In this lesson, we're going to be talking about the E minor chord. So first, make sure that your guitar is in tune. If you're wondering, again how to tune your guitar, I have that in Module One, lesson six, and it shows you how to tune your guitar. You can also use an app or download an A Tuner app on your phone, or iPod or whatever. And those are usually pretty good for helping to tune your guitar. If you don't have a clip on snark or something like that, what I'm going to do now is designate terms to each finger in the left hand because those are the fingers that you're going to use to learn how to play the chords.

Right. So the first finger we're going to call the index, index finger, the middle, then the ring finger, and the pinky finger. So index, middle, ring, pinky finger. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you what you fret to put which finger on which string, right. So for example, an E minor, I'm going to say on the A string, which is here. Now if you remember from learning the strings and from tuning, Eddie ate dynamite Good bye, Eddie to remember how to name the strings.

So to find a string, Eddie age, so that's a, that's the A string. You can also look at where I'm placing my finger. So we're on the A string, second fret. So these are the frets 123. So a string right here, second fret One, two, so I'll put my middle finger on the A string, second fret. Can you even play that if you want to get it to ring out as best you can.

Okay. Now for left hand technique, you want your fingers to be as curved as much as possible. You don't want to be like this, if you can, try not to have them bending the other way, but have them curved like this. And you don't want to be gripping the guitar like that. You want to have your thumb back behind the neck, and then have some space in between the neck of the guitar and your hand. So your thumbs gonna act kind of like a pressure point or even like, pretending you're pinching the guitar with to get a nice clear sound, maybe give your hand a break now, because I know when you're first learning, you're gonna have to develop the muscles for your fingers to play the strings and also what's called the calluses on your fingers.

They toughen up to be able to press down on the strings and so on. So that's why it's also good to practice a little bit each day to develop those things. Okay, so, for the E minor chord, we're going to place our middle finger on the second fret of the A string Then we're gonna place our ring finger on the second fret of the D string. And you can play those two notes. Maybe right now just use your thumb to just pick those two strings and see if you can get them to ring out as best you can. Now, with the E minor chord, you're gonna be strumming all the strings, so strum is just play the chord, that's what I mean by strumming.

Okay, you're going to strum all the strings. So just give that a shot right now. Try that a few times. You can pause the video and see if it's the top and if not, you might want to go back to just playing one finger at a time. Doing the next one. You want as best you can to be somewhere in the middle of the fret.

Stop. can be exact, but somewhere in the middle of the fret as best you can. So this is the second fret on the A string and second fret on the D string. And then give it a strum. Remember the space between so the space between your hand and the fretboard and your thumb, not like this, but kind of almost like you're pinching the guitar, your fingers are curved. Okay?

It's important to be really thorough with this right now because it's going to help you for all the chords that you learn later down the line. Now, let's talk about the right hand technique. You need to strum the guitar with your right hand in order to produce a sound. Right, fair enough, you just jump down strum Okay, now here I'm just using my thumb for demonstration purposes. And you can use that but I would highly recommend getting a pic using that for your strumming. Okay, so let's talk about how to hold the pick briefly.

You want to put your hand like this kind of curved fingers. And then you can place the pick on the bottom part of your finger and then just put your thumb down and that's roughly how it's gonna be. Okay, you thumb can be kind of like this perpendicular with the pic. thing, just give it a try without a chord, just gotta get used to it. And you'll find where it feels comfortable, right, you'll find where it feels comfortable. And then you can just go with that for now.

As long I wouldn't, you know, grab the pick with two fingers, like that sort of thing and do that at this point. So just how I showed you and that'll help us jump down. Let's jump strum. You don't need to like really dig into it. I wouldn't be doing that. At this point, just try.

I know sometimes when you're trying to get the strings to ring out, or like this, you want to strum harder. I would try to avoid that as much as possible. If it's not ringing out, okay? This is important for learning anything guitar, really, if the strings not ringing out right away, just practice it a few more times. And then I would let it go and leave it for another day because you're just building up your finger strength, right? So it's, there's not really a point to really trying to grind it out like that, you know, you just might end up hurting your hand or something like that.

So so it's for the E minor chord. Just try strumming down like this. Four times, and then stop. And then find your position again. Come down, one For not even a bad idea to try up strum or up to just get used to that you can go down, down, just working your right hand and the left hand together. Let's talk about that chord diagram that you see on the screen here.

So what that is, is the top three frets of the guitar like this. Up and down. You can see how there's the low E string and then a string, D, G, B, and high E string. There's the frets, okay. And then you see the two dots. And as you probably guessed, that's where you place your fingers.

So the two dots for the E minor chord are going to be here in here and that's where we put our fingers to play the chord right, our middle finger on the second fret of the A string and a ring finger on the second fret of the D string. We will be using these chord diagrams throughout the course so it's important to learn how to use them or how to read them. And now let's head over to lesson two where we will learn about the a sus two chord