10-Day Guitar Challenge: Day 1

hi guys my name's Andy Crowley thank you for joining me for day one of this 10day guitar challenge where we're going to play guitar for 10 minutes a day for 10 days this day one is my absolute beginner's first lesson so if you were taking a onetoone uh private lesson with me and you'd never even held a guitar before or you tried a few bits in the past but it was a long time ago and this is the guitar lesson that I would be showing you in this lesson I'm going to show you how to play the easiest two chords on guitar and then get you playing your first song by the end of this video in under 10 minutes so if you've never even played a song before this is the ideal place to start and let's get you straight in for a closeup and learn how to play these two easy chords so the first chord we're going to be learning is the E major chord also known as an E chord and this is where we need to place our fingers to be able to play it now if your guitar isn't in tune it doesn't really matter where you put your fingers on the guitar it's not going to sound right there is a video of mine in the description below where you'll find a video showing you exactly how to tune your guitar with and without a guitar tuner so check out that video first if you suspect that something isn't sounding right here but I'm going to talk you through a couple of other bits of the guitar before we get fully started so these metal strips going down the guitar here are your Frets and going across are the strings we number the strings thinnest to thickest so one two three four five six and each fret it's the area between the metal strips that we'd call fret one fret two and fret three anytime we place a finger on a fret we really want it to be to this side of the Fret so the side nearest to you up against the metal strip but not on it so if I wanted to place my finger on First Finger first fret it would be placed here rather than in the middle and we also want to be right on the tip of your finger like this for this first chord the E major chord we need that first finger to be on the third string at that first fret so that's just here right on the tip of our finger and we are pressing between our thumb and First Finger my thumb is directly behind where my first finger is on the guitar just here the middle finger needs to be at the second fret of the fifth string so string five 1 2 3 4 5 and the third finger otherwise known as the ring finger goes here directly underneath at the same fret on the string below so just one recap these fingers are placed finger number one or the index finger middle finger and the third finger finger here the little finger it's best to keep it as close to the third finger as possible rather than shooting off and doing its own thing this is where we want to place it here for this particular chord we do want to strum all six strings and make sure that they're all heard so let's do that now and strum our E major [Music] chord now that sounds like it should sound and hopefully yours sounds the same if not your guitar may be out of tune so check out that tuning video however we also want to make sure that all six strings are ringing out by which we want to pick the thickest to the thinnest string so string six to [Music] one and if they all sound like that then we're doing it correctly possibly one of the strings sounds a little bit like this we got a little bit of either buzzing or it's not ringing out at all like this there are two common reasons that that can be the case the first thing is you need to be at this side of the Fret as I said at the start of the video if they're in the middle of the Fret that may not ring out they all want to be at this side of the Fret not at the far side and then each finger also needs to be right on the tip not flat now this is common because whenever we hold things say if I was just holding this guitar neck to pick it up we'd grip it like this but this is not how we press down notes on a stringed instrument we need to be right on the tips of our fingers and make sure that this joint in our fingers is bent and kind of curled over so that each tip of the finger is at 90° to the Fret and when those two things are the case when we're at this side of the Fret and on the tips of our fingers it's just a case of getting that right amount of pressure down but with the right finger placement it may be a little bit less than than you think now even I at this point have some lines on the end of my fingers this is normal we do have to press down you know a decent amount to get the note ringing out but try not to press down any more than you need to try and find that sweet spot the second chord we're going to cover in this video is the air major chord and with this chord we can play any one of 10 songs as I say there will be a song at the end of this particular video but there are a number of songs 10 songs that are played only using these two chords on my website and the link to that is also in the description so to play the a major chord it's best to start off on the E major chord that we already known now we need to keep this first finger down but lift the other two away and this is really important this is going to be our anchor finger because when we're learning chords the hard thing isn't necessarily playing one chord it's the change between so what we're going to do is keep this first finger down but slide it over to the second fret and this time we want to be around in the middle of the Fret because we're going to place the middle finger above it at that same second fret