Introduction

Hey there, you're probably here because you love Jesus and you love worshipping him. Maybe you know how to play the guitar or the piano, or not. Maybe you're a beginner or you know your instrument well. You're probably thinking: music theory, pff, that's boring, that's complex, that's dry. But I have good news for you. Music theory can actually be really fun, and it can help you improve and simplify your playing a lot and free up some space in your head while worshipping. The less you have to think while playing, the more focus you can have on actually worshipping, and that's what we want, right? Therefore, I think everyone benefits a lot from some basic understanding of how music works. And I have good news for you: contemporary worship music is simple. Yes, it's really deliberately simple. It's so simple that it even feels dull to do when you know how complex other music can be. But why is this so? The music should support you in worshipping and get out of your way. Your focus should be to give all the glory to Jesus, to pour out your heart before him, to stand in awe and adoration before him and to surrender to his good plan for you and your life. Music is a gift that can help you express that, and the bar should be as low as possible for everyone to join in and participate. I know we can praise him with complex music as well. It's a gift as well, and there is so much beauty in it. When I hear the masterpieces of the ancient composers, my heart opens up and praises God for such beauty, but not everyone can easily join in with this music. Therefore, I'm glad that we have this stripped-down contemporary worship music, which in its simplicity has a lot of beauty as well and is very well suited for worshipping all together. And since the music is simple and the bar should be low for everyone to join in, the same should hold for this course. So if you want a comprehensive course of all the facets of music and learn music theory the hard way, like I did, go and read a book of a few thousand lines. If you are a nerd like me, you probably have some fun doing so, but for all the others I want to break it down to the simplest and most basic concepts you need to know, so that it should be easy to follow for everyone. My name is Felix, and one thing you'll quickly realize about me is that I'm a little nerd. You will probably notice it in a few places within this course. I studied computer science and therefore do think a bit mathematically from time to time. I've learned music theory the hard way, practicing all the scales, cadences, harmonies, and much more, like real-time harmonizing of old hymns, etc., while learning to play the organ. And it was quite a challenge for me to switch from doing that complex stuff to the simplicity of contemporary worship music without overdoing it. The simple patterns I will show you helped me a lot to stay within that simplicity. So if you are a classical pianist, organist, or whatever your background, this course is for you as well. You're just like me, coming from the other side. Let's all meet in the middle. In this course, you will learn how to play nice and easy chords without thinking about it too much. You probably saw chords like F#m7add11 and thought, what the heck, I'm not playing this. If you follow this course, you will and you won't even notice. I will introduce you to contextualized chords, where you don't have to think of any extensions—I mean that 7add11 stuff—because they will arise naturally without any thinking. You will play nice chords and sound like a pro, with much more depth, color, and fullness within your chords and playing, and it will get simpler as well. I know this sounds too good to be true, but it enabled even me to play the guitar, and I'm not that good at bending my fingers. And it helped me to play without much mental effort, so you can fully focus on worshipping. So let's get started.

0. Technical Background

Ever wondered why music theory is the way it is, what a tone is, and why we have twelve of them (twelve equal steps per octave)? No? That's completely fine. Feel free to skip this chapter and start with the real stuff. But if you're interested and have a few minutes, I encourage you to read through it. You don't have to remember everything or even completely understand everything. But within the technical background of how music works, there is so much beauty that God put into it that we can discover, even though we only scratch the surface. The theory of how music works is nothing we have created; we have discovered it. It's beauty baked into the core physics of our world—wonderfully crafted. And we can use it to take pleasure in it and praise God with it.

The Two Dimensions of a Tone

So what is a tone? Like everything that is, it's a wave. Something that moves back and forth. For example, if you pull on a string on your guitar or press a key on the piano, a string moves back and forth. That string moves the air back and forth until it reaches your ear. Then some parts in your ear move back and forth, and your brain translates it into something that we call a sound we can hear. Isn't that stunning? And there are two dimensions to it. How strongly or widely it moves, which defines how intense and how loud the sound is, and how fast it moves, which defines how low or high the sound is. That's why, when you pull hard on the string, it becomes louder, and if you make the string shorter or tighten it more, it moves faster and therefore becomes higher.

