Lecture 2: Key of C

The key of C is the blueprint key for all of the other keys. And remember, just like the
master key to a building opens all the doors in the building, the key of C will the same
thing for all other keys. It contains the ingredients or the rules that are universal for
music – that is, European music.

There are many different types of scales around the world, and if you’re interested in
those types of scales, please check out our exotic section, or our musical oddities
section, as we call it – a general strangeness going on in there, but very interesting
never the less, which you can help to integrate that into your playing.

You know, there’s a couple scales in there that sound oriental, and I thought that those
were just great to go over the blues, and you can integrate those stuff. But you are
probably at the beginner stages right now – that might be something you might be
interested in.

There’s also discussions in there, and interviews, and all kinds of different stuff with
other people, and if there’s not any interviews in there now, there will be very soon. A
lot of these places on the site are still under construction. This is a work in progress
and just like all the other videos on the site, there will be more added every week
forever, and your fee for the subscription will never, ever increase.

So, key of C – the key of c is the master key, so it’s all the white keys on the piano, so
it’s really easy to map out the key of C. It’s C, D, E, F, G, A, B – that was real easy.
The musical alphabet ends with G, and it just starts over again. So when it starts over,
it just keeps going all the way up, and all the way down – well, all the way up until you
can’t hear it anymore. A piano keyboard has 88 keys on it, and that’s range of human
hearing. Any higher and you’re playing for dogs. So here we go.

Let’s go ahead and start with the C chord. So as you know, C is down here. You’ve got
your index finger in the 2nd string and on the 1st fret, and then the rest is history, right?
Okay? A little technical difficulty there, [?] my volume knob must’ve been turned down
or something. Okay, I’m in G7. With G7 – if you look G7, it’s just kind of like a giant
sea[?], you just throw everything out to the side. So you take what you did inside here
and you move these two out, and then you move this one out to this side. So I just call
it the giant sea[?].

And remember, seven chords have kind of a twangy, blues, backwoods type of sound to
them, and just an f.y.i., you can exchange, you can or you can switch out any seven
chord for any major chord if you want to do it, so say for instance if you’re playing C and
you want to spice it up a little bit, do the C7 version. See how that’s a little – it’s a little
more rock? And without it It’s sort of just a straight square, you know, chord – and sort
of generic. Nothing wrong with generic, there’s a time and a place for everything.

Okay, so we did G7, and then F. F is the dreaded chord. Nobody likes this chord and
the reason why – and I figured it out in my 15 years of teaching I finally figured it out -
this here, we have to hold these two down with this finger, and some people just don’t
like this, and I know I didn’t like it when I first started. [?] And this finger here, the
middle finger’s here, and then you’ve got 2 others over here.

So this is the F that I recommend. Some people like the little partial F, okay, where
you’re just staying on top of the 4 – the 4 highest strings over here – and then you avoid
the 2 lowest ones. I go ahead and go for all 5 because one more string and you might
as well just be barring[?] it all the way across, so we’re just going to do it like this. And
this also provides you a good way to switch from C, to F. C, F.

So let’s go ahead and just try and switch from C to F without playing first. So C, and
your index finger stays in the same fret, right, for F, and then back to C and remember,
it stays back here, and then the F, and here again – went back to F again. So there you
go. Pretty easy stuff. It’s not incredibly easy, but it’s – it can be easy if you take your
time out to practice I’d say, 20 to 30 minutes a day. You can get this stuff.

And just in case you’re wondering, there is a PDF download over here to the right side
of this video in the video description that’s a link, and if you click on that link, you can
download a zip file that has 4 MP3 files each played in a different beats per minute. 40
beats a minute, 70, 100, and then 130 – and 130 is hard. So the 40 is like, really super
slow, and you should – most people should be able to do that – but at least it gives you
a tiered way to play up, as well as provide you with a little background because there’s
nothing like sitting in a room all by yourself, playing to nobody.

So it gives you the feeling you’re playing with another guitar - because that guitar is
tuned up now, so you have to make sure that you use our tuning video to make sure
you’re tuned up to those MP3s, or else, it’s not going to sound good, it’s going to sound
like the 3rd grade orchestra. So let’s go ahead and just get started. It looks like we’re
going to do C 4 times, then F 4 times, then C 4 times, and then G 4 times, and then
we’re going to do C again, F again, and then we’re going to do the flip – remember the
flip? We just take the last 2 chords the 2nd time around and flip them around, and then
we’ve got G7 and then C, okay, instead of C and then G7.

So when we use a songwriting trick going on there, very peripheral, very, very
ornamental type of thing going on there. If you want to get into the big stuff, look at our
songwriting section and I’ll show you how to write a song in like 30 seconds, okay – and
we’re talking good songs. Most of the really good songs you know, are like 3 chords
you know, anyway. So why do we need to spend time on all this complex stuff anyway?