The REAL Secret to Faster Chord Changes

One of the biggest frustrations for beginner guitar players is being able to change your chords fast enough, because usually for most players, by the time they finish getting the chord ready, the song's already moved on to the next chord, and then you're behind. You're already always feeling like you're having to play catch-up, all right? The just hands just not moving fast enough. Well, don't worry, this is totally normal. It's part of the process. But what I'm going to do in this lesson is I'm going to show you some different tips and techniques that that will help you work on your chord-changing hand. All right, because the biggest thing I find for a lot of students is they focus on the chords, but they don't focus on getting the fingers themselves to move faster. And that's what we're going to do in this lesson. So first things first, why do the chord changes feel so hard? They feel almost impossible, for some students. And you need to know this is a totally new mechanic. You know, people are like, oh no, I type a lot. And it's totally different. And it's a new sensation that you have to develop in your hand. And a lot of times when you have things that are new, you're tense, you're really tight, and you cannot move fast when you have tension. So you really have to develop a muscle memory for the chords so that you can relax. And relaxation actually is where the comes from, and also not having to think about it. Because in the beginning, you know, you're just learning where the chords are. So it's almost like a coordinate system, and you're having to put them down one finger at a time, okay? And that's frustrating, and it takes time. But one of my favorite quotes is a Bruce Lee quote, and it's, you know, I'm not scared of the person who knows 10,000 kicks. I'm scared of the person who knows one kick and has practiced it 10,000 times. Now, if Uh, in reality, you may have to practice these chord changes 10,000 times before they become fluid, before you can do them like me. You don't even have to look at the guitar, and you can— you know, I can make a C chord in the air. A lot of you probably can't do that because you don't have the muscle memory, but as you get the muscle memory, the relaxation will come, and with the relaxation comes the speed. So keep that in mind as we're working through these exercises.. So the first thing I focus on with students in my 7 Level Guitar System is finger dexterity. Okay, we have to get these fingers moving in the first place. All right, and I work with a lot of older adults over the age of 50. Some of them have arthritis in their hands, and one of the biggest things you can do before you even get started playing is just doing a bit of this to get some blood flow into your hands, get those joints moving, get some of the fluid going into those joints. Um, and I have some videos on, you know, arthritis and, and playing guitar. There's different picks you can use, um, but the biggest thing for a lot of students is, you know, your hands just don't move as fast as they used to when you're 20. So we just have to get them warmed up, and we have to work on the skill of actually getting the speed back into our hands. So how do we do that? One of the first things I talk about with my students is a spider exercise. All right, and we start with just the first 3 fingers because those are the 3 you use the most in the beginning for using your chords. We'll get to the pinky later, but right now focusing on less is sometimes more. Remember, speed comes from repetition and doing something over and over again with accuracy. Okay, so usually I'll tell students we're gonna use the first finger, second finger, third finger, and we're gonna do a simple spider exercise. We'll start at the 7th fret where it's less stretch. All right, if you start further down, you have to— the frets get wider, you have to start stretching your hand more. So if you start at the 7th fret and you go 7, 8, 9, each finger has its own fret. And you're just going to do 3 down picks with your picking hand. If you don't have a pick, you can use your thumb, will still work the same. Oh, I dropped my pick. See, I've been playing guitar for a very long time and I still drop my pick on the floor. So you never have to be embarrassed about dropping your pick because I still do it. All right, so here we go. We're going to start at the top string and we're going to do 1, 2, 3. We're going to move down to the next string, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. All right, and then we're going to work our way back up. Okay, so we're going from the top string to the bottom string, the thinnest string, back up to the thickest string. And you can go as slow as you need to. I'm going to go at a very slow pace, which is going to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2. Every time we get to 1, we're going to hit the next note. Okay, so it gives you time to relax. Remember to breathe. Okay, don't forget to breathe. I have so many students who hold their breath, and when you hold your breath, that's going to make things tense. And what does tension do? It slows things down. So Breathe as you're going through this. All right?