It's All About Color

In music theory, we only focus on the second dimension: how high it is. And in physics we measure it by how often it moves back and forth per second. For example, if you pull your fifth string on the guitar, the A string, it vibrates about 110 times per second in standard tuning, and we call the frequency 110 Hz. So we have infinitely many tones we can technically produce—everything from 0 Hz to infinity. But we cannot hear everything. Most people can hear roughly between 20 Hz and 20 kHz (it varies with age and the individual). The range of an 88-key piano goes from 27.5 Hz up to 4.19 kHz. A guitar is much more limited; it goes from 82.4 Hz up to 1.39 kHz. But still, in each of these ranges, there is an infinite number of tones because you can put as many digits after the decimal point as you want, but at some point, we are no longer able to distinguish them.

Making the Continuous Scale Discrete

But with such a continuous scale, it's pretty hard to do theory. It's hard enough to do theory with the twelve equal pitch steps we use in modern music, but it's impossible to do it with an infinite number. So do we just randomly pick twelve frequencies and define that these are our tones? That's exactly what many people think, but it's not random. It's designed into the core of physics, and to understand that, we have to look into why a guitar sounds different from a piano and why a trumpet sounds different from a violin. Isn't it true that if I play the same tone on each of these instruments, they have the exact same frequency? And I can even play them with the same intensity, so they have the same volume, right? That's right, but why do they sound different?

Overtones or Harmonics

The answer is that a frequency almost never comes alone. It has some other frequencies that belong to it, which are baked into physics. These are called harmonics or overtones. So if you play a tone on any instrument, not only is the fundamental frequency of this tone produced, but an infinite number of higher frequencies are produced as well, and the intensity of these higher frequencies defines the color of the tone. Listen to how those overtones show up as different "colors" in practice:

And that's why different instruments sound different: they have a different color because their overtones are different. And the same effect that gives the tone itself color through the overtones is the effect we use in music theory to combine tones to create color. So we have to understand the overtones and what creates the color to create color ourselves. I know, now it gets really nerdy, and I hope that you are still with me.

The First Simplification: Octaves Are the Same

The first overtone/second harmonic has exactly double the frequency. It's the points where the waves don't align that bring color. If you have double the frequency, they do align at every zero point of the fundamental frequency. That is boring; that is almost no color. It's so boring that we even consider it the same tone in music theory. That's why on your piano every white key before the two black keys is called C, even though it is a different tone. The span between these two frequencies is what we call an octave. And now we notice the first simplification we make in music theory. If we consider every octave of a tone the same, we only have to focus on one octave because after that, everything just repeats. But now we want some color, but the least amount of it. The next simple ratio we meet is 3:2, which corresponds to a perfect fifth. When you compare the waves for those two frequencies, the zero-crossings line up fairly often, but not as perfectly as in the octave, so it still sounds relatively pure. We call this interval a fifth. For the ultimate nerds among us: it comes from comparing harmonics, but since we treat octaves as the same tone, you hear it as a fifth relative to the root :)). We could go on like this forever and discover the whole family of simple intervals, but since you are probably already bored and I don't want to waste your time, we stop here; you see the pattern. The interval with the sharpest color we know is the minor second. In the "pure" model this corresponds to the frequency ratio 16:15 (a minor second).

The Second Simplification: Equidistant Semitones

From those overtones/harmonics, we can build a picture of "pure" intervals like octaves (2:1), perfect fifths (3:2), and the minor second (16:15). But here's the problem: if you want those simple ratios, you can't also make every key perfectly work at the same time. So we make another simplification: we divide the octave into twelve equal steps (semitones). In twelve-tone equal temperament, each semitone step has the frequency ratio 2^(1/12) (about 1.05946). That means the "minor second" is close to 16:15, but not exact, so no key is perfectly in tune, yet all keys are equally usable.

The Circle of Fifths

With this simplification, we get something cool because we can just use the fifth and repeat it to get around each of the twelve pitch classes, and after that, it repeats. This is called the famous circle of fifths.

Some Takeaways

We now understand the foundation of our modern twelve-tone system. The key takeaway is that these twelve equidistant semitones fill an octave and repeat indefinitely. Each tone possesses its own unique character shaped by natural overtones and harmonics. By leaning into this God-given physics of sound, we can harness musical color to create genuine beauty.

1. Scales

What Is a Scale?

