Song Starter
Tell us the
chords you
know.
You get back the songs you can play today, the one chord to learn next, and what a capo does to all of it. Tune first. It takes thirty seconds.
Metronome
Practice every change to a click before you speed up.
1Tap the chords you can play.
Even badly. If you can make the shape and get most of the strings to ring, it counts. Do not know the names? The little pictures show where the fingers go.
Barre chords (index finger flat across the strings)
Extra flavours (sus, add9, sevenths)
2What you can play right now.
Every progression below is one real songs are built on, using only the chords you tapped. Press Play it and strum along. One chord per bar, four beats each.
Progressions
Learn one more chord
The single shape that opens the most new songs for you, given what you already know.
Fingerings & strum
Diagrams are the neck held upright in front of you: thickest string on the left, nut at the top. Numbers are fingers (1 index, 2 middle, 3 ring, 4 pinky). A hollow circle means play the string open, an × means skip it, a bar is your index finger across several strings.
The strum: down, down-up, up-down-up
The first pattern everybody learns, and it fits nearly every song here. Your strumming hand swings down on the numbers and up on the "ands" the whole time; the pattern only decides which swings touch the strings.
↓ down through all the strings · ↑ up through the top three or four · · keep the hand moving, miss the strings.
3What chord sounds good next, and why.
Pick a chord you are playing. Songs move between chords in a handful of ways, and each one has a feel. Press Hear it to listen to the move back and forth.
I am playing…
4Put a capo on. Play the same shapes.
A capo is a clamp across all six strings at one fret. Your fingers keep making the same shapes; the whole guitar just moves up. One fret up is one half step up. That is the entire rule.
Tap a fret.
Why anyone bothers. Guitars are easy in C, G, D, A and E because those keys use open strings. Singers do not care about that, and plenty of songs live in B♭, E♭ or F. Without a capo those keys mean barre chords all the way through. With one, they mean the chords you learned first, moved up.
The other direction. A song too high to sing? Take the capo off or move it down. Too low? Move it up. Same shapes, same fingers, new key.
Putting it on. Clamp just behind the fret wire, not on top of it, and only as tight as it needs to be. Squeeze too hard and every string goes sharp.
| Shape you make | What the room hears |
|---|
Bring it Tuesday.
Pick one progression, play it with the metronome every day this week, and we will build the rest of the song together at the next meeting.