Chord Progression Lesson from Next Level Guitar for Acoustic Guitar

Here is yet another excellent beginner acoustic guitar lesson taught by David Taub with Next Level Guitar.

If you haven’t had the chance to check out Next Level Guitar, then I Highly recommend you visit their website to check out all they have to offer.  They have over 785 online guitar lessons and for a small fee, you can become a member today! Check out my review of  Next Level Guitar Here .

This lesson is in the key of e minor.

Here are the chords you will be learning in this video: EmAdd2, Cmaj7, Dsus4add2, Amadd2, Fmaj7#11, Gadd6, Am9

Don’t let the names of these chord intimidate you as they are a lot easier to play than they look. David will demonstrate how to play each one.

This is a very interesting progression with a very dark, dreamy sound to it.

There are two strumming patterns that David will be teaching to use along with this chord progression.

The first is the following: (Where d=down and u=up) d/d   u/d/u.  David adds a bit of interest to this first strumming pattern by only hitting the root note of the chord on the first downward strum.  This is a little more challenging than strumming all the notes, but it does make for a more interesting sound.

The second strumming pattern is:

d/u/d/u/d
d
u/u/u/d

The above pattern does seem a little intimidating.  As David suggests in the video, break up the pattern into smaller parts instead of trying to play the whole thing at once.

After you learn the above  strumming patterns, there are some other things you can try to breathe some new life into this progression.

One is to arpeggiate the chords.  This means that instead of strumming all of the notes in a particular chord at once, you would pic each note one at a time.

Another tip is to vary the point at which your pic strikes the strings.  When strumming an acoustic guitar, you are accustomed to strumming over the sound hole for the most part.  But you can get a much different sound if you were to strum the strings closer to the bridge for instance where the strings are tighter.

Another great tip is to combine arpeggiation and strumming together.

David will of course go over all of this and more in the lesson.  I do hope you enjoy!