Now we know the basic grid of which almost all music I know is made: the twelve semitones we derived from the physics of sound. We already achieved a lot—we've come from an infinite number of frequencies and now have twelve tones we can do music theory with. But twelve is still a lot when we try to combine notes that sound nice together. We still have too many combinations. But God gave us the ability to think abstractly, and we can use that gift once again. Instead of focusing on all twelve notes, we can pick some that sound nice together. So we divide the twelve tones into two groups: the ones that are in and the ones that are out. And that is actually what a so-called scale is.

Explore the Twelve Semitones

Below you'll find a list of all twelve semitones. I know these are thirteen because the first and the last one are the same. Now you can randomly pick tones that are in and others that are out, and hear how it sounds. I've also included some presets of common scales that other people came up with over the years.

The Major Scale

Now you're probably thinking: man, these are a lot of scales… But the nice thing is that there are only a few that are relevant, and one is so prominent in CCM and our whole Western music that it's enough to learn this one and consider the other ones small adjustments—which happen in, like, less than 1% of the songs. And this scale is the major scale.

Seven Notes from the Circle of Fifths

This scale may seem random, but actually what sounds good is not random. God is a God of order and he designed beauty to have some sort of order. In the Middle Ages, our Western scales were born by choosing seven out of the twelve tones. Why seven? Because it's the perfect number. The godly (three, Trinity) and the earthly (four, the four cardinal directions) come together. That's what Jesus achieved on the cross. I don't know if this is why they chose seven, but they did choose it. And instead of randomly picking seven notes, they used the first seven fifths inside the circle of fifths we already saw in Chapter 0—out of which the twelve tones are built. And this leads us to the unique pattern that is so prominent it impacted the design of the piano: the seven white keys that are in and the five black keys that are out. What they did in the Middle Ages: they took the first seven fifths, brought them into order, and gave them the first seven letters of the alphabet—A, B, C, D, E, F, G. But now you have seven possibilities to play this scale. You can start on A, the Aeolian scale; you can start on B, the Locrian scale; and so on. Those seven scales are called the seven church modes. Two of them were later renamed major—the one starting on C—and minor—the one starting on A. And the major one is the most prominent; basically every worship song is built on it. That's why it's good to learn the structure of it. We always skip a tone except between E and F and B and C. These are the so-called semitone steps in the scale.

Playing the Major Scale

If you want to play that scale on the piano, you can start in front of the two black keys and play eight tones. If you are on the guitar, you can start wherever you want and just skip one fret if there is a tone that is out.

Keys and Scale Degrees (1–7)

So the major scale it is—the one we should remember and the one we will use later on. You can basically start that major scale on each tone, and the pattern defines what tones are in and what tones are out. It's always the same pattern. And this is what we call the keys. So the key of C is actually that basic one: C–D–E–F–G–A–B–C. For example, the key of Ab is the same pattern applied starting on Ab: Ab–Bb–C–Db–Eb–F–G–Ab. But to make our lives easier and key-independent, we just give the seven tones inside that scale the numbers 1–7. This makes it easier for us to do theory, and it also makes it easier to play together with others who may use a capo on the guitar or transpose on the keyboard. The 1 is always the 1 and the 4 is always the 4, and that makes communicating much easier. Another benefit is that it's much easier to identify patterns across different songs. It's not a random combination of chords and tones; it's always the same patterns.

Pentatonic and Mixolydian (For Later)

There are two other scales that may be relevant later on. One is the pentatonic scale—this uses the same principle as our major scale but has only five instead of seven tones. And yes, those are the first five in the circle of fifths; therefore it misses the 4 and the 7. So it's basically the major scale without the 4 and the 7. This is sometimes useful for improvising, especially on instruments like the electric guitar. The other one is the Mixolydian scale—the one out of the seven church modes that starts on G. But you can think of it as the major scale with the flat seven—so you make the 7 one semitone lower. It may help to select it from the presets and compare it with the major scale. This scale is used in some worship songs to bring a really cool touch to it. Examples are the legendary Revelation Song by Jennie Lee Riddle / Gateway Worship and Open the Heavens by Gateway Worship. Give Thanks by Henry Smith also has some elements of it. You do not have to bother that much with those two scales. Focus on the major scale, and then, when you need them, the small adjustments shouldn't be that hard later.

2. Chords

Modern worship music is pretty simple, as we have already seen multiple times, and the same holds true for chords. But what is a chord? We know what tones are and that there are seven different ones we have to think of when doing music theory for worship: the seven tones of the major scale. A chord is basically a combination of tones and basically defines the current mood. It could be happy, sad, warm, dissonant, or whatever. Each chord within a song has a specific function, and depending on how we arrange them, we get different feelings: uplifting, ongoing, finishing, etc. So, in theory, there are a lot of different chords—basically any combination of the seven tones you can think of. Puh, at least we narrowed down the scope to that already.

