“Hey man, I’m a guitar player…why would I want to think like a piano player?” Good question. It’s all about being more MUSICAL. What I am talking about is harmony. You can do a lot with different voicings.
When someone tells your average guitar player “play a G Chord”, you get something similar 90% of the time. You either get an open chord or “Cowboy Chord” as I call them, or you get a barre chord. Yes, they do pit the requirements of a G Chord. What they don’t do is provide anything new. Actually, there really isn’t much new much new out there, so going back to basic harmony works every time.
You don’t need to be a genius at music theory either. Knowing the notes up and down the neck is all that is required. Take the G Chord, one of the first chords you ever learn on the guitar. Look at the notes in that chord. I will jump to the chase for you, the notes are G, B and D. Anywhere you put these three notes on the neck of the guitar is a G Chord. This also means you can have any one of the three notes as the highest note of the chord. The highest note usually is the easiest to hear, so in effect you make a melody of the top voices of chords as they change.
Another thing to consider is that you only need three notes to make a chord. Your basic “Cowboy” or barre chord G has six notes, so obviously some notes are doubled. Yet another thing to consider is the two bottom strings are right in the frequency territory of the bass guitar. When you put emphasis on those strings it gets pretty heavy, which is the basis of most early Heavy guitar playing…...think Black Sabbath...the “Power Chord”. I can remember trying to figure out some of those songs like that and scratching my head. “Am I learning the bass or the guitar part?” It was hard to tell. I am not saying that sound is bad, but it can be very one dimensional.
The guitar is actually a small choir of sorts. Each string is not actually a string, it is a voice. You can arrange notes on the strings like a composer would arrange voices. Piano players do this too. You can think of the guitar as the right hand of the piano, the bass as the left hand. So, if you have one note on the bass and three on the guitar, you have four-part harmony. Interesting, huh?
I personally use the D, G and B strings on the guitar for a huge part of my chord voicings. Those three strings fall right about where the right hand naturally falls on the piano. Middle C is on all three strings. Also if you look, D, G and B are G, B and D rearranged so they are actually a G Chord…in case you didn’t already know that. Two of my favorite guitar players of all time used those three strings for a huge part of their harmonic vocabulary. The first one is Joe Walsh, the second one was the late Terry Kath. They never got in the bass player’s way. The result is very musical to my ears.
You can do so much with three notes. Try find the same notes to a chord in different places on the neck and pay attention to the note on top of the chord. What if the chord has more than three different notes? Well, for one the bass is covering one note. Also, you don’t always need to play every note to imply a harmony. This kinda gets into theory after a while, but the more you do things like this, the more you understand the theory behind harmony.
If you have any questions, drop me a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., I am glad to help. Enjoy this concept and I am working on learning how to use some software so I can show you visually some of these concepts. Peace and Love, RR.
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