Movable Shapes in Guitar Chords & Shapes

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. So by now, we've taken a look through all of the five different chord shapes, CAGED, C, A, G, E and D, and both their open and moveable positions. I'd like to talk just a second about what exactly moveable positions mean. If you're not familiar with music theory, it could be a tricky concept. On the guitar, it basically means that we take the shape of a chord, for instance here's my A, and we can just--we can slide that shape. Now, what I'm doing is every time I slide this shape and I started on a different fret, I'm actually playing a different chord. I'm no longer playing an A here anymore. The way we figure out what chord we're playing is whatever chord shape that we're looking at, we want to first look at the bass note of whatever that chord shape is. They're all different. For instance, the E, the bass note was on a 6th string. The A, it was on the 5th. The D, it was actually on the 4th. And we find our bass note and in the case of the A, our base note is the note A, which is that 5th string open here. Now, if I take it and slide it, for instance, up one fret, I have the note A sharp right here. Well, that means my whole chord is going to be in A sharp if I'm playing it here. If I slide it up one more, you'll see we land on the note B here. Now, I'm playing a B chord. Go one more and I'm playing a C, and I can even go up to C sharp. So it makes it a little bit easier a lot of the times when we're playing songs. If I'm playing a C sharp chord, I can just take my A shape and slide it up four frets as opposed to learning some really difficult shape which sometimes you might find. So if you like, you can take a second and review this. You might even want to find online a diagram of all the notes on the guitar, specifically the three bass strings, so that way you can refer back to them if you're playing a chord that you're not familiar with like a B flat chord for instance. You can look at where that might lie on the guitar neck and move your moveable shape, any one of the five moveable shapes, so it'll fit within that nicely. That's the A, that's my A sharp, B, C, and C sharp. So, these are how we look at the bass notes and find the different chords for our moveable shapes.

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