The 6 Basic Chords

But as there are only seven tones, there are also only six chords we have to think of, and these are the basic triads of the scale. How do we get them? We start with any tone of the scale, like the 1, and stack thirds on top of it. So, for the 1, it's (1, 3, 5); for the 2, it's (2, 4, 6); and so on. We only have to remember that the 8 is the 1 again, so the 5 would be (5, 7, 2). I guess you got that. So we get the six basic chords of a key. Why six and not seven, you now probably ask? Yes, there is a 7, but it's basically never used and therefore not worth talking about. And the six chords are:

And for those of us who can actually read notes, this is what it looks like within the key of C:

Major and Minor

You may now wonder why I wrote an m behind the 2, 3, and 6 and not behind the 1, 4, and 5. That's because they are minor. What does this mean? We will see within this section. Such a basic chord can either be major (bright, happy) or minor (mellow, sad). If we associate other emotions with it, that's fine. Let's find out if you can hear the difference:

Alright, I hope you heard the difference, but why is it like this? To understand this, we have to take another look at the major scale:

As we can see, since seven tones are in and five are out, there are two places where two consecutive tones are in. That's between the 3 and the 4 and between the 7 and the 1. If you now count the actual semitones from the 1 to the 3, you will see that it's four, and if you count from the 3 to the 5, you will see that it's only three. That means that even though, if we only look at our seven in-scale tones, the distance always looks the same, it can be different. It can be four semitones, which we call a major third, and it can be only three semitones, which we call a minor third. If you now have another look at our six basic chords and do some simple counting, you will see that for the 1, 4, and 5, we have a major third on the bottom and a minor third on the top, and for the 2, 3, and 6, it's the other way around. And that's why three of them are minor and three of them are major. Just a side note: for nerds like me, the counting is fun, but it's OK if you just learn 1, 2m, 3m, 4, 5, 6m by heart. So if a chord is minor, we add an m, and if it's major, we leave it out. It's as simple as that. Another useful side note is that you can make any minor chord major by lifting the middle note, the third, one semitone, and the other way around. This might get useful later on.

The 7 Chord

Even though it's not that practical, I would like, for the nerds among us, to show the full picture and talk about the 7 chord because, in theory, it is there. But why does nobody use it within worship music? It's because it's neither major nor minor. If you do the counting again and start at the 7 this time, you will notice that from the 7 to the 2, it's a minor third, and from the 2 to the 4, it's a minor third as well. This chord is called diminished. It has an unstable sound that sounds nice within the correct context but is not useful for flowing worship moments. Another reason might be that throughout history, the tritone—the distance from the 7 to the 4, which is also one semitone less than in the other chords—was often associated with the devil.

Slash Chords

In addition to the six chords 1, 2m, 3m, 4, 5, 6m—we cannot reiterate it often enough, so please learn it—you might see something like 1/3 or 4/5, etc. That means: take the 1 chord or the 4 chord and use another bass note. We do not care if this note is within the chord or not. So for 1/3, the 3 is within the 1 chord. Therefore, it's just a reordering of the notes so that the 3 is on the bottom, but for 4/5, the 5 is not actually within the chord, so it gains an additional fourth note as its bass.

3. Context

Did you know that the Bible teaches that there is no God? Before you reach through the internet and stone me, I can prove it to you. Please read Psalm 14:1. Ah, funny, you know what I did? I took it out of context. And as you should remember to never take something out of context when reading your Bible, you should add context to your chords too. But what is the context of a chord? The same chord, for example, the C chord, is the 1 within the key of C, but it's the 5 within the key of F, and it's the 4 within the key of G. The chord stays the same, but the context shifts, and therefore the chord fulfills another purpose. So each of the six basic chords of a key has its own purpose. We will talk more about that within a later chapter, but the 1 is home, the 6m is home but different, the 4 is its stable neighbor, the 5 and the 2m want to lead you somewhere, and the 3m is just that weird guy that sounds absolutely stunning. Now you got another glimpse of my weird brain :). But what's important is that each chord has a specific function given its context. If we play a song, we automatically put the chord into its context because it's surrounded by the other five, or at least parts of them, and in almost every case, it's clear what the key is and therefore what the purpose of this chord is. I said almost every case because there is some ongoing discussion about Revelation Song, which we talked about earlier in the context of the Mixolydian scale. So if the context is clear, why do we need to talk about it? It's because most worshippers do add additional notes to a chord that put it into context. That's because our ears work in a way that means we find it sounds good if there are parts that change and parts that stay the same. So we have some sort of movement and some sort of constant. It's a nice representation of what happens in real life. Our emotions (the chords) change regularly, but the context we're put in—God, his word, his love, and his mercy for us—never changes. Now that I'm done preaching, let's see how to do this.

