During one of my random visits to Facebook, I saw a shared post showing a video of a guitar player from my old stomping grounds, Ohio. Okay, so what. There's tons of guitar players in Ohio. What makes this guy special is how he overcame a number of physical challenges to play guitar. 

His name is Brock Davisson, and he has mastered tone, despite his unorthodox approach to playing guitar. He's killin' a tune with a Blues Rock vibe in this video. Notice the amount of vibrato (vibrato is is a type of string bending to maintain a note and sustain it indefinitely) he uses whenever holding a note. There's a clue there in developing your tone - the unique sound you get when playing. Work on your vibrato! 

As you can see, Brock doesn't play guitar the way most of us do. He's confined to a wheelchair and has some very short, fat fingers. But as you can hear, that hasn't stopped him from becoming an accomplished guitar player. So if he can do it, so can you... Just sayin'.

Today I wanted to point out something very subtle about open guitar chords that I suspect not many of you have ever thought about. I say that with a certain amount of confidence  because I know I never thought about it until a couple months ago.

As you probably know by now, each guitar chord can be fingered a number of different ways. What I mean is, a chord can be played using different shapes on the fingerboard.

This really isn't apparent to new guitar players because we all tend to learn chords the same way - the open chords first. Barre chords are scary because we have to use our index finger to press most or all the strings down, so those don't typically get introduced until a new guitar player is comfortable playing open chords.

We start off learning a single shape for each guitar chord and that's enough to strum along to our favorite songs. But there's a lot more possibilities for playing the same chords in box of the first three to four frets.

We humans are visual animals and have an easier time seeing physical things than we do conceptual images. It is fairly simple to understand that we can move a chord shape up the neck from fret to fret and it will produce a different chord with each fret change. Let's call this moving the chords vertically up and down the neck.

But what if you decided to play one chord in different places horizontally across the strings? 

What 'choo say, Davey?

Okay, bear with me for a second. Imagine you could add an unlimited number of strings on each side of your guitar neck and they were tuned in the same way as the existing six strings. It would look something like this:

Now think about an open chord - any chord will do. For example, let's look at the C major chord. The C chord is made up of three notes, the C, E and G notes.

When you play a C major chord in the open position, the most common fingering is this:

Here's what the notes would look like if we had unlimited strings like above:

Why go through all this explanation for a theoretical string set up? Well, first off it's not as theoretical as it might sound. Here's a 10-string guitar recital for your curiosity.

Besides that, my purpose is to show you that you can play the C chord (or any other chord for that matter) in different ways to achieve different sounds based on the note that is played first, whether it's the C note, the E note or the G note. 

This is what chord inversions are all about. I've talked to you about playing inversions up the neck, but as you can see here, inversions can be played across the strings as well. Depending on the effect you want the chord to play on the overall sound of a song or progression, inversions give you a tool to use chords in a way that help strengthen the emotional kick a song has on the listener.

Yup, this is something I will go into much greater detail in the Chords Course as well. I don't expect you to fully understand my warped way of looking at things here. It might take a few times reading through this to start getting a feel for the concept.

Even if it doesn't come to you right away, you've been exposed to the idea. If nothing else, you're that much closer to having the light bulb come on in your understanding of chords and inversions and how the notes work together based on the standard string tuning. 

Okay, enough brain stretching for the day. Go out and have a great weekend, Yo... Rock on!

Peace~

Dave

P.S. So yeah, I tried something a little different with the email formatting, and NO, I won't be doing that again... Sorry for the mess!