HATE That C to G Chord Change? Try THESE Tips!

Now I was poking around in my private community of students and the number one question that keeps coming up is, Lauren, I hate this C to G chord change. Everyone hates it. So if you hate this chord change, you're not alone. I'm going to show you some tips in this video how to work on making that faster and smoother.

Now, when it comes to chord changes and the speed of chord changes, it comes down to mostly relaxation, okay? And we do that in guitar by developing muscle memory, okay. And muscle memory is getting the neurons in our brain to be able to do something without us having to think about it. Now, when we first learn chords, if you're doing, you know, the three fingered C chord and the three fingered G chord, and depending on whichever way you're doing it, if you're doing it with the third finger on the bottom or the pinky on the bottom, it doesn't matter. I usually teach the third finger. That's just what's more comfortable for me. So for a lot of people, you know, it's a lot of movement on this chord change going from C and then G. Watch this third finger. Look how much landscape I have to cover. So that third finger is going from the high E string all the way up to the C note on the A string. Which is why some people probably prefer doing their G chord this way. It's a little less distance to travel, but for a lot of people, it still can be a pain in the butt. And this pinky is a weak finger for a lot of people. So I know a lot of people who do their G chord this way. Now the thing you have to do is first finger push ups. Okay? First thing you have to do is how do we get muscle memory? Muscle memory is doing something over and over and over again. Repetition used to tell people all the time. If you come in, if you came into my studio when I was teaching at my music school and I was a drill sergeant, I would have you do these things. I would say, okay, we're going to set a timer for a minute. I want you to take a C chord. I'm going to show you the progression that I would have people do. I we would start by having the C chord just very slightly come off the strings of the guitar. Okay. If you're in the U.S. i'm probably doing an eighth of an inch. If you are on the metric system, I'm probably doing like half a centimeter. Okay. It's barely coming off the strings. We're just getting the fingers used to lifting and you don't even have to do anything with this strumming hand. Okay? This is all the fretting hand. This is a huge mistake a lot of students make. They never take the time to separate the hands. You're always going like this back and forth between the two hands. If we take this hand out of the equation. But, Lauren, what if the strings are muted at this point? I don't care about that. I'm just trying to build muscle memory. So I don't care if they're muted or not. I just want to make sure I can play the C chord by slowly peeling off my fingers. Okay. Same thing with the G chord. Can I barely lift it off the strings and get it there? Because a lot of people, especially on this C chord, what they do is they take their fingers off the strings, and this is what happens. The fingers flatten out. They kind of collapse. I can make a C chord in the air without, you know, without my guitar. So for a lot of people, they'll take their fingers off, and then they flatten out. So we need to train this shape into our fingers, and we do that by first just barely lifting them off the guitar. Now the next step after that is to lift them up, you know, maybe an inch off the guitar. Okay. Maybe a few centimeters off the guitar. Okay. And once you can do that, same with the G chord. You go back and forth, back and forth. Okay. Once you can do that. Now we're going to try and straighten out the fingers. I'm still holding the fretboard, though. I'm straightening out my fingers. I'm bringing them to the fretboard, and. And my goal here is I'm trying to get them to land about the same time. Okay. People always ask me, which finger do you move first? When I go to a G chord, it's definitely my third finger. And when I go to my C chord, it's definitely my third finger. Because this third finger is going to carry. It's got to cover a lot of distance. All right? So I'm always moving my third finger first on my G chord. My third finger hits first before the other fingers on my C chord. I'm pretty good at getting all those fingers down at the same time. All right, so we're here. We're peeling away, straightening out our fingers, bringing it back. The last step is, can I drop my hand down to my side, come up to the guitar, make a C chord? Okay. Now you're taking away the feeling of that fretboard. Okay. Same with the G chord. Can I Come here and make. You know. And you can see when I come up, I got to get that. I put the third finger in place because that's kind of like my pivot point in my placeholder. Okay. Once you can do that, you're like, okay, cool. We've kind of developed some muscle memory around these chords. And this isn't just C and G. This works for any chord change. Next, what you need to do is just start sitting on these chords. C, G, C, G, and asking yourself, when you're doing this, am I breathing? Okay? Your body needs oxygen to. To relax. So a lot of students, they're like.