and the third finger directly below it and this is the a major chord you may have seen this chord played like this however if this is the first time you've ever picked up a Guitar before it's going to be incredibly difficult to change between any chords and these included so we're making this as easy as possible by keeping contact with the fretboard at all times and using that first finger as an anchor point so this is the a major chord that we're going for Let's uh place this first finger at the third string second fret one 2 middle finger goes directly above it and third finger below it and it's best to keep that first finger around in the middle of the Fret this time and this time only really so that we can fit the other two in and with this particular chord we want to strum from string five and this is what the a major chord should sound like to check that all those strings are ringing out we want to pick again from the thickest to the thinnest but we're going to start from string five there is more opportunity for Strings not ringing out on this one so again try and get them as far to towards you as possible and keep right on the tips that is the best way to get them ringing out but you may have to press on just just a little bit harder on this chord to get those strings ringing out one more time strum pick each string and [Music] strum so to change between those chords we need to keep that first finger down at all times and change between them so if we go back to the E major chord now and just give it one single strum of all six strings we keep the first finger down slide to the second fret middle finger above third finger below and strum and then to change back the first finger stays down slide it back to that first fret middle finger above third finger below and strum again so we're on that first chord that we looked at now the E chord so we keep the first finger down we slide it to the second fret for the second chord that we looked at middle finger above third finger below and strum try and strum from the fifth string so missing out the thickest string but if you do accidentally catch that thickest string it's okay for now we're just learning first finger stays down we move back to the first fret for our first chord which is the E major and strum and that's our E major now you may wish to pause the video here so that you can have a little bit longer practice between those two chords changing between the the E and the a chord remember to keep your first finger down at all times and the first chord we looked at has your first finger on the first fret and then chord number two the air chord first finger second fret middle finger above third finger below and strum and you're wanting your fingers to take around a second to go to each chord to move on to the second part which is basically going straight for our our first song which is a song called for what it's worth by Buffalo Springfield this song has just these two chords and we have to play each chord for a bar of each to do this we need to understand about bars and beats the beat is whatever you would nod your head to when your favorite song comes on so when you're kind of grooving onto a song and tapping your foot and enjoying it you're tapping your feet or nodding your head to the beat this is an even pulse throughout the song and It generally goes to a count of four so an even count of 1 2 3 4 and that is repeated throughout an entire song evenly it's that count of four that we call a bar so the simplest struming pattern we can do for any song is just strumming on the beat and we're going to strum each chord in this particular song four times so we strum the E chord four times 1 2 3 4 four and keep that first finger down when we're going to change to the second chord which is the a chord and then strum this four times one 2 3 4 and then we need to change back to the E chord and do this in a loop for around a minute and if you've never heard that particular song that we're going for the link is in the description to a YouTube video of the song so you can have a quick listen to it to hear what we're going for and you should pretty distinctly hear this uh rhythm guitar part throughout the entire [Music] [Applause] [Music] song now keeping the strumming hand going while changing chord is undoubtedly the trickiest part of learning songs on guitar however this anchor thing keeping the first finger down makes it a much easier task and helps us going forward to learn the other chords that we're going to be learning in the coming days so drilling this change is so important rather than learning more chord so many beginners get a book full of 10 chords or 100 chords and try and learn them but it's mastering the change between them that's going to get you the end goal of being able to play real songs as soon as possible and hopefully this will be one that you can play just in a few minutes now by following me so let's start with the E major chord the first chord we covered in this video and we're going to strum this four times and soon as we've done that we want as soon as we strum that fourth strum we want to change immediately to the air cord as swiftly as possible now if this takes a few attempts and that is totally fine because this is the end goal of this first video of this day one of this 10day guitar course so so if it's a little struggle at first that's understandable cuz it might be the first thing that you've ever done go easy on yourself allow this trickiest part of this the cord changes to bed in and for you to get used to them before you put too much