Seeing big intervals

[Jed]

I re-borrowed a guitar that floats between a friend and myself and removed the E A and e strings. What a fantastic suggestion. You'd have like the smile that crept onto my face as I discovered "whoa, there's a G major up here?!?"

LOL well, . . . er, . . I didn't mean it literally! But now that you have it's a very powerful way to build chops on a string set that most guitarists are weak on. Mick Goodrich @ Berklee talks about the Unitar (playing the guitar as if it only had one string). It's kind of a weird concept but the point is that we as guitarists should work to know our instrument from every possible perspective. Don't let yourself believe or feel that you are restricted to some arbitrary group of adjacent frets. Learn the whole instrument by learning one or two strings at a time.

Also, I just realized that by arp you were abrieviating arpeggio. Correct me if I'm wrong.. I'll take a look at that excercise tonight. If I understand, the excercise will be ascending/decending 1,3,5's? If so the other two excercises would be 1,b3,5 and 1,b3,b5?Although I know a few arpeggio patterns I don't have a clue what technically defines an arpeggio. Could someone tell me "the rules"?

Yes, Arps = an abreviation for arpeggio
An Arpeggio is just the notes of a chord played over time as opposed to all at once. There are no rules, just descriptions of common constructs.

Singing along with my notes sure helped too. Is that what you meant by voicings? Thanks again Jed.

Singing the note names as you practice is very powerful. It's good that you've started doing that. A "voicing" is one specific way to play a chord. Any chord can be played in different ways. A C (major) triad could be played as x32010 or as x35553 or as x7555x or as x7x988. These are all C (major) triads but these are four of the more than 20 different voicings available on the guitar. Does that make sense? Think of the G chord you found up high on your DGB strung guitar. That an example of one of many possible voicings for a G chord.

cheers, (keep working . . and asking, . . you'll get there)

[Malcolm]

Chord voicing -- you have a Country band with three acoustic guitars in it all playing open string chords to the same chord progression. Going to sound muddy. Now if one of those acoustic will play those chords in another voice - no mud.

One of them can play the cord at a different location as Jed pointed out - that's another voice. We could use inversions, i.e. instead of a C chord with the C E G notes in that order an inversion puts them in E G C or G C E. Same C Chord just another voice. Another way is for one guitar to play 6th, i.e. instead of C F G use C6, F6, G6. Another way is to use a capo and capo into another voice, not necessary to go into detail, for this string.

Point. Playing in another voice just adds another voice to the mix. Everyone is playing the same chord just in a different voice. You and I singing - we both are in the same key but my voice is my voice and your voice is your voice. It's a duet.