The 1 and the 5

It's pretty simple: in addition to the three notes of a basic chord, we do add the 1 and the 5. That's no law; that's just how basically everyone does it. You can add only the 1 or only the 5, or you could get crazier and add the 1, 2, and 5, or you can add the 1 and 3 like Gateway Worship does with some of their songs. You have full freedom, but for simplicity, start with what is done 99% of the time. From now on, I will call the 1 and the 5 the context. They sound nice with every chord. A lot of melodies, solos, etc. are built around this foundation. But how do we add that to our chords? It's as simple as that: we just add it. Some chords, like the 1, stay the same; some others gain one additional note, and some others even gain two. Within the table below, you see all the chords in a table and, of course, in notes again:

That's it, as simple as that. If your worship team plays with a tonic pad (a pad that is just constant throughout the whole song), these are exactly the two notes this pad plays. It fills space and gives context. But whether you play with such a pad or not, and no matter if you play guitar or piano or whatever, it's always nice to add these notes. In my playing, I always add them. The 4 chord does not exist for me without the 2, so the 5 of the key. There are some easy patterns for piano and guitar to play them without even noticing, and that's why I told you within the introduction that you will play chords with crazy extensions without even noticing and that you can ignore them within the worship setting. In 99% of the cases, the extensions they add to the chords within the sheets are exactly that. It may vary a bit; for example, the 2m47 may be written as 2m7add11 or whatever, but it's the same, only named differently. You do not need to understand that to make great worship. You can just ignore them and add your own context, the one you know of.

Critique

You may like adding context or not; you can do it or not. Basically, every big worship band does it. It's the de facto standard. I sometimes hear from guys coming from my church music background that this just muddies up everything and turns it into a soup of sound and that this is some new fashion-driven thing. This is nothing new. The great Bach did it within a lot of his masterpieces, and other composers did as well. This is not a concept that was invented within modern pop music. The concept of the 1 staying as context throughout the whole song has been known throughout history as a pedal point (Orgelpunkt in German). Some small old organs even have a dedicated switch to let the bass note stay throughout the whole piece of music.

The 1-3 Confusion

I know we're at the basics and we want to get to the practical stuff, but one more advanced topic is so present that I want to clarify it now. You don't have to fully understand it now, but you have to know that it's there. Some guys like to add the 7 to the 1 chord so that it's 1-3-5-7. It's then called the 1maj7: major seventh because of the semitone steps in between. We saw the minor seventh already within the 6m7 chord. The difference, again, is the counting. The major seventh has one semitone more than the minor seventh, and if you count for the 1, then it's major. But anyway, if we take the 1/3 with that major seventh and compare it to the 3m with respect to the context, we will notice that both of them are the same; they both consist of 3-5-7-1. So the 3m and the 1/3 can be used interchangeably. They may highlight a different accent color but are technically the same. I tell you this because I often saw them used interchangeably. Some sheets use the 1/3 and some the 3m. One example is the song What a Beautiful Name It Is. It has the common power progression 4-5-6m-1/3 within the bridge. And some sheets use the chords 4-5-6m-3m. I don't know if you care, but now you know why. But that was the last theoretical topic. I promise you.

4. Application Guitar

Let’s get into the practical stuff. We’ll start with how to apply what we learned to easily play nice chords on the guitar. And the system is simple. We apply the 1-5 context as static parts to all of our chords. That has two advantages. It sounds nice, but it also makes playing easier because we have to take care of fewer strings, since at least two of them always stay the same.

G Major

We start with the six chords we have within the key of G. I think they are the easiest ones to learn because you only have two fingers to move to reach all of them. They are the most common as well, especially in modern worship music. Almost every known worship artist uses them because they sound incredible and are so easy to play that you have enough free brain power to focus on singing, praying, and worshipping.