pressure on yourself so let's play along together really slowly now and let's have a go playing our first song for what it's worth by Buffalo Springfield so we get ready on our eord we press down and we begin struming in 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 then change to the a chord and begin strumming again 1 2 3 back to the E changing back and 1 2 3 4 first finger stays down we change to the A 1 2 3 4 and pause there so now Now's the Time to take stock with how you're doing if you need to pause the video just briefly one time again to just do some individual changes which will drill that change a little more often to help you get used to it more maybe take a quick break to rest your fingers a little bit cuz you might have big lines and they might be quite sore that's understandable and totally normal in the beginning and when you feel up to it play this video from this point one more time and this time we're going to try and get those spaces between the chord changes as as quick as possible and the goal is just to keep our right hand strumming evenly no matter what chord we're playing or whether there's a change or not we're just going to try and keep this chord and strumming okay so from the E chord Play Along With Me One Last Time in 1 2 3 4 e 2 3 then 2 a a 2 3 4 e 2 3 4 and a 2 3 4 e 2 3 4 a 2 3 one last time from the e e 2 3 4 and a 2 3 finish on [Music] E and that's that's how to play our first song and that is the end of day one of this 10day guitar challenge so thank you very much for making it this far your homework now is to practice these two chords the E major and the a major the changes between them and then try and play them for four strums of the E chord and the four strums for the a chord and we want to keep that chord sequence going for around a minute and in total that should be around 10 minutes worth of practice so if you do that straight away after watching this video you'll be in the perfect position to join me for day two tomorrow where we'll learn a new guitar chord and a new song and this time the song will have a very easy lead guitar part which is a bit more of a Melody so we won't just be focusing on chords in this course we'll also focus on some single string playing as well it's going to be really cool it's going to sound just like the song and be really really recognizable something great to show your friends and I hope you will join me there thank you very much for watch watching guys please subscribe if you enjoy this course and I'm sure I'll see you again in one of my videos take care of yourselves and bye for now

hi guys my name&#39;s Andy Crowley thank you for joining me for day one of this 10day guitar challenge where we&#39;re going to play guitar for 10 minutes a day for 10 days this day one is my absolute beginner&#39;s first lesson so if you were taking a onetoone uh private lesson with me and you&#39;d never even held a guitar before or you tried a few bits in the past but it was a long time ago and this is the guitar lesson that I would be showing you in this lesson I&#39;m going to show you how to play the easiest two chords on guitar and then get you playing your first song by the end of this video in under 10 minutes so if you&#39;ve never even played a song before this is the ideal place to start and let&#39;s get you straight in for a closeup and learn how to play these two easy chords so the first chord we&#39;re going to be learning is the E major chord also known as an E chord and this is where we need to place our fingers to be able to play it now if your guitar isn&#39;t in tune it doesn&#39;t really matter where you put your fingers on the guitar it&#39;s not going to sound right there is a video of mine in the description below where you&#39;ll find a video showing you exactly how to tune your guitar with and without a guitar tuner so check out that video first if you suspect that something isn&#39;t sounding right here but I&#39;m going to talk you through a couple of other bits of the guitar before we get fully started so these metal strips going down the guitar here are your Frets and going across are the strings we number the strings thinnest to thickest so one two three four five six and each fret it&#39;s the area between the metal strips that we&#39;d call fret one fret two and fret three anytime we place a finger on a fret we really want it to be to this side of the Fret so the side nearest to you up against the metal strip but not on it so if I wanted to place my finger on First Finger first fret it would be placed here rather than in the middle and we also want to be right on the tip of your finger like this for this first chord the E major chord we need that first finger to be on the third string at that first fret so that&#39;s just here right on the tip of our finger and we are pressing between our thumb and First Finger my thumb is directly behind where my first finger is on the guitar just here the middle finger needs to be at the second fret of the fifth string so string five 1 2 3 4 5 and the third finger otherwise known as the ring finger goes here directly underneath at the same fret on the string below so just one recap these fingers are placed finger number one or the index finger middle finger and the third finger finger here the little finger it&#39;s best to keep it as close to the third finger as possible rather than shooting off and doing its own thing this is where we want to place it here for this particular chord we do want to strum all six strings and make sure that they&#39;re all heard so let&#39;s do that now