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A 6-pack to lower your inhibitions!

Firsty Lasty

New Student
Nov 11, 2019
278
284
Something I love doing is picking notes anywhere on the fretboard and trying to make a chord out of it by ear. Sometimes I stumble across pieces of songs I recognize, sometimes I rediscover chords I already know, and sometimes I find things that sound good but I don't know wtf is going on musically. I always find the process inspiring because it give me harmonies I don't recognize.

I think it's especially important for beginners to not feel trapped within the boundaries of what you know. If you only know a few chords, the guitar doesn't care. All the other harmonies are already there waiting for you. You don't need anyone's permission to go find them. Feeling uninspired trying to work with just power chords and some major/minor cowboy chords? Make something better.

Here are a half dozen examples of chords I've found in the last couple days. A couple of them aren't too strange. While finding these I also stumbled across songs by Metallica and 7M3.

5 7 7 6 0 4 , It's "A maj 9". This is very easy to play, it sounds great, but I don't see it in chord diagrams online. Why is such a simple & useful chord not written down anywhere? What simple & useful chords will you find? You have to search for these yourself because "the internet" won't teach you everything. Thumb gets fat E string, index finger gets high e string.

x 8 7 5 0 5 , not easy to play! It's F major triad + a sharp fourth.

x 15 15 0 13 0 , another easy one. The notes are F G C E, so it's like Fsus2+maj7th

13 15 12 0 15 0 , not easy! Middle ring index pinky.

7 0 7 9 0 7 , thumb index pinky middle. Three of the notes are B in different octaves. Sometimes redundancy is just good.

this last one can be taken a few directions.
X (0 or 9) 9 11 (9 or 10) 9 , and the same shape lower down at x (0 or 4) 4 6 5 4 . Musically simple, but I like it. There are several other ways to modify this one.


Have fun with this if you're not dead inside, and share what cool things you find.