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Now that you've mastered
the first version of this lesson, let's now fill out the sound by adding some more notes with those spare fingers. If you did make sure you were using the fingering I used in part I, those spare fingers should be hovering just above the notes we'll be needing. Remember that the purpose of this lesson is to get those fingers of yours to become familiar with the feel of playing finger style guitar, which entails all kinds of things: playing two notes at once on any combination of strings, playing three notes at once, on any combination of strings, four notes, five notes, full six string chords ... holding one note while moving others, sliding notes or whole shapes around ... everything and anything. And that's just for the left hand! The right hand has to follow all this, coordinate to pluck single notes, double stops (two notes), chords, arpeggiate through them, keep the thumb steady and regular while the other fingers syncopate ... again: everything and anything.
But, this lesson is just a taste of it all. There are many lessons here already that are combinations of all the other stuff, though.
Let's first remind ourselves of a chord actually is: a chord is a cluster of notes played together. The notes are (at least) the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes from each chord's scale ... that's probably the easiest way of putting it. We don't really need to worry about the names of those notes right now or go searching for them, we'll just use the well known chord shapes for those chords, the ones that are found down near the nut.
We're using G, C and D chords for this lesson, but we're not always going to be using the full six string shapes, we're going to pick and choose fragments of these full shapes that suit this particular piece. It's never a good idea to add notes higher in pitch than the melody note. That's because we tend to hear the highest note in any cluster as the most important, and we don't want to take away from the importance of the melody note when it's low. So, for example, the very first pluck of this version uses three notes from an open G chord. We could have played the open G string too, but then the melody note (the open D string) would get smudged out by that higher note.
You'll see that I add the chord notes only when there's a change in chords. The rest of the melody notes are left bare and on their own as in part I. This does two things: it lets the listener know the exact chord structure of the tune; it also creates a 'sound texture' as time passes ... the ear becomes used to hearing this sequence of chord/single note sequence (green/blank in the tab below), and there's nothing the ear loves more than confirming a pattern and saying "I knew it, I knew that was coming". Of course, once it gets too used to a pattern, it's time to jog it out of the comfort zone with something new ... like the G7 in bar
5 and the extra beat/chord over the D in the last bar. The G7 is thrown in as a surprise in chord flavor (it really lets us know that we're heading to a C chord) but it's also a cluster of notes that's not there in bar
1, which it's a repeat of. (I should mention that the G7 and a couple of other note clusters here are not technically 'chords' in that they don't consist of the full set of required notes, but this is not the lesson to worry about technicalities of nomenclature.)
Note that the Ds are treated the same as in Part I. That's because the melody note and bass note are on adjacent strings and there's nowhere to add more notes. If I had added any above the melody note, it would have smeared the melody out. There's nowhere below the bass note to add anything because that bass note is a root (the note that names the chord) and you don't want to add anything lower than a root. So, if there's nowhere to add, don't add. It makes perfect sense to the ear without any additions, the texture is preserved, so all is well.
Notice that I don't pluck the strings at once, I sort of roll through them very quickly, a bit like thrumming your fingers impatiently on a table top but backwards. Don't feel that you have to duplicate that, it's just my way of doing it. It's fine to just grab and let go of all strings as one super-pluck.
Have fun with this. Hopefully you do have a child in your midst who will love to hear this but, one way or the other, if you're just starting out, your fingers will appreciate this simple workout.
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