Beginner Course Level 2

Mircea Gogoncea
Four Note Chords

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Beginner Course
About Your Instructor
Mircea Gogoncea is a 27-year old
Romanian-German classical guitarist
based in Los Angeles. He has performed
in over 350 concerts on 5 continents.
Having won 167 prizes, he has one of the
highest number of guitar awards in the
world. Among the most prestigious are
the 1st prizes at the 2018 Havana
International Guitar Competition in
Cuba, the Julián Arcas Guitar
Competition in Spain, the GFA Youth
Solo Competition in Los Angeles, and the
Audience Prize at the F. Tárrega
Competition in Benicassim, Spain. In
April 2018, he organized and taught the
first-ever guitar masterclass and
workshop in Lagos, Nigeria, which he
successfully fundraised with a concert
tour of India and Germany.
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His trip to India and Nigeria was turned
into a documentary that can be watched
on YouTube. As of 2020, he is a Teacher’s
Assistant for classical guitar at the
University of Southern California in Los
Angeles and a doctoral student under
Grammy award winner Scott Tennant.
He graduated with maximum marks and
honors from the excellence program at
the Robert Schumann Hochschule
Düsseldorf under Joaquín Clerch, as well
as the “Advanced Diploma” program of
the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Previously, he had completed two
master’s degrees simultaneously in
Düsseldorf and London. During his
studies in London, he was awarded the
inaugural David Russell Prize in 2014.
Beginner Course
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the tonebase Beginning
Guitar Course!
This course is intended for students who
have already completed the Beginner
Course: Part 1 with Daniel de Arakal. If you
have not had a chance to go through it, I
recommend you start there.
At the end of the previous tonebase course,
you successfully learned to play
‘Andantino in C Major’, Op. 59 by Mateo
Carcassi. This piece demanded the
mastery of certain musical and technical
concepts, such as: multiple notes played at
the same time, different rhythms in the
treble and bass voices, alternating right-
hand fingers, as well as reading and
understanding accidentals.
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In this course, we are going to take this to the
next level by going through: four-note
chords, basic music theory and harmony
concepts, arpeggi, dynamics, right and left
hand preparation, left-hand slurs,
rasgueados, and other musical terminology -
all culminating in a piece you will learn to
play in its entirety: the famous ‘Malagueña
Fácil’, a Spanish tune popularized by
Francisco Tárrega among others, and slightly
revised by me for length and ease of playing.
One of the great advantages of learning to
play guitar via tonebase is that you can learn
at your own pace. However, if a long time
has passed since you completed the previous
level, you might feel like you have forgotten
part of what was explained there. This is
perfectly normal! Should this happen to you,
I recommend you go back and recap the last
few lessons of the previous course, since
concepts from there will generally not be
explained again in this course.
Watch Daniel De Arakal's
Beginner Course Part 1
Beginner Course 04

FOUR-NOTE CHORDS
C MAJOR CHORDS

The very last note of the piece you learned at the

end of the previous course was a 4-note chord:

This is a C-major chord, played on the 5th, 4th,

3rd and 2nd strings. The exercises and pieces we
will be learning in this course will feature a
number of chords like this one. To get started,
let’s learn a few more chords!

Before we do that though, here’s an interesting fact that will become very useful
later: there are other combinations of strings that create a C-major chord. Why is
that? Well, we will get into the more theoretical aspects of chord theory in future
lessons of this course. For now, just keep this in mind.

With this newfound freedom, let’s try a little

exercise. Hold down the C-major chord with your
left hand, and with your right hand, play this
combination of strings: thumb on the 5th, index
on the 4th, middle on the 3rd, and ring finger on
the 2nd.

Then, without changing your left hand, play these

strings (thumb on the 4th, index finger on the 3rd,
middle finger on the 2nd, ring finger on the 1st).

This first version is a C-major in root position,

and this second version is a C-major in 1st-
inversion. Alternate between these two with your
right hand.
Beginner Course 05

As you can see, the left hand stays put the whole time. Remember to relax your left
hand between exercises, otherwise it might get tired and start to hurt fairly quickly.
However, once you begin this exercise, the left hand stays there, and the right hand
alternates between these two string combinations.

