Mini Guitar Lessons

Now that you’ve practiced Dsus2 and Dsus4 in isolation, it’s time to combine them to create longer, more interesting melodic lines. These chord voicings are commonly heard in many popular songs, adding depth and variation to the music.

Think of music as an experiment with sound. As you play, try blending these chords in different ways and see what feels right or sounds good alongside other chords you know. Explore and enjoy the process—there’s no wrong way to discover your sound!

Let’s expand our suspended chords library by adding another cool sounding guitar chord – Dsus4. You can create this chord by simply adding your little 4th finger on the 3rd fret 1st string whilst holding the D chord.

How do you like it? Remember, application is important, apply everything you are learning to your music and songs that you know.

Let’s continue our suspended chords mini-lessons. Today, we will transform the D chord into Dsus2.

This is a very easy transformation – all you need to do is to remove your 2nd finger from the 1st string. Isn’t that easy to remember?  Don’t forget to practice it with your favourite strumming pattern.

Now, let’s try to combine our newly learned chords – Cadd9 and Cmaj7. Again, there are so many ways to use them in your songs. Try to experiment and see what you come up with.

Remember that in order to use these voicings effectively, you need to integrate them with the knowledge you already have.

This is another idea for expanding your options when playing the C chord for a long time. Simply by adding the little finger on the 3rd fret, 2nd string we will transition from the C to the Cadd9 chord.

I hope you like the sound. If so, try to implement it into your playing.

In this lesson, we will make a simple and cool-sounding alteration to the C chord. By simply removing the first finger from the C chord we transition into the fringes of a jazzy sound.

The name of the new chord is Cmaj7. Try to experiment with different strumming techniques to see how these two chords work together.

If you follow my previous two lessons, you should be quite comfortable now with the chords Asus2 & Asus4. In this lesson, we combine them together. With these kinds of chords, you can create really interesting voicings.

Since you are familiar now with voicing Am – Asus2, let’s have a look at another option Am – Asus4. This is another easy alteration of the A minor chord, this time, we will add our 4th finger on the 3rd fret 2nd string. If you don’t use your little finger too often, it may turn into a pretty good 4th finger exercise.

When you play your favourite songs, many times you will play a single chord for a long time. In this lesson, we learn how to enrich the harmony of a song by adding a small alteration to the A minor chord. A minor will become Asus2 by simply lifting your first finger. This will add a little voicing to your chord. You can use this technique with any rhythm.