1 (G)

Am

3m (Bm)

4 (C)

5 (D)

6m (Em)

You can probably get around with only these six chords for years and play multiple full worship sets. You now probably think, that’s nice, but most songs aren’t within the key of G. That’s right, but you can use your capo to go up to at least E, and within that range, you can play most worship songs well. Another reason why these chords are so easy is that for all of them (except the 1/3), you can just strum all six strings and do not have to select some of them. For the 1/3, you have to start strumming on the fifth string, the A string, and keep the sixth one, the low E string, silent. For the 4 and 2m, it sounds nice if you do not strum the low E string as well, but you can if you want. The only downside is that, as a beginner, your pinky and your ring finger start to hurt badly soon, but that gets better the more often you play.

If this is new for you, stick with that for now and come back later as soon as this is muscle memory for you. If it’s easy for you to play these chords, I have a few variations and new colors to add for you.

Variation 1: One Moving Finger

The first variation is that you can also play every chord, except the 3m, with only one moving finger, but you have to be much more careful about which strings you strum, and you have to block some strings. You can block strings by doing what beginners do by accident, but now you do it on purpose. Your finger on a string next to the one you want to block is positioned at such an angle that it touches the string you want to block. Therefore, it cannot resonate, but it’s not pushed down. This also unlocks one really nice chord for you as a replacement for the 3m, and it’s the 1/3.

1 (G)

2m (Am)

1/3 (G/B)

4 (C)

5 (D)

6m (Em)

One advantage of the one-finger 5 variant is that you can easily resolve it to the natural D chord if you want. As we learned, the 5 chord is always a 54, but with this shape, you can lower the high E string to resolve from D4-3 if you want this in specific places.

Variation 2: 1-3 Context

A second variation could be to change the context from 1-5 to 1-3. I know that breaks all the rules, and you have to be careful because it does not work for every song. You just have to lift your ring finger, and that’s it. You can use it carefully to bring a bit more color into your playing or to play some easy riffs. There are also songs that fully use it, like Completely Abandoned by Gateway Worship. This gives the song a real melancholic feel. If you are more into music theory, you could argue that the 3 is actually the 5 of the minor key, but we do not have to start this discussion here.

1 (G)

2m (Am)

1/3 (G/B)

4 (C)

5 (D)

6m (Em)

Variation 3: Passing Colors

The third variation is not as complete as one and two; this is just a collection of three nice colors you can add. These mostly work as passing chords, and I saw them used often enough to discuss them here.

1add9 (Gadd9)

4add6 (Cadd6)

C Major

After the champion G major, we will now have a look at C major. Most of the principles we discussed for G major also hold for C major, but it’s not as nice to play as G major. This is at least my opinion. If G major is the champion, then C major is its little brother that tries to be as cool but cannot keep up. I rarely use it and would rather play C major as G major with a capo on fret 5. But you can use it if you don’t want to put your capo as high or to reach even higher keys like the D-F# range without having the capo too high to play.

1 (C)

2m (Dm)

3m (Em)

4 (F)

5 (G)

6m (Am)

You can capo the C shapes as well. This is how the key moves:

As you can see, the C major section does not receive much love from me. If you know cool variations, reach out and tell me.

E Major

Now the real fun begins: the stuff for the cool kids. The key the guitar was made for. But why is that the case? Because the context in E major is E and B, and what are the two high strings on the guitar? Right, B and E. And what is the lowest string? Right, it’s E. So for E major, the guitar provides the context without us doing anything, and we can fully focus on the three middle strings to play cool stuff. And that is not only in root position but across the whole fretboard. This gives us the most possible flexibility but comes at a cost. If you move across the fretboard, you probably have to look more at your fingers and what you are playing. And since you’re also playing high on the fretboard, you are a bit limited in how high you can set your capo. With each step you put it up, you lose some freedom at the top of the fretboard. With that said, let’s dig in. And it all starts with the standard E chord.

1 (E)

Now, since the E chord takes up the three middle strings and the three outer strings are our context, we can take the E chord as it is and move it up one fret, and we will get the F chord. You probably know this principle from barre chords. It’s completely the same, but without the barre, because we actually want that context. If you move it up one fret and only play the three strings you have your fingers on, you should hear a nice F chord, but if you play it in context, you should start realizing that it hurts your ears to do that. And that’s because F doesn’t sound good within the context of E. We didn’t play Ab within the context of G either, but only the six chords that do belong to that key. And that’s what we want to do in E for now as well. So instead of going up one fret, we can go up seven frets, and we have our 4 (A); if we go up nine frets, we have our 5 (B); and if we go up twelve frets (above the two dots), we have our 1 (E) again, but one octave higher. That’s how we build our three major chords.

