How to improve your chord changes
Beginner Guitar Essentials Lesson 8
This series of lessons will set you up for success on the guitar. You’ll learn what to focus on as a beginner, what to ignore, and how to structure your practice so you can start using what you’re learning to play songs as quickly as possible!
Learning the routes between chords
We’ve talked about the concept of mental bandwidth and how we have separate metrics of success for both chords and strumming. You’ve learned how you shouldn’t be concerned if your chords sound a little rough when you’re working on improving your strumming.
That’s normal.
However, we don’t want rough chords forever and there are still some things you can do to optimise your changes so they won’t take up as much of your mental bandwidth.
I like to use the analogy of locations. Each chord is a different location. If you know the route between these locations, you’re going to be able to go between them a lot more quickly, confidently, and effectively. You won’t be stopping to check a map or second guess what turn you should take. You’ll know the route and the process of changing chords won’t use up as much of your mental bandwidth.
The diagrams below will show you how to think about each movement so you can learn the routes as efficiently as possible.
Changing shapes in one movement
Learning how to change chords in one movement is a crucial part of developing as a guitar player. If you have to put the fingers of a chord down one at a time, it will literally take three times longer than it needs to for you to complete a chord change. This will put a huge limit on your potential as a guitar player.
Here’s how to practice changing to a shape in one movement:
Hold a chord shape tightly with good technique
Relax your grip while leaving your fingers on the strings
Grip the chord tightly again
Repeat this process moving your fingers further and further away from the strings each time
Enjoying the lessons?
This series of lessons is test footage from the first part of our upcoming beginner guitar course. These lessons are all from the first of 10 sections that will help you form a rock-solid foundation when you’re starting out as a beginner guitar player.
If you’ve got any feedback on the material, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear what you think!
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In the next part of this lesson series, we’ll go over the benefit of thinking in numbers when you are learning chord progressions.
A guitarist who has learned all the notes on the fretboard: Can more effectively learn scales and chords; Has a better understanding of keys, intervals, and scale degrees; Is able to more easily memorise songs; Has a greater capacity to understand music theory; Is more effectively able to develop their aural skills; Gets ‘lost’ far less frequently when they are improvising on the guitar.