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By making use of the open strings on your guitar, you can experiment with and achieve startlingly different melodies from your guitar with quite little effort.
Try the following exercise as an example:
- Chords in the key of Gmajor: G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em.
- You have the strings E, A, D G and B available to you.
- Try to begin playing A and Am bar chord shapes for some of these chords, but instead of barring the whole neck of the guitar, use your index finger to fret just the A string.
- Leave the third string open.
- This leaves your E, G and B strings open.
- Move around whilst either strumming or fingerpicking between your bar chord positions for Am, Bm(first finger on second fret), C (first finger on third fret), D (first finger on fifth fret), Em (first finger on seventh fret) and G (first finger on tenth fret).
- Enjoy the different sounds that you get from this!
- The end (for now)
It’s fairly easy to apply the same principle to other key’s. The example above works well for G or Em. But you can do similar things using similar or other bar chord shapes for E, Cm, D, B, A, Fm, and probably many more, I’m sure. You will need to adapt the shapes you use. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t.
You know what to do!
Tags: caged, open strings
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