Tip: One Finger Chord Primer Part 6

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. We’re going to learn a new tune in this lesson, Aura Lee, which is much better known as Love Me Tender. Aura Lee is going to teach us a new chord form. It’s our first that uses two fingers. Here it is.

This is played on strings 1 to 3 – or, 1 to 4 for a fuller sound. As with our other chord shapes, this one can slide to any fret. In fact, the Aura Lee arrangement in this lesson uses this shape in two different positions: frets 2 and 4.

Before we get to the playalong, which shows you which frets to move your left hand to, listen to this sound file. It tells you the order in which to pluck the strings. This is a zip-compressed mp3 file.

Don’t worry about playing exactly what’s played in this sound file. You can play the chords any way you want: one string at a time, or pluck them all at once. Just let your right hand do what sounds good to your ear.

Here’s the playalong for the left hand.

You can play this in Windows Media Player, and also the free and lightweight VideoLan player.

What to practice: Practice playing along with the video until you can play the complete arrangement. Then, turn off the video and play the song solo while singing the melody.

Review the other songs you know, including Cielito Lindo. You can review that here.

Remember to take the time to play around, to color outside the lines, as a kid with a coloring book does. Music is resilient, and it always gives you another chance to sound good. To help you recall ideas for different ways of playing a song, go to this lesson.

In the next One-Finger lesson, we’ll learn another two-finger shape.

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Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2009 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News – February 1, 2008 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.