Esteban's Canon

[unbibium]

I was watching my new TV and I came across that Esteban infomercial, where he sells an acoustic guitar and DVD set.

He describes how he teaches you the first three chords, G, C, and A-minor, and then teaches you how to use those three chords to play... PACHELBEL'S CANON!

SSC1: I don't know Pachelbel's Canon on the guitar, but based on my notes from Paravonian's rant, I can tell he transposed it from D into C, and I'm damn sure he did a bunch of other dirty tricks to make it work with just those three chords.  Now I feel I have to TiVo it and reverse-engineer it.

Comments

[reverendluke.livejournal.com]

That's the nice thing about guitar. Transposing is theoretically as easy as buying a kapo.

[twillis.livejournal.com]

But that's CHEATING! CHEATER! CHEAT!

Are you sure

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

it wasn't FOUR chords? Hard to imagine making it sound nearly correct without the subdominant (F), and there's no obvious way to fake F as a variant of one of those chords. In fact, to reduce it to three chords, I'd omit the submediant (A-) rather than the subdominant:

I V (or I⁶₄) IV⁶ I⁶ IV I (or IV⁶₄) IV V

Re: Are you sure

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

I wondered whether to mention the need for an F-chord, particularly because it's a bastard of a chord to play on a guitar with an untrained hand. You either have to flatten your index finger across all the strings, mash all four of your fingers in close proximity in the high four strings, or flatten your index finger against the high two strings while placing your second and third fingers precisely on the third and fourth strings. Or, play some inversion where F isn't the lowest note. The kind of stuff that generally waits until the second DVD.

The commercial did promise a complete course, though.