Playing in the Key of E

First a review…

Common musical scales have 8 notes. Most popular songs, including worship songs are written using 4 chords that are built off of certain note numbers in these scales. Those note numbers are: 1, 4, 5, 6. Our little graphic now has 4 common guitar scales as examples, it looks like this:

Note #	1	2 (minor)	3	4	5	6 (minor)	7	1 or 8
G scale	G	A	B	C	D	Em	F#	G
D scale	D	E	F#	G	A	B	C#	D
A scale	A	B	C#	D	E	F#	G#	A
E scale	E	F#	G#	A	B	C#m	D#	E

So when playing/chording songs in the key of E, the 1,4,5,6 chords are E, A, B, and C#m. I’ll give you two ways to play them.

              E                                    A B                                     C#m

                       

                   

             E                                 A (Asus2)       B C#m

                           

                              

NOTE: The white dots on the diagrams above are the white spots painted (or stuck) on most of your guitar’s fretboards.

If you’ve learned chords for the key of E before, you’ll probably find that these are different. There’s a reason for that - actually, hopefully 3 reasons:

1. Conservation of finger movement. While your fingers move across a lot of frets when changing these chords, they actually NEVER change strings or positions.
2. Sound. With most of these chords we’re playing almost all the strings AND a number of them are being played ‘open’ - with any fingers pressing on frets. This makes the sound of these chords really ‘ring’ out clean.
3. Ease of learning. I’m hoping the fact that the chord shape doesn’t change will help you all learn these chords fast. The only thing that changes with these chords is where they are positioned on the fret board.