These chord tricks are from Matthieu Brandt’s 50 Chord Tricks You MUST Know course which will help hone your rhythm chops by helping you craft and recognize interesting chord applications and engaging rhythmic ideas.

Chord Trick #6: Power It Up

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Move a cliche power chord voicing to a different set of strings and end up with a huge sound that will also hand you some colorful extensions.

Chord Trick #8: Inverted Pyramid

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Inversions of chords will get you new voicings that can be put to work in this more complex approach to playing backup. With this chord trick you can create a more orchestral way of playing your guitar by looking at each chord note individually, instead of some set chord voicing that moves to another set.

Chord Trick #29: Fade to White

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Close chord voicings can be achieved by playing an open string together with a fretted note. This trick is about close chord voicings without open strings.

Chord Trick #36: Open Aria

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The close chord voicings will get you an intense flavor with a lot of tension without the need to move the chord away. This is different from the dominant seventh tension that makes the progression want to move forward to another chord.

This particular voicing is played far up the neck, which makes the trick even more impressive.

Chord Trick #37: Benny

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This is a combination of jazzed-up chords with some major pentatonic double stops and triads in the style of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Lenny’.

Chord Trick #39: Mysterious D

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One of the fattest tricks around, when playing in D major or D minor, tune your low E string down to a D and play fills on the middle strings. Keep one or two fingers on the fretboard to glue it all together.

Chord Trick #50: Slish and Slash

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Slash chords are chords with a bass note that is not the root of the chord. This chord trick is about creating some fresh sounds by adding bass notes under a chord that you would not expect.

Dig these strumming patterns? Download Matthieu Brandt’s 50 Chord Tricks You MUST Know50 Chord Tricks You MUST Know for much more including tab, notation, and jam tracks!