this and notice that all the notes then that are opediated in here are legal right so i can start i'm starting to say i'm starting to fill out the fretboard up here just by looking at these notes that i know that are are movable so that's chord shape i know this chord shapes up here so that's and i know this chord shape works that was my bought my a bar chord so now i'm starting to say okay i can be like a right because then i because i'm starting to fill out i'm starting to fill out my fretboard and i'm looking at these chords not just as like things one thing that i can play one shape that i can play i'm saying i hey those are notes that are legitimate up the fretboard which i can play however i can double stop this little bit see how i'm holding that down i can like just play that if this i can play these together right and i'm just kind of i'm just trying to i'm just using the shape as basically a place to fill out the fretboard up top and then we can move it from from here if i was taking that little position that middle position there's my a i'm moving it up until i hit a d which is on the 12th fret so i know i can play it up here so so you can't you cannot basically move the entire shape up is what i want to point out here so if i moved like this e you might think well this is an e bar chord shape so i'm just gonna move and i can move that shape up to the a and so all of the blue notes around it should be fair game not not the case uh because because you're gonna all the blue notes might not be fair game but everything that's in that shape will still be in the key of c and every every movable shape that we talked about that we moved up will still be kind of fair game so let me see if i can make that more concrete so down here we're going to say this if you were to to switch to the key of uh of e minor i'm going to unhide these cells right click and unhide and then i'm going to unhide these cells thought i had some more cells in here i needed to unhide somewhere unhide and so so now i'm in the e minor so here's which is related to the g major and then here's where i need to unhide the relative unhide unhide okay so now i'm going to hide and then i'm going to hide from the let's go from the 13 over to the not the major but the minor which is on the right so right click and hide so so now we're looking at the e minor so if i change my whole thought process to say okay now i'm in i'm not playing in the key of c i'm switching entirely to the the e minor then you're still gonna have this shape in here so so this is where it gets a little confusing because you're like okay well that shape is still the same so doesn't that mean all of the other notes all of the other blue notes around it will be the same well no because now we're not in the key of c we're in the key of e which is a mode that you can link back to its major root i would think about it as a link to the major which is a g so we're basically playing the g major mode which is now the e minor so so if you played it this way then you can still move up from the 145 and you can learn that you can move that shape up just like we did before to the five and then i'm sorry to the four here which is the a and then to the five which is going to be the b so and that's a useful thing to learn but you want to keep it separate in in your mind uh when you're noodling around in the key of c because if you learn everything we've talked about in the key of c all the notes that you're playing will blend together so let me show you what i mean by that if i hide from here up to here right click and hide uh so now we've got these two on top of each other and see this one on both of them this e fits in here but you have a different set of notes around it right this is different than this so you can have similar notes but you're not going to have the same the same shape around it even though the shape of the chord fits in either of the two scale shapes so those are the things that you kind of want to basically keep those separate and be able to think in your mind that if i'm playing this as it relates to the key of c then that's what i'm trying to do here say well that's useful because then if i learn all these notes that are in the key of c i can start to see them as available notes that i can play in and of themselves and i can see them as notes that i can expand my chord shapes to and still be squarely within the key that i'm playing uh whereas if you start to switch the key up here you could do that but then you have to kind of switch your mind to be saying okay now the notes around it i'm in a different key so what what are all the relative notes around it so we'll talk about the different keys later but it's useful to practice and fund practice the one four five this way i just want to point out that you want to kind of keep your mind straight on in terms of what key are you playing because that'll make it a lot easier for you to visualize all the different opportunities on the fretboard in a particular key which is confusing uh but less confusing if you just set your mind to that okay i'm going to unhide this and oh i hit it i'm going to try to reset unhide and then i'm going to hide all of the all of these so let's get it back to where it was because you messed it i messed it all up i'm going to right click and hide this and then i'm going to go to these ones and right click and hide that and then i'm going to go to these ones and then right click and hide that and then i'm going to go to these one uh and that that one looks good and then i'm going to unhide up top, unhide, and get us back to hiding just on the first four frets to the major key right click, and hide. And then I'm going to scroll up. So now that we've talked about basically trying to mush all this stuff together by playing in one space and then trying to, trying to like pull stuff in so that we're, so that we're noodling around in the entire scale and kind of mixing all the chords together and whatnot. Next time we'll try to separate it in our mind or try to kind of analyze what we're actually doing by looking at the, the intervals and whatnot, the different, the different numbering conventions and intervals.