and strum our E major [Music] chord now that sounds like it should sound and hopefully yours sounds the same if not your guitar may be out of tune so check out that tuning video however we also want to make sure that all six strings are ringing out by which we want to pick the thickest to the thinnest string so string six to [Music] one and if they all sound like that then we&#39;re doing it correctly possibly one of the strings sounds a little bit like this we got a little bit of either buzzing or it&#39;s not ringing out at all like this there are two common reasons that that can be the case the first thing is you need to be at this side of the Fret as I said at the start of the video if they&#39;re in the middle of the Fret that may not ring out they all want to be at this side of the Fret not at the far side and then each finger also needs to be right on the tip not flat now this is common because whenever we hold things say if I was just holding this guitar neck to pick it up we&#39;d grip it like this but this is not how we press down notes on a stringed instrument we need to be right on the tips of our fingers and make sure that this joint in our fingers is bent and kind of curled over so that each tip of the finger is at 90° to the Fret and when those two things are the case when we&#39;re at this side of the Fret and on the tips of our fingers it&#39;s just a case of getting that right amount of pressure down but with the right finger placement it may be a little bit less than than you think now even I at this point have some lines on the end of my fingers this is normal we do have to press down you know a decent amount to get the note ringing out but try not to press down any more than you need to try and find that sweet spot the second chord we&#39;re going to cover in this video is the air major chord and with this chord we can play any one of 10 songs as I say there will be a song at the end of this particular video but there are a number of songs 10 songs that are played only using these two chords on my website and the link to that is also in the description so to play the a major chord it&#39;s best to start off on the E major chord that we already known now we need to keep this first finger down but lift the other two away and this is really important this is going to be our anchor finger because when we&#39;re learning chords the hard thing isn&#39;t necessarily playing one chord it&#39;s the change between so what we&#39;re going to do is keep this first finger down but slide it over to the second fret and this time we want to be around in the middle of the Fret because we&#39;re going to place the middle finger above it at that same second fret and the third finger directly below it and this is the a major chord you may have seen this chord played like this however if this is the first time you&#39;ve ever picked up a Guitar before it&#39;s going to be incredibly difficult to change between any chords and these included so we&#39;re making this as easy as possible by keeping contact with the fretboard at all times and using that first finger as an anchor point so this is the a major chord that we&#39;re going for Let&#39;s uh place this first finger at the third string second fret one 2 middle finger goes directly above it and third finger below it and it&#39;s best to keep that first finger around in the middle of the Fret this time and this time only really so that we can fit the other two in and with this particular chord we want to strum from string five and this is what the a major chord should sound like to check that all those strings are ringing out we want to pick again from the thickest to the thinnest but we&#39;re going to start from string five there is more opportunity for Strings not ringing out on this one so again try and get them as far to towards you as possible and keep right on the tips that is the best way to get them ringing out but you may have to press on just just a little bit harder on this chord to get those strings ringing out one more time strum pick each string and [Music] strum so to change between those chords we need to keep that first finger down at all times and change between them so if we go back to the E major chord now and just give it one single strum of all six strings we keep the first finger down slide to the second fret middle finger above third finger below and strum and then to change back the first finger stays down slide it back to that first fret middle finger above third finger below and strum again so we&#39;re on that first chord that we looked at now the E chord so we keep the first finger down we slide it to the second fret for the second chord that we looked at middle finger above third finger below and strum try and strum from the fifth string so missing out the thickest string but if you do accidentally catch that thickest string it&#39;s okay for now we&#39;re just learning first finger stays down we move back to the first fret for our first chord which is the E major and strum and that&#39;s our E major now you may wish to pause the video here so that you can have a little bit longer practice between those two chords changing between the the E and the a chord remember to keep your first finger down at all times and the first chord we looked at has your first finger on the first fret and then chord number two the air chord first finger second fret middle finger above third finger below and strum and you&#39;re wanting your fingers to take around a second to go to each chord to move on to the second part which is basically going straight