As you can see, we now switch the way we display chords to see the full fretboard. I color-coded them for you as well, so it’s easier to find them across the different charts. We now have our three major chords, but what about the three minor chords? Next to the E major shape, there actually is an E minor shape. You probably know the standard E minor chord as well: the E major chord but without pressing down on the G string. That’s half of the story because, actually, the E minor shape contains a finger placement on the G string as well. We just don’t have to do it in root position because there, we would place our finger on the end of the fretboard. To make the E chord minor, we have to lower the 3rd, as we learned within the theory section earlier, and that means lowering it one fret. And then we can move it around as well.

Now we have all of our six chords, and you now also know why we use the middle finger to the pinky for the E chord and not the index to the ring finger, as you may have learned when you learned the standard chords. I know doing this differently feels weird for a while, but trust me, it’s worth the effort to relearn because this way, we can reach the minor variant as well. Something else to mention is that for most chords, it’s better not to hit the low E string and to use only the other five. It does not sound that nice on the guitar in most cases if you have your context lower than your color.

Before you continue, please familiarize yourself with these six chords and play a few songs, or just play the whole scale of chords or some chord progressions. Don’t overwhelm yourself, and learn the different positions by heart before continuing. That makes the rest much easier, and you won’t get lost in possibilities. But if you feel ready to continue, I will give you some more chord shapes that you can move across the fretboard.

Asus Shape

The next one is the Asus shape. This one is especially cool since it doesn’t include the 3rd. Therefore, the shape is the same for major and minor.

Now you already have two ways to play the six chords across the fretboard. But you can also combine both versions and play 1, 2m, 3m with the E shape and 4, 5, 6m with the Asus shape. Therefore, you won’t get higher than fret 6 and can use your capo.

Capo	0	1	2	3	4	5
Key	E	F	Gb	G	Ab	A

F#m Shape

Another shape is the F#m shape. It’s a bit harder to play since you have to mute the A string, and actually, I would only play the three minor chords from this variant. The 6m, especially, is one of my favorite versions of it to play.

D/F# Shape

And one very nice variant is the D/F# shape. With this, we get all of our chords with their 3rd in the bass. I really love them; in the right places, they do sound so nice. The most often used versions are probably the 1/3 and the 5/7. But the others are worth trying out as well.

B7 Shape

The last movable shape I will show you is the B7 shape. With this, too, not all variants are useful because, in modern worship, we mostly only add the 7 to minor chords. The only chords I really use from that are the 6m and the 2m. If you are interested in the typical lo-fi sound, you can try alternating between the 1 and the 4. They sound really, really nice within this shape but sound too different for standard worship use cases.

Extra 4 Shapes

Another concept that works well for the 4 is that the fifth string, the A string, is its bass. Therefore, we only have to take care of the D and G strings when playing the 4. This gives us a lot more possibilities to play the 4 across the fretboard. Here are the additional ones I found the most useful.

After seeing this many shapes, you probably think, what the heck? That’s too much; how do I choose how to play? Therefore, I want to give you some guidance on how I like to play.

1. All E-Shape

This is an easy way to start, but if you want to get more advanced, this sounds a bit disconnected, with too much movement. Sometimes, I still like to use that pattern, especially if I want to use that high 1 chord. It sounds so beautiful. For example, within the chord progression 1-5-6m-4. Another case where I like to use it is in soft parts when I want that clear rising transition from 3m to 4. For example, within the chord progression 1-3m-4.

2. All Asus-Shape

This is similar to the all-E-shape, but to my ear, it often sounds a bit better because it’s not so linear, with the 1 in the middle. But the 2m and 3m won’t really work that well and don’t sound really nice. I use this mostly for big chorus parts.

3. E+Asus-Shape

This is my go-to when playing with a capo, as already mentioned before. Its biggest strength is that you do not have to go that far up the fretboard; therefore, you have some room to set a capo. With this, I find Ab with a capo on the 4th fret especially beautiful, or even G with a capo on the 3rd fret. This is a nice addition if you play with two guitars and the main guitar uses the G chords.

