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In the last segment of this series I'll talk about using the thumb of your left hand to
work with some chords. The most popular time that you'll see this is a D over F sharp chord.
Now let's talk about that. There's the D chord, the common open D. Now, if you wanted to play
this note in the base, you could play it like this, with the first finger, and mute the
A string, but if you're playing a D and you just want to throw that note in real quick,
it would take some time to maneuver your fingers, so what you could do is just slide the thumb
up there. That would also be a first inversion, because F sharp is the third in a D chord.
You could also do that with more complicated chords. Like for example, if you wanted to
play this chord with a G in the base, you'd run out of fingers. So you have to use your
thumb. This would be a G 7, flat 13 chord, with an F in the soprano. You could use the
thumb to wrap around to get that G in the base to make it a G chord and not an over
chord.