for our our first song which is a song called for what it&#39;s worth by Buffalo Springfield this song has just these two chords and we have to play each chord for a bar of each to do this we need to understand about bars and beats the beat is whatever you would nod your head to when your favorite song comes on so when you&#39;re kind of grooving onto a song and tapping your foot and enjoying it you&#39;re tapping your feet or nodding your head to the beat this is an even pulse throughout the song and It generally goes to a count of four so an even count of 1 2 3 4 and that is repeated throughout an entire song evenly it&#39;s that count of four that we call a bar so the simplest struming pattern we can do for any song is just strumming on the beat and we&#39;re going to strum each chord in this particular song four times so we strum the E chord four times 1 2 3 4 four and keep that first finger down when we&#39;re going to change to the second chord which is the a chord and then strum this four times one 2 3 4 and then we need to change back to the E chord and do this in a loop for around a minute and if you&#39;ve never heard that particular song that we&#39;re going for the link is in the description to a YouTube video of the song so you can have a quick listen to it to hear what we&#39;re going for and you should pretty distinctly hear this uh rhythm guitar part throughout the entire [Music] [Applause] [Music] song now keeping the strumming hand going while changing chord is undoubtedly the trickiest part of learning songs on guitar however this anchor thing keeping the first finger down makes it a much easier task and helps us going forward to learn the other chords that we&#39;re going to be learning in the coming days so drilling this change is so important rather than learning more chord so many beginners get a book full of 10 chords or 100 chords and try and learn them but it&#39;s mastering the change between them that&#39;s going to get you the end goal of being able to play real songs as soon as possible and hopefully this will be one that you can play just in a few minutes now by following me so let&#39;s start with the E major chord the first chord we covered in this video and we&#39;re going to strum this four times and soon as we&#39;ve done that we want as soon as we strum that fourth strum we want to change immediately to the air cord as swiftly as possible now if this takes a few attempts and that is totally fine because this is the end goal of this first video of this day one of this 10day guitar course so so if it&#39;s a little struggle at first that&#39;s understandable cuz it might be the first thing that you&#39;ve ever done go easy on yourself allow this trickiest part of this the cord changes to bed in and for you to get used to them before you put too much pressure on yourself so let&#39;s play along together really slowly now and let&#39;s have a go playing our first song for what it&#39;s worth by Buffalo Springfield so we get ready on our eord we press down and we begin struming in 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 then change to the a chord and begin strumming again 1 2 3 back to the E changing back and 1 2 3 4 first finger stays down we change to the A 1 2 3 4 and pause there so now Now&#39;s the Time to take stock with how you&#39;re doing if you need to pause the video just briefly one time again to just do some individual changes which will drill that change a little more often to help you get used to it more maybe take a quick break to rest your fingers a little bit cuz you might have big lines and they might be quite sore that&#39;s understandable and totally normal in the beginning and when you feel up to it play this video from this point one more time and this time we&#39;re going to try and get those spaces between the chord changes as as quick as possible and the goal is just to keep our right hand strumming evenly no matter what chord we&#39;re playing or whether there&#39;s a change or not we&#39;re just going to try and keep this chord and strumming okay so from the E chord Play Along With Me One Last Time in 1 2 3 4 e 2 3 then 2 a a 2 3 4 e 2 3 4 and a 2 3 4 e 2 3 4 a 2 3 one last time from the e e 2 3 4 and a 2 3 finish on [Music] E and that&#39;s that&#39;s how to play our first song and that is the end of day one of this 10day guitar challenge so thank you very much for making it this far your homework now is to practice these two chords the E major and the a major the changes between them and then try and play them for four strums of the E chord and the four strums for the a chord and we want to keep that chord sequence going for around a minute and in total that should be around 10 minutes worth of practice so if you do that straight away after watching this video you&#39;ll be in the perfect position to join me for day two tomorrow where we&#39;ll learn a new guitar chord and a new song and this time the song will have a very easy lead guitar part which is a bit more of a Melody so we won&#39;t just be focusing on chords in this course we&#39;ll also focus on some single string playing as well it&#39;s going to be really cool it&#39;s going to sound just like the song and be really really recognizable something great to show your friends and I hope you will join me there thank you very much for watch watching guys please subscribe if you enjoy this course and I&#39;m sure I&#39;ll see you again in one of my videos take care of yourselves and bye for now

Transcript for:10-Day Guitar Challenge: Day 1

Transcript for:
10-Day Guitar Challenge: Day 1