So we have 1-2-3-4— 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4— 1-2-3-4! One-two-three-four—one-twos three four one-two-three-four-one twothreefourone twotheefoor...? Twoooohhhh?! Tworeeefour onetwotreeforeonewtreeforeontwedreepooronetweethreoerenttwohthréeforrrr!! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3-4! 1-2-3— for one-two-three-four—one-two-three-for-one-two-three—for one two three four... One-two-three-four? 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Now this is a great exercise because it's working on both hands. So we're working on coordinating the hands because you're going to switch chords and you're going to strum at the same time. So that's great. And eventually, you know, you'll want to pick up the speed with this, but in the beginning you want to go nice and slow. And remember to keep your hands relaxed because in the beginning when I watch students do this, usually their fingers are doing something like this. Your fingers are going to feel like they have a mind of their own. So we're working on starting to get control of our fingers, kind of fine motor control of the fingers, okay, to do these very, very specific and small movements. All right, and we're also training them to start relaxing, okay? But that relaxation is not going to come unless you do a lot of repetition. Remember, the muscle memory must develop, and then you will start relaxing. And when you start relaxing, then and only then can you go faster. All right, here's another valuable tip, um, for working on getting those fingers to move faster is to start with the chord shape. Okay, so I'm gonna do a G chord, which a lot of people know. Okay, you got a G chord here, and what you can do is just lift up your fingers one at a time from the positions on that chord, and you're just kind of teaching that finger where to go. Okay, because eventually what you're going to do is you're going to work your way up that you can remove the whole chord and put it back. But in the beginning, especially if you're doing something like a C chord, a lot of students are not going to be able to maintain that C chord when they let go. What's going to happen is they're going to let go and the hand is going to flatten because you just don't have the muscle memory developed quite yet. So if you're working on a C chord, you can just lift up the 3rd finger, lift up the 2nd, lift up the 1st. Okay, now this is a repetitive motion exercise. All right, any of these things, repetitive motion.. And what happens sometimes with repetitive motion is, especially if you get older, tendons, right? I have a little bit of tendonitis in my fretting hand right now. So I don't wanna overdo this exercise. You really only wanna do these, you know, for a few minutes. Okay? I always tell people a good warmup is like 5 minutes, and that could just be your spider exercise. Okay? That could just be moving the fingers, doing a little bit of movement and doing these what I call finger pushups, which is Basically moving the fingers all in the air at the same time. Eventually you'll want to drop your hand down and bring it up to the guitar and make those chord shapes. Okay, so you can do work on that, but that is the first one, is just making the chord shape, lifting up a finger, lifting up another finger, lifting up. Okay, and then slowly you'll be able to peel off all the fingers and get them to land about the same time. Okay, no matter what chord you're doing, okay, you'll be able to make those shapes. But first it's just all about, again, the developing control and finger independence. All right. And a little bit of muscle memory. So those are a couple of good exercises. I teach some other exercises in my 7 Level Guitar System because we focus on hand dexterity a lot. But the best thing to do is to actually work on 1 to 2 minute chord changes. What do I mean by that? You're gonna get what's called a metronome and it's basically a click. So this is a metronome. Okay. All it does is click. And the number here is what we call music beats per minute. Okay? And it's like miles per hour in a car or kilometers per hour if you're in the UK. It just tells you how fast you're going. Okay? And this is a very important tool. I have so many students who ignore the metronome because they hate it. It is tricky to work with in the beginning, but it's great for developing timing and it's your scorecard. Okay? I have a lot of students who are like, you know, when I was first starting teaching, students didn't know if they were making progress or not because they were just judging it on something really subjective. So if you write down a number, if you write down your speed for your chord changes, you can get faster. Usually what I tell absolute beginners to do, because their chord changes aren't very quick, is to set a timer for 60 seconds. Okay, set a timer on 60 seconds and do chord changes. So say you're practicing E minor to an easy C chord. I teach you the easy C chord in my 7-level system. So we're going E minor, easy C. Okay, back and forth. And you would just count how many times. So So this would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And for a lot of students, it's maybe 16, 17. Some people get in their 20s. Okay. I very rarely, actually, I don't think I've ever had someone who started in like their 60s or 70s. Okay. It's just, it's too fast. Your fingers just aren't used to moving that fast. Maybe if they've played guitar before, but for most people, they're starting off in the teens, the 20s, maybe the low 30s. All right. So what you would do is then you would set this metronome. So say you started at 30. So this would be your speed. It's very slow. So it'd be E minor, C, E minor, C. All right, so you would write this down, that number, and then next week you would come back, next week you would come back, and eventually what you want to do— I'm going to just boost this up to 60 for this demonstration. Okay, so now what you would do is you want to push this metronome to get you to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Now with this exercise, something a lot of students confuse is they think it has to be perfect. All right, I am a perfectionist myself. This exercise is trying to get you to go faster, and I always tell students, when you're trying to go faster, you have to sacrifice a little bit of clarity. So maybe you can play these E minor and these C chords perfect at a very, very slow pace, but then you pick it up to 60 and it starts sounding like this. You're only getting those muted strings. I'm okay with that as long as your fingers are getting to the right spot. We can clean that up with time. The goal of this is we're pushing for speed. So if you're fine, like 60 is getting tough, what I recommend you do just try 70. And you're like, why would I try 70? I can't even do 60. Try 70 because you're going to be like, oh my God, it's going to make you speed up and it's going to make