4. Fret 2-4

If you, like me, already tried to rearrange the chords and slice them the other way around, by position instead of by shape, you might have noticed that you can play all six chords within frets 2-4. The main characteristic of that playing is that you have that beautiful 1/3. I mostly use this system in power bridges. I especially like the typical power bridge with the 4-5-6m-1/3 progression. That works really well with this way of playing. In addition to that, this works really great with a capo too.

1/3 (E/G#)

2m (F#m)

3m (G#m)

4 (A)

5 (B)

6m (C#m)

5. Fret 7-9

Just as you can play all the chords within frets 2-4, you can play almost all chords within frets 7-9. The only chord that doesn’t work that well is the 3m.

1 (E)

2m (F#m)

3m (G#m)

4 (A)

5 (B)

6m (C#m)

6. Bass + Double ContextMy absolute favorite

Last but not least, my absolute favorite: the one within the fret 7-9 system. If you look at the 1 chord within the Asus shape, you can notice that the D and G strings you hit with fingers 3 and 4 build up a second context again. So you can keep them down and use fingers 1 and 2 to replace the bass note. This works really well for soft parts and fingerpicking but can get loud as well.

1 (E)

2m (F#m)

3m (G#m)

4 (A)

5 (B)

6m (C#m)

You can also put the D# into the bass. This gives you an E/D#, so 1/7, or you might also think of it as a B/D#, so 5/7.

1/7 (E/D#)

This gives you the full bass range from E-D#-C#-B-A. If you want to play the full scale within the bass, you can just cheat on the A chord, jump to the 2-4 position, and continue playing down.

4 (A)

1/3 (E/G#)

2m (F#m)

1 (E)

Another nice thing you can do is, since you have your middle finger free, use it to lower the E on the G string to a D#. This works best on the 5, so the B chord. This resolves it and adds its 3rd, but it works nicely on the 1, the 4, and the 6m as well, as some sort of passing chord.

5 (B)

1 (E)

4 (A)

6m (C#m)

This concludes the E major section for now. One hint I still want to give you: since you now probably understand what separates a major chord from a minor chord, you can try to make the 4 and 5 minor as well. This creates a really incredible sound. Or if you move your 1 down a whole step, you have the b7. But more on that in the upcoming section, Crazy Chords.

D Major

If E is for the cool kids, and it’s really cool, D is for the absolute hipsters. Some of them even tune their guitar in a different way for it. But let’s see how it works. The concept is just as simple. It’s keeping the D string open as context and keeping the A string muted. So you only have the 1 as your context. You probably think, why mute the A and not leave it open as well for your context? It’s because it’s too low and therefore doesn’t sound good. Then we would rather have only the D as context. Now, for the B and high E strings, we have two options: either do not strum them or tune them two semitones down to A and D and use them as context. With that system, you only use two fingers, one on the low E string and one on the G string, and play thirds. That’s it. You only have three strings that make a sound: the 3rd of your chord and the D as context. That is completely simple, but not all chords work well.

G Major Again

So here we are again; we are back at G major. But why? Because for G major, there is another fundamentally different system to play. I didn’t want to overwhelm you at the beginning because, for G major, we can move the chords across the fretboard as well. It’s not as intuitive as for E major, and that’s why we are doing this last. Maybe you already wondered why we use the B and high E strings to make a D and G as the 1-5 context and do not use the D and G strings we already have and leave them open. Two reasons. For one, it sounds better on the guitar the higher your context is, and the other is that you can’t just move two fingers around as easily. But let’s have a look at the alternative one-finger variant for the 1 chord. This uses all four strings except the D and G strings. Therefore, we can move this around the fretboard too.

To my ears, that does not sound that good, but we can use it as a template and at least get the same chords we got for D major. Let’s ditch the 2m and 6m since they sound bad. Then we can make the 3m sound nicer by lifting the ring finger so it becomes a 1/3. On the 7th fret, we can also play the 6m beneath the 1/3 by moving the index finger to the A string and leaving the low E string open. We can make the 4 nice by lifting the pinky; then we have a third. And to my ears, it sounds better if we lift the pinky on the D as well. Then it is an add2 but sounds nice.

Another shape you can move around in general is the following.

5. Application PianoComing soon

6. Chord ProgressionsComing soon

7. Crazy ChordsComing soon

8. Experimenting with ContextComing soon