Before we move on, keep in mind that

we can also combine these two
inversions of C-major we learned: place
the thumb on the 5th string, index on
the 3rd, middle on the 2nd, and ring on
the 1st, and play!

This resulting chord is a more “open”

voicing of the first C-major we learned.
Basically, as long as your left hand stays
put on these specific frets and strings,
any combination of strings you play will
be a valid version of C-major.
Beginner Course 06

G MAJOR CHORDS

Next, let’s learn a new chord. Here’s a very simple G major chord. The 3rd finger of
the left hand goes to a low G, on the 3rd fret of the 6th string, while the 4th finger
goes to a high G, on the 3rd fret of the 1st string. As for your right hand, you will be
playing the 6th string with your thumb, 3rd string with your index, 2nd finger with
your middle, and 1st string with your ring finger.

Now, in case you have already played some basic guitar chords before you got started
on this course, you might have learned a different version of this chord. There are
many correct ways of playing the same chord.

This diversity of options and fingering choices makes our music more interesting
and allows for very different-sounding combinations of the same chords in the
pieces we will learn.

So for now, let’s start with this very simple way of playing a G-major chord. At this
point you might be asking yourself: why do we have to play this with the 3rd and 4th
fingers? They are so weak and sloppy. Wouldn’t it be easier to play using a different
combination of fingers in our left hand? And the answer to that is that - yes, it would
be easier with other fingers. But we are using these right now because they allow us
to move smoothly between this chord and the next one we are going to learn.
Beginner Course 07

G7 CHORD

The next chord we’re going to learn is also

a type of G-major, called a G7. What does
the number 7 stand for? It is a G-major that
contains an interval called a 7th. I will
explain what this means when we get to
the more theoretical lessons in this course.
For now, let’s just call it a G7 and learn to
play it.

For this chord, the 3rd finger will remain

on the low G on the 6th string, however
instead of playing a high G on the 1st
string, we will be playing a high F - with
our 1st finger on the 1st fret of the 1st string
- quite easy to remember! As for the right
hand, let’s do exactly the same thing we
did for our regular G major: thumb on the
6th string, index on the 3rd, middle on the
2nd, ring on the 1st.

All right, now let’s alternate between these

two chords! Play the regular G-major,
followed by a G7, and repeat.

Now, you might notice, this particular

combination of chords seems to sort of want
to go somewhere, but never to reach it. It’s
not as satisfactory as just playing different
inversions of C major repeatedly. This is a
perfectly normal sensation to have, and in
fact we will explain why it happens later in
this course.
Beginner Course
In order to “resolve” it (this is what it’s
called in music, when the tension from
a chord is finally released by another
chord), let’s add the open C-major into
the mix. We will be playing G-major,
G7, followed by an open C-major.
Now, you might notice that for the
more “open” version of the C-major, we
don’t need the second finger.
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Since we are not playing the 4th string,
there is no point in pressing it down
with the left hand either. This is
different from our previous exercise,
where we were playing the 4th string in
the other inversion of the chord - so we
did need the 2nd finger.
To make this even more interesting,
let’s start on the original C-major we
learned last course, and then go to the
exercise we just played: G-major, G7,
and open C.
This creates a nicely rounded-off
sequence. This will be your first piece of
homework for this lesson. Practice this
sequence repeatedly, until it sounds as
smooth and natural as possible.
Beginner Course 09

Since we are already here, let’s learn another simple sequence. Start with the regular C-
major we learned last course, then move on to C-major 1st inversion - that’s the same
chord but all the right-hand fingers go one string higher. Once you have these two, play
a G7 just like we learned and now another inversion of G7, where your top three right-
hand fingers stay the same, but the thumb goes all the way to the 4th string.

For an additional challenge, check out exercise number 1C. This one is an optional
exercise with a more complex chord progression - try to read it by yourself! Remember
the accidentals and what they do - the sharp specifically, which makes your note one
half-step higher than its natural version.

The chords from this exercise, while not strictly necessary in order to advance towards
the objective of this course, will come in very handy for other pieces you might want to
learn in the future. Below is a simple chart reminding you of the notes on each string
for the first three frets. Use it to your advantage!

All right, that’s it for today! Practice these well and come back to the next chapter once
you have them sounding smoothly and nicely.
Beginner Course 10

Notes

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