lessons | chord fills


Dylan Schorer

Chord Fills Add Spice to Your Playing

Dylan Schorer was Acoustic Guitar's music editor from 1994 to 1999. He won the 1993 fingerpicking contest at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and until recently he performed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, accompanying various songwriters and playing solo. He recently moved back to the Salt Lake City, Utah, area, where he continues to play music, write lessons, and mess around with computers.

In this lesson Schorer shows you how to add licks, fills, and altered chords to enhance the sound of your chord progressions. To hear the examples, you need the RealPlayer plug-in.

Enjoy your lesson, and check out Chord and Harmony Basics. This book is full of handy lessons about basic chords, harmony, theory, barre chords, and much more. An audio CD with all of the music played slowly and up to tempo is included.

Find out more about Chord and Harmony Basics.

 

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Introduction and Tune-up

So you’ve mastered all the basic open chords, you have several accompaniment patterns down cold, and you have a few songs under your fingers, but you’re looking for ways to inject more of your own personality into the music. You’d also like to try moving around the fingerboard a bit more rather than hanging out in first position all the time. Strumming through the chords of a song can be very effective, but there are moments when the music calls for a bit of filigree and spice. In this lesson we’re going to learn several fills that can be used to punctuate key moments in a song and break the monotony of a steady accompaniment pattern. Let’s begin by looking primarily at fills and other enhancements that are built around specific chord shapes. These kinds of fills can be seamlessly woven into a basic accompaniment pattern. All it takes is a little imagination and some practice.

The well-known Dsus4-to-Dmajor chord change (remember "Pinball Wizard"?) can provide inspiration for an infinite number of licks. Example 1 shows how Dsus4 and Dsus2 chords can be used to enhance a basic D-chord harmony. Instead of holding down each chord for an entire bar or more, you switch between them quickly, creating a small melody on the first string with the other chord tones resonating beneath.

Example 1

The same idea can be applied to an A chord, as in Example 2.

Example 2


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© 2002 String Letter Publishing, Inc., David A. Lusterman, Publisher.