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It is night and day compared to the dark ages of 2007. The same thing goes for YouTube tutorial. The amount of R&B song chords are ever growing and if the song is popular enough or recent enough (anything from 2010 onwards), the chances are greater that you will be able to find the chords of any song that you like. However, once past this, your learning will be much faster than mine for the simple fact that quantity of contents available now. Then you move on the minor 7th and major 7th which are common in R&B (e.g. Then, you will progress to play other barre chords such as Fm, Cm, B, Bb. This can take a few weeks to learn and getting used to (typically the F chord will be the first chord you will learn). It is true that there is no getting around learning the barre chords (there are YouTube videos that are more than 20 minutes long that simply deal with barre chords). Keep in mind things have greatly involved since 2007 (many of you are probably reading this from smartphone…which was not the norm then).
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In no way are my comments above intended to discourage anyone in learning to play this beautiful genre of music. I don’t want to give the impression that the genre is impossible to play or is reserved for people with natural talent or requires unreasonable amount of time to learn. Like anything else worth having in life, with determination and hard work, virtually anything is possible. Unlike pop or rock which tends to use beginner-friendly chords, the average R&B song has between 70-100% barre chords…and the little bit that is not barre chord tends to be chords that requires gang sign-like fingering. This can make the genre impractical to beginners….R&B tend to us chords with minor 7th and major 7th so you tend to see a lot chords with names like C#m7, G#m7, Abmaj7, Ebmaj7, Dm7b5….which can be quite intimidating…I mean as a beginner, we generally tend to flee even at the sight of a single barre chord in a song, let alone an entire song that doesn’t have a single non-barre chord. When the first few R&B song chords and YouTube tutorials or live performance of songs first appeared, it became obvious that I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was quite excited to learn all those 90s-2000s classic R&B songs and initially was under the impression that the chords would be regular chords like G C D. This was to me the toughest thing to get over. No beginner is gonna touch that song…at least not in the early learning. You will notice that virtually all the chords are actually barre chords. Brian, being a great guitar player (and musician for that matter), actually regularly plays this song with just his acoustic guitar….so here is a video of him performing the song live in Seattle where you can actually see the chords being played: The music can seem deceivingly simple enough from a quick listen. Take a listen to Brian McKnight’s hit “6 8 12” (tutorial in-bedded in the link for those interested in the chords) If you were to find some R&B tutorials, they were not always the most accurate (keep in mind whoever published it at the time likely would have had to learn the whole song by ear so the inaccuracies here and there were totally understandable).Ģ) R&B songs use a lot of barre chords: This is not always obvious when you just listen to the songs. You can verify this by googling tutorials for R&B songs and see how many were published 11 years ago or earlier as of 2018. In addition, YouTube was only 2 year old at the time so the amount of tutorials, let alone R&B tutorials were scarce. Needless to say, most guitar sites didn’t have a lot of R&B songs.
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They were however concentrated toward the pop genre (pop ballad, pop rock). To be fair, the amount of song chords were burgeoning at the time. This obviously was not the case back in 2007. We are now living in an era where we get surprised or disappointed if a particular song we want to learn doesn’t have a YouTube tutorial or does have the chords on popular guitar sites. Let me explain….ġ) Finding Song Chords: The vast amount of quality content available now is just amazing which is a product of the evolution of our technology that led to the ease of creating contents and obviously amount of contents being published per year. It was a slow but exciting at at times uneven progress from there. In the last article, I told the story about how I got my first guitar.