The F Major Chord on Guitar
In this video we're learning about the F major chord on guitar!
We’re going to cover how to create the F major chord, what music notes it is made of and talk about some songs you can find it in!
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Transcription
In this video we're going to cover the F major chord for guitar! So a lot of beginners get kind of confused about the F chord because they're not sure which version to do. There's a lot of different chord grids out there for them. And the easiest one would be this 3rd fret D string, 2nd fret G string and 1st fret B string. And the problem is it sounds kind of small if you're just hitting those three strings. And there's a lot of strings you’ve got to mute around it to get the full F chord and not some kind of inversion or anything like that. One thing you can do to enhance it a little is to barre your first finger over the B and the E strings on the 1st fret. That'll make it sound a little bigger, a little fuller and a little better. So for that version we're going to use our third finger, on the 3rd fret of the D string, our second finger finger on the 2nd fret of the G string, and we're going to barre our first finger for both the 1st frets of the B and the E strings. So if this is your first time working on the F major chord your first goal should be just to get the bottom four strings sounding good. Nice and smooth. Then what you want to do is work on your strumming. Now the open A string is okay because A is in the chord. So you will be doing an inversion, F/A. But it's not going to sound bad because it's in the chord. The E is not going to work. So we do have to avoid hitting the E. So once you have these four notes good you practice your strumming but instead of just a blanket strum you're going to practice pulling your pick away from the strings before you hit that E string and same thing coming down. Come in after the E string. That way if you hit the bottom four, great. If you accidentally hit the A it's going to sound okay. You're just trying to avoid the E. Once you have that you can do two things to kind of enhance the chord a little bit. You could raise your ring finger a little bit so that you're muting the A string as well. That way you're only getting that… and not the inversion, but you still have to kind of do the slanted strumming. Another thing you can do is practice wrapping your thumb around to mute the E. So you can blanket strum a little more. You're going to hit the open A then, but again it's in the chord so it's not bad. Once you hit the point where you're maybe trying to wrap your thumb around enough to mute both the E and the A or if you're trying to mute the E with your thumb and raise your ring finger to mute the A. At that point I would say you may as well start working on the full barre chord, which is going to be the best sounding version of F major. That way you're not trying to like do this crazy kind of like mute this mute this but you know, but still getting these nice notes. At that point you're just going to go towards the F barre chord. The F major chord is made up of the notes F, A and C. It can be found in the major keys of F major, C major and Bb major or their relative minors of D minor, A minor or G minor. So if I was sitting at a piano and I wanted to make the F major chord I would hit the notes F A C. Now because we're playing on guitar, we have to take more strings into the consideration, we’re going to do a combination of those. So in this basic position, if I’m not using the open E, open A or anything like that. We're going to be using the notes F, A, C, and F again. So again, without the E and the A string we're making the notes F, A, C, and F again. If we included that open A we'd have the A note as well. The amount of songs that use the F major chord are just endless. But a handful are Let it Be by the Beatles, Have You Ever Seen the Rain by CCR, My Girl by The Temptations or The Scientist by Coldplay. And of course there's a bunch of different ways to play F major, so here's just a handful. I hope you enjoyed the video and I hope you learned a couple of things! If you did, please give it a like! If you want to learn more guitar, please subscribe! Now get back to playing and Happy Practicing!