Full transcript of “OPEN Chord Players: This is the SECRET...I Mean...The SECOND Fret”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 [Music] all right how you doing everybody so look uh I had been playing for quite some time and all along there was something right under my nose that I never took the time to figure out or notice or learn or maybe I had seen it and I just it didn't jive with me at the
0:48 time and I just passed it by um I now call it the secret fret okay um and in that fret there's just so much valuable tools to use especially for us that play open chords most of the time um maybe not so much raw beginners because you're still trying to figure out your chords and everything but as you start playing chords and adding chords open chords to your repertoire and playing them quite well there's something that you really need to pay attention to and get it into your repertoire it will change everything it it it's the glue that holds all the open position position stuff together right what is
1:33 it it's actually called and this isn't my name for it it's actually called the second fret let's take a look at [Music] [Applause] it all right so I had been playing and I'm an open chord player and I've been playing open chords for quite some time I was out of a lot of open chords I was playing them quite seamlessly and I had a pretty good you know I I was working on my strum patterns and getting things down but I was looking back I was very tardy at that every everything was slow for me at the beginning and you know I was playing and everything and uh all along this fret was right under my nose and I just
2:19 didn't understand you know the importance of it okay now this isn't a guitar thing or a music thing this is a me thing okay is as soon as I discovered this and I had been playing for years before I did discover this as soon as I discovered it like it was like a whole new world kind of opened up for me all right so this fret right here just happens to be right in the middle of the three Frets that we use to play all of our open chords right and some people will stay there for their whole guitar playing lives and that's just fine right so this fret here has a lot of stuff going on so let's take a look right right so right off the bat it's the Fret that we play our a major chord in and we play it
3:05 exclusively within that fret all the notes are within that fret some people play it like this I tend to play it with a one finger bar uh some people kind of get their their hands in there like that you know they get all kind of scrunch them in there like that either way it's all self-contained within the second fret we also have this little split a chord that we leave the middle string unfreed and that's like an A7 okay now we'll often use that along with E7 and D7 to play you know kind of uh bluy kind of chord progressions right so that's all within that fret we have our E minor chord that is played within that fret and then we have 2/3 of uh a d chord and
3:51 it's these two right here of course if we bring up our ring finger we have a full D and of course if we use maybe the G or the D note on that high E string we have a different version of the chord and then again we can use both fingers here so we have the beginnings of that D chord all within that second fret as well but most importantly we've got these little nuggets right now this is so important it's these six notes right here it's open five string Fred five string open four Fred four open three Fred three all in the second fret okay now you don't really need to know what those notes are right they're b e and a but you don't really have to to know you
4:37 just got to know that they sound good and most importantly these notes played either open as an open string or a Fred note they're like the glue or the Stitch that holds everything together that we do here in the open uh position okay so when we start thinking of things like we've covered walk cups and walkdowns real basic right remember we went from a c to a g and back like that kind of stuff okay all right so these are all those notes that I'm talking about right in the intro you saw me open up with right that's all these notes
5:24 here now sometimes when you're lost and you need to get from down here to up there all you got to do is [Music] just these notes connect everything and they're also very involved in all the open chords we play so c d a minor e you know you name it those one more or more or many of those notes of the chords come from the middle of that second fret so it's really really an important threet for open cord players and that's what we are for the majority of our guitar playing Journey right some of us
6:11 will Branch off to Bar chords or all things different completely like electric guitar and power chords and playing scales and stuff like that but you know what this right here is so important to learn at an early early stage now I didn't do that I've been playing about four or five years before all of a sudden I realized how important this fret was and what goes on in that fret so again I call it the secret fret it's actually the second fret okay and remember you're only limited by your creativity and your ability so that's the whole thing if you haven't done this before now you're going to kind of you got a learning a little bit of a learning curve going on but if you've been playing for a while right and you're playing open chords and maybe
6:56 maybe Fring the odd note here and there but even not if you're just playing open chords it will not take you long to get your fingers around the whole okay and it's going to take some time so I would what I would do is I would start really slow okay maybe fret I use a combination of this finger and my middle finger all right because that's where most of the stuff is going to happen when you're playing your open chord so what I do is like I'll I'll sort of just go up and down those strings I'll play them open and Fred with my forefinger or my trigger finger my okay my pointer finger like that then I'll switch it [Music] up and along the way you know I'm going
7:42 to try to make some Melodies out of it whenever possible and then eventually I'm going to start transitioning into chords so for example if I'm on my pointer finger I might try something like that and if I'm using my big finger I might try something like that [Music] right there's all kinds of combinations that we can do just for practice okay so these notes for those of you that really want to know all right I mentioned that they were b e and a and they're all notes from
8:30 the E minor pentatonic scale but they're also notes from the G minor pentatonic scale because G major and E minor are relative cousins okay so that mean so basically E minor is a relative minor to G major and every major chord has a a relative minor and what that means is well first of all it's always the sixth chord remember how we we number chords in a key right so G would be one then a would be 2 and B3 and C4 and D5 well a form of E would be six and because it's a six chord it's actually a minor chord right so basically what we have here
9:17 okay is the relative minor of the G is E minor and that means that they share the same notes in the scale so this scale that we learned this pentatonic scale which is where all those middle notes come from right [Music] there are from those two scales all right so I wanted to point this out to you because there is some really good picking there and it is definitely the Fret that holds everything together on these three Frets so if you are a guitar player that loves to play open chords you've got to start exploring
10:03 that fret get those notes out of there add them into your little embellishments and runs and walk ups and walkdowns and your guitar playing will definitely go to another level right so I hope this helps okay and uh like everything it's just a starting point it's just to point out to you that there is something there now it's up to you to go and figure out how you're going to use this new found treasure all [Music] right have fun with it bye for [Music] [Applause] [Music]
10:49 now
