One and two, and one and two,

(Demo)

And one and two, and one and two, and hitting a down stroke. You can make that chord very percussive

(Demo)

To where there is any hardly note in it really. I think a lot of the more contemporary Bluegrass players that are doing that or you can make it more toward the ringy end of thing.

(Demo)

It is hardly percussive at all and the middle ground

(Demo)

Is sounded like that and the way you get the percussive effect is you essentially you have got to control of all the strings. So, cut off the sound that gives that percussive sound. What you doing is letting up on the strings. You are not taking your fingers off the strings.

(Demo)

You are just releasing the tension a little bit. You are not pressing down, just letting the string come up to their normal height,

(Demo)

And that tells the sound.

(Demo)

I think playing rhythm is really fun in the Bluegrass Band and there is all sorts of different sound you can get. Your pallet really is how percussive your want to be then you will get into different ways of making the chords. There are just lots of different varieties but this is just the basic chord shape.

(Demo)

But maybe you want it to be a little bit more ringy or maybe you want more percussive or maybe you want to emphasis the down beat too.

Another way to think of that is boom chop, boom chop,

(Demo)

Boom chop, boom, chop and you can leave the boom off.

(Demo)

So, those are the things that you can kind of experiment around with and see what works best in the context that you are playing.

Another thing I wanted to tell you about making chords is. I mentioned briefly that once you got that shape down, to get to play another keys. You just move the chord up and down as you need to.

It helps to know what the notes are of a scale and this will also be available at the website, but let me just name the notes. So, that would be G, G#; A, A#; B, C, C#; D, D#; E; F, F#; G so, those are the notes.

So, say you are on the cave A and the singer says, “Oh, that is too low for me, I want to sing it in B.” So, you will have to go, “Okay, where is the A, here is an A note, where is the B?” It goes A, A #, B, so the distance from the A to the B note is two frets,

(Demo) one, two.

So, you know that you need to move up for the two frets to make it B.

Actually, its going to be easier to get this if you look at a diagram and then see a sort of visual representation of it. One more thing about just this basic major chord that is used in Bluegrass, I just showed you that.

Say in the key of A to play a D, we go kith this shape here that you see in the A with these three fingers and they are relative position to each other and just move it on this direction. If you do not have any place to put this finger, if you play that chord you do not want to play that open E.

(Demo)

Well, you can but that will not sound that good in the Bluegrass context, so we are just playing the bottom three notes.

If you want to play all four the full course strings, take that D note and instead of playing it with three fingers, play it with this three fingers, your bottom three fingers. So, you switch the whole thing, see from there to there. Exact name note, exact same positions just different fingers. Now, you free this finger up,

(Demo)

To fret at the second fret of the E string,

(Demo)

So, now you can play all the notes if you want. Before, if you would have all the notes with this position you get this E which is not part of the D chord, or not part of the D major chord.

(Demo)

So, that is what that shape looks like with

(Demo)

F # on top.

Now to play an E, do exact same thing I have mentioned to you before with this version of the D chord, just move it up two frets like that. So, here is your E and one final little trick, a lot of times some of the tunes you are playing, you are going to only be playing an A and an E chord and rather than going. Okay here is my A, now I have to play a E, I am going to take my fingers off and I am going to find the E. All that you do not need to do all that. What you can do is keep this fingered planted,

(Demo)

because that notes common into the A chord.

(Demo)