They're trying to do their chord changes, and then they stop and they go, okay. So by doing that, by holding your breath, it's causing a lot of tension. And these are the tension points I want you guys to pay attention to when we're doing this one. Do you feel tension in your shoulder? Because guess what? If you feel tension in your shoulder, it's carrying all the way down your arm. So what I do with students is we'll say, hold the cord. Where do you feel tension? Like, my wrist. Okay, let's first start by just shaking it out. Relax the wrist. Good. How does your forearm feel? Okay. Oh, my wrist feels good. My forearm's tight. Great. Relax the forearm now. Now, for some of you, believe it or not, you probably have tension in your bicep. You may not feel it, but if you have tension in your bicep, then you definitely got it in your shoulder. So if you're feeling tension in your shoulder, this whole arm is just tensing up, and tension is going to slow you down. So we need to relax the arm, the front fretting hand. Okay, Shake it out. Give it a good shake. Put it back on the guitar. And this will be a test. This is the test to know if your arm is relaxed. So believe it or not, I don't know if you guys are going to believe me, but your thumb is only here to hold your hand on the guitar. If I let go of my thumb, my hand should fall right off the guitar. I had a guitar teacher who taught me that I had already been playing guitar for many, many years. They went around the room. I went to this workshop, and they went around the room, and someone came behind you and tried to peel your thumb off. Now, what happened with a lot of people is this. The thumb would come off, and the hand would pause. So the hand would drop, but it would stop about here. And that's telling you bicep the bicep is tensing up, so you need to work on relaxing. There's a lot of downward pressure on cords. So do this. Just relax your hand. Let's shake it out again. Bring it up to the guitar. Downward pressure on the strings. Okay? Your thumb is on the back of the guitar. Just flick it off real quick. If it's relaxed, it should fall right down to your side. And if you let go and you did this. Tension, there's tension somewhere. If your hand does not just fall off the guitar, it's going to tell you where there's tension. So this is a very important test for you guys to work on. Okay, so we had finger push ups, we had relaxation. And next we have just the chord change itself, but doing it with a metronome. I always tell students, use a metronome. Metronome is just a click.

I get a lot of students in my seven level course. I kind of give them a goal. I'm big on having goals and targets to hit. So this way you know when you can move on to the next level. So in, you know, my seven level system, because we learn these chords first, I tell students, you know, try and get to like 60 to 80. If you can get within that 60 to 80 range, awesome. The gold standard is a hundred. And what does that mean? So this is 100 bpms and all I should be doing is every time I hear a click, I should switch chords. So we have C, G, C, G, C, G, C, G.

Now for someone like me who's been playing the guitar for 20 years, that's pretty easy. And for me, that's actually pretty slow. But when you're just starting to learn the guitar, that's really fast for a beginner. So a lot of my students, what happens is they get stuck around that 60 bpm mark, especially on this C to G chord change. So I lowered my click down to 60 so that you guys can hear it. So this is just a metronome. Okay. Showing you how to use a metronome too. So what I'm going to do is that's C and G. C, G, C, G. Back and forth, back and forth. And a lot of my students get stuck here. Part of it, a lot of it's because of that tension we just talked about. And if you can relieve some of that tension, that will help make your chords faster too. But the other trick is to trick your brain. So a lot of students, you know, we get stuck on the fact that everything needs to be perfect. Okay. If you're a Perfectionist. If you're one of those perfectionists, let me know in the comments below. Just say, that's me. I'm the perfectionist. And in guitar, especially when you're just starting to learn, I always tell my students, the beginning is all about the mechanics. It takes years to master this instrument. Perfection. Perfection will come down the road because not even I'm perfect. Go watch a bunch of my YouTube videos. You're going to see me making mistakes. I leave them in there on purpose so that you guys can see I'm human. I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. Now what happens? They're using the metronome, and I'll be like, well, you're forcing yourself to go faster. The metronome helps you get out of your comfort zone. Okay? That's why I love using a metronome. It also gives you a number, which is like a scorecard that you can write down. So I'll tell people, if you're stuck at 60 beats per minute, what I want you to do is I want you to go up to 70. And they're like, I can't do 60. How am I supposed to do 70? I'm like, just do it anyway. Just do it anyway. Put it up to 70. Hit, go, and go as fast as you can. Go as fast as you can. I don't care if the chords sound like this.

If they're muted every single time. Because what happens is, people then go up to 70, and this is what it sounds like.

And they're like, wow, Lauren, that. That really helped a lot. That was horrible. I'm like, yeah, it was pretty bad. But now what I want you to do is go to 65. And then magically they go to 65, and they're like, oh, this doesn't feel so bad anymore. Why? Because they had just trained their brain to catch up to 70. Okay. And maybe they weren't successful at doing 70, but they got out of their comfort zone and they forced themselves to go to 70, which meant that now coming back to 63 or 65 felt much slower. So it's just a little bit of a psychology game you're playing. And this highlights a very important part of practice. In order to get 30 faster on the guitar, you have to let go of that perfection. I know. They're like, practice makes perfect. No, sometimes you have to practice imperfectly. Okay? Especially on chord changes. If you don't get sloppy, you won't force yourself to go faster. Speed has to sacrifice a little bit of clarity. If you want to go slow and get all of these chords sounding beautiful and perfect, you have to sacrifice speed. You have to go slow to go, oh, I got to fix that finger. Okay, There we go. You have to go slow to get perfect. Okay? But if you want to get fast, you got to throw perfection out the door. You got to push yourself out of your comfort zone, because that's how you grow. Staying in the comfort zone doesn't help you. Using a metronome and forcing yourself to go out of your comfort zone will help you get this C to G chord change much, much faster. Now, if you're looking for another cool step, secret trick of mine to help you with this third finger, the one that's used in that C to G chord change, go check out my faster fingers in one week exercise. Right over there.