you panic. All right, it's probably going to make you tense up because you're going faster. All right, and you're going to try and, you know, you're going to try and keep up with this as best as you can, and it's probably going to be horrible. But then what you do is you come back to 60, and then all of a sudden 60 feels slow. Okay, so it's just a little psychological push to remind yourself, go faster, push yourself out of your comfort zone. A lot of people are scared to go fast or push themselves out of their comfort zone. So I would work with this metronome, one chord change at a time, and do it for a minute, okay, at whatever speed. And maybe you do 30 seconds at a slower speed, 30 seconds at a faster speed, but work on each chord change, 1 minute, maybe 2 minutes if you want to. That's what I do, um, with my students in my course. I say, hey, you're going to play along with me for 1 to 2 minutes, and we're going to work on doing chord changes together. And that's what we do. You have to get that repetition in to get these chords to move faster. Now, on the opposite side of speed, I said, is going slow, right? So now when we go slow, we can focus on clarity. But when we're going slow, we want to move the fingers with intention. Okay, you're kind of training them to move together. Okay, so if you watch on the close-up, you're gonna see my fingers. I'm trying to get the— in the beginning, a lot of— most students build their chords like this, just one finger at a time. When you go slow, I want to encourage you to, oh, try— even if one finger gets first, try and get the other fingers to move. Like on my G chord, my third finger always lands first, but these other fingers are just right behind. So So going slow and really focusing on relaxing and getting those fingers to move together is super, super important. And try to keep them close to the strings. Try not to come away from— I see a lot of students do this. They kind of— I'm overexaggerating, but they pull away from the guitar and then you have to come back. So kind of keep the— try and keep those fingers hovering over the strings. And something that helps my students a lot that I teach is pivot points. And that's why I teach the E minor, the C, the G, and the D chords first, because when you learn an E minor chord, okay, which I'm not going to teach here, but if you want to go learn these chords, you can take my free crash course. We'll put a link in the description below. Okay, E minor to C, there's a pivot point, meaning my second finger doesn't move. Okay, E minor, C. Same with E minor to G, my first finger does not have to move.. So it makes changing between these chords easier. Okay, and in my course we have an easy C chord and we have an easy G chord. Okay, so you really only have to move one finger and it just helps you, helps you get going a little bit faster, um, because starting with the 3-finger chords, especially for older adults— I mean, any adult— I, I did this test, um, at my music school when I used to teach privately one-on-one Um, when I started people on the full chords, it was always much more discouraging and they were more likely to quit faster than if I started them on the two-finger chords. The two-finger chords were just confidence builders, helped you get the hands moving, and they could use those pivot points a lot more effectively, which meant we could play music a lot faster, which is a lot more rewarding for students. And finally, I want to share some of the biggest mistakes students make when trying to learn chords. First mistake, they try to learn too many chords at the same time. So I know teachers, they'll give you a sheet and it's like 20 chords and they're like, go home and learn these. That's a lot to memorize. Okay, think of it like memorizing a password. Okay, that's why I only teach students usually 4 chords at a time. It's much easier to you— for you to remember a 4-digit password than a 20-digit password. Okay, your brain has to get the repetition in enough to make these kind of like part of your— like a language. It's like learning a language is music. So you have to use it enough for it to become fluent. And if you're trying to learn 20 things at a time versus just focusing on 4, um, you will get much better at those 4. And trust me, the 4 chords I teach students— G, E minor, C, and D— those first 4 chords, you can play thousands of songs with just those 4 chords. So don't think you're missing out on anything, but it's definitely going to help you progress a lot faster. Mistake number 2: going too fast too soon. Okay, I have a lot of students, I know, especially when they're practicing rhythm and strumming. Okay, when you're doing strumming and chord changes, you want the strumming to be fast. Keep things slow, work on the muscle memory at first. Okay, when you do your, your chord drills, yes, push for speed, but when you're playing songs and you're working on things, go nice and slow. Give your brain time to think, because when you give your brain time to think, it's more likely to relax. So we're kind of going between fast and slow. I find so many students focus on fast, fast, fast all the time, but there is benefit in going slow. So make sure you do both. And another huge mistake is that students use songs to practice versus practicing chord transitions. So there's nothing wrong with playing music, That's the fun part. I want you to play songs on the guitar. That's what keeps you coming back and having fun, okay? But you should focus on the hard things first and really dedicate a portion of your practice time to just doing chord changes and chord transitions, okay? Because that's what's going to make the song sound more musical. Even with strumming, if your chord changes aren't very quick, we can't get really intricate with the strumming. We have to keep things simple. So the more you focus on hand dexterity and getting these chords moving, the faster you're going to be able to make the songs you know and love sound more like the song. Now, if you're like one of my students who's over the age of 50 and your fingers aren't moving as quickly as you hoped they were, that's okay. It doesn't mean you can't learn guitar. I have a lot of students, they're like, maybe I shouldn't be learning guitar. That's not the truth. It just means you haven't put enough repetition and consistency in yet. To get good at playing the guitar. I've helped students in their 60s, 70s, 80s. I've even had a few students in their 90s, which is super impressive. So you are never too old to start learning the guitar and having fun with music. Just understand that it takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of consistency. And if you're looking for another great exercise for getting these fingers moving even faster, go check out this quick 6-minute lesson over there, which is one of my secret weapons for building hand independence and getting those chord changes moving even faster.