Essentials For Guitar Chord Playing and Mute Practice

1. Simultaneous playing of chords

Usually two, three, four, five to six chord unisons commonly used on the guitar. The most basic form is the four-note chord unison. The four-note chord used every picking finger of the right hand. Playing two notes can only play some of the constituent notes of the chord. It is used to play harmonic intervals, that is, two notes that sound together, or two notes. When playing two notes, only four fingers of pima are used. When a five-note or six-note chord is played in unison, one finger must be used to quickly pick two or three notes. The most common is p-finger or a-finger swipe, some players even use the seldom-used little finger of right hand.

①When playing chords with the left hand, the ima fingers should be as close as possible, and the overall plucking should be consistent, so that a good sound can be produced.

②The chord is performance don’t rely on strings. When playing the chord, the p and ima fingers of the right hand should be used to squeeze the strings together. Besides, you need make a downward tensioning action.Then play the chord again. As to make the chords loud, sometimes when the melody is hidden in the chords, the fingers that play the melody need to be stretched down. For example, if the chord is played with the right hand without stretching or pinching, the finger is pulled upward. Finally, the sound will be weak and weak, and the tone will be rough and unpleasant.

How to be neat and loud

Let’s practice playing various chords at the same time with open strings.

(1) Four-tone chords

①Pay attention to the technical actions of pinching and closing the strings with the right hand when playing chords.

②When the ima finger is played across the strings, the fingers of the right hand should be as close as possible to play.

③ When playing the bass strings, the direction of the right hand should be perpendicular to the strings to prevent the generation of noise.

(2) three-note chords

(3) Simultaneous performance of two tones

①When two notes are played together, the right hand should also pinch the strings and close together like when playing multiple sounds.

②For group c practice, please use (pi, pm, pa) thumb and single finger practice first, and then use thumb and ima to practice alternately (pi, pm, pi, pa, pm, pa).

2. Applied practice of playing chords at the same time

Let’s first restore the harmonic backbone of the 25 Kalcassi Etude No. 2 that we learned in the previous lecture. Then use the basic chord progression to arrange various types of chords to play. So while thoroughly practicing various performance techniques from multiple angles, you could have a deeper understanding of music.

We write each chord according to its time value, then we get the harmonic backbone of this song. The following is the harmonic backbone of the first section of Etude No. 2. There are two ways to deal with the passage in the second paragraph. One is to keep it unchanged and still play the passage, and the other is to write out its harmonic structure. In this piece of music, the harmony of the passing sentence is the same as the chord before it. The method can also be used for the practice of Villa-Roberts’s twelve advanced etudes.

Below we make various rhythmic variations on the harmonic backbone of this piece to practice various chord performances.