# Expanding chord/shape vocabulary



## Sunny1433 (Nov 23, 2018)

I'm an intetinterme level player and I've been really trying to up my chord/theory game after being inspired by people like Joey Landreth, Airel Posen, Chris Buck etc.

I understand chord theory and how chords/Triads are constructed. I'm now really trying to understand how to involve other intervals like fourths and Sixths into my lead and chordal playing. But I'm really confused about how to actually go about exploring everything because it seems like there's an infimoin number of ways of doing it and just so many chords and inversions that can be used. It's really daunting. Any tips on a streamlined (point A to B to C and so on..) way of how I could do this? I recently bought a guitar theory for dummies book for this purpose too..

Practice routine: I practice about an hour and a half a day. Technical stuff for 20 mins, theory stuff for 30 mins and song stuff (original or covers) for 30 mins. And Noodle for 10mins.

Thanks


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## dolphinstreet (Sep 11, 2006)

Well, since you already know your triads, you could start with adding the 4th. A triad is 1-3-5 so you can start by moving the 3rd to the 4th. Now you have 1-4-5, which is a Sus4 chord. Do that to all the triad inversions you know, and make sure you know which note is which interval. That should keep you busy for a bit.

This is probably obvious, but if you want to do just 4ths, just drop the 5th from that Sus4 chord.

If you want to play 6ths, again start with the 1-3-5 triad shape, and move the 5th to the 6th. Drop the 3rd to play just 6ths.

That's a good thing to practice, and make sure you learn this all over the neck.

The way to become good at this is 1) know which note is which, 2) memorize the grips/voicings, 3) practice 1 and 2 a lot, to backing tracks and metronome. I would suggest spend 20-30 minutes on this every day. After a few weeks, it will start to feel solid!

Hope that helps!


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## Sunny1433 (Nov 23, 2018)

dolphinstreet said:


> Well, since you already know your triads, you could start with adding the 4th. A triad is 1-3-5 so you can start by moving the 3rd to the 4th. Now you have 1-4-5, which is a Sus4 chord. Do that to all the triad inversions you know, and make sure you know which note is which interval. That should keep you busy for a bit.
> 
> This is probably obvious, but if you want to do just 4ths, just drop the 5th from that Sus4 chord.
> 
> ...


Thanks so much for taking the time out with this! I'll give it a go


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## dolphinstreet (Sep 11, 2006)

You can do it!


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