TOP 3 EXERCISES For Faster Chord Changes in 1 Month

So one of the common questions I get from beginners is, Lauren, how do I get my fretting hand to move faster? I'm learning chords, but I feel like I just can't change those chords fast enough, and I'm getting frustrated. So in this video, I'm going to show you three exercises that I do at students to help them build finger dexterity so they get their hands moving and their chord changes faster. And stick around to the end of the video. I'm going to show you one of my top secret exercises that I show students to get faster fingers within a couple weeks.

So the biggest problem that most students don't understand is that we really have to focus on finger dexterity, especially if you're an older learner. You know, our fingers aren't as flexible as they were when we were all 20. Okay. So we have to get them to stretch out and become a little bit more nimble. So the first thing I show students is a traditional spider exercise. So this first exercise is a little more traditional. This next couple I'm going to show you are not as traditional. So first, let's start off with this one, because it's just a very good way to work on finger dexterity, and that's what we have to do. We have to get the fingers moving. And if you don't practice for this specifically, it's going to get harder for those chord changes to get faster or it's just going to take a lot longer than it should. So in this exercise, we're going to be using fingers 1, 2, and 3. Okay? The first three fingers. Don't worry about the pinky yet. When you're a beginner player, you should be focusing on open chords. Don't be playing bar chords yet. They're too hard for you at the stage that you're at. But you should be focusing on open chords. C chords, G chords, D chords, E minor, A minor. And, you know, if you're a student of mine, you know, I teach the two finger easy C, G and D chords and the E minor chord. And the less fingers you use, the easier it's going to be to move them. Okay. But if you're someone that's traditionally playing open chords, you're usually using the first three fingers. So. So that's what we're going to focus on. We're going to focus on building the speed, flexibility, and stretch in your first three fingers. So we're going to take the first finger and we're going to put on fret seven or, Sorry, I Lied. This is fret five. Whoops. So we're going to put on fret five, fret six, and then fret seven is the third finger. Okay? Now, you'll notice that these frets, they're smaller the closer to the body we are. And when you get to the headstock, they get wider. So. So for most people, 5, 6 and 7 is going to work out great. If that's too much of a stretch for you, if someone who's older and your hand isn't feeling as flexible, you can always come up to 7, 8, 9. It's the same thing. Eventually, we're going to work our way down to this first fret. All right? And if you'd like a copy of the tab for this exercise, if you go to my free crash course, you can download the workbook that has the tab for this specific exercise. It's absolutely free. So we're gonna start on the fifth fret. First finger, okay? And then sixth fret, then eighth fret. Now, you don't have to leave your fingers down like I did here. You could lift them up. Okay. At this point, it doesn't matter. All I want you to do is get the fingers moving. That's what we need to start doing. And you're gonna go 5, 6, 7. Okay? 5, 6, 7, 5, 6, 7. Now to G string, 5, 6, 7. The B string, 5, 6, 7. And then the E string. 5, 6, 7. And when you get to that high E string, we're going to work our way back up to the B string. 5, 6, 7 again. 5, 6, 7 again.

Up again.

One more time. Okay? And all I'm doing with my picking hand is I'm just doing three down strums. Alright? Three down picks. It doesn't matter. We're not focusing on this hand so much when we're focusing on the fretting hand. Now when you start, this is going to start very slow and that's okay. I want you to go as slow as you need to to make this comfortable. Now, some of you, your fingers might be doing this, and that's okay. That's normal. The tendons are very stiff, so that's going to happen. But what you should do is you should practice this all the way down, all the way down, all the way back up.

And you should do that up and down five times. So down and then back up is one down. Up is two down. Up is three, four and five. You should do that five times in a row. And however long it takes you is however long it takes you the first time you do it, it might take you five minutes. And then as you keep going, it might take you three minutes. And then all of a sudden, it's one minute, and then maybe it's 30 seconds, depending on how fast you get. But you can see we're just focusing on these first three fingers because these are the fingers you're using. C chord, G chord, D chord, A minor, E minor, A minor, 7, D minor chord, all those open chords. We're using these first three fingers. So let's focus all of our attention on making these three fingers move faster. And this is a really great exercise that you should start all of your practices off. Just spend five minutes on this exercise, and I guarantee you that your fingers will start feeling better, they'll start moving quicker. If you want to start stretching your hands out more, you eventually go to 3, 4, 5. Okay? You work that the way down, all the way back up, and then you go to frets 1, 2, and 3. This is the biggest stretch. And again, frets 1, 2, and three. This is where you play all your open chords. So the sooner you can get this exercise down to these first three frets, the better it's going to be for you and your chords and your chord changes. All right, so we've gone through, we should be doing. With the first five minutes or so of your practice routine, the next thing to get faster chord changes is we have to just start developing muscle memory. We have to start getting our fingers to remember where these chords are. Because in the beginning, when you're forming chords, a lot of times you're doing this, you know, one finger at a time, and that takes time. All right? If you have to do one finger at a time, you have to wait for the first finger to get in place before you can move that next finger. So eventually, we want to start working on getting these fingers to move at the same time. And that's very hard in the beginning. So. So the first step is to just practice switching between two chords. And I usually tell my students, pick a pair of chords. All right, let's pick an E minor chord and a C chord. All right, I'm doing a full C chord I like just as a note, because not everyone plays their E minor this way. I like to play my E minor with the first and second fingers because it creates a pivot point, meaning I don't even have to lift up my second finger to get to the C chord. Okay. To go back to E minor is very simple. You can leave that second finger right in Place. All right, now you've just eliminated moving one finger. The other thing is when you're going from E minor to G, you can leave the first finger in place. It just kind of has to slide a little bit in the fret. But it makes going from E minor to G very. So I like those pivot points. It makes things a little bit easier for a student. So. So let's start with that. I'm going to do E minor to G. Okay. What I would tell a student is watch a clock. We're going to time each other because usually in the beginning, it's very, very hard to do these chord changes. Most people I know, especially if they're doing the three fingered chords, sometimes they can't even do 20 chord changes a minute. So a chord change is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So you would count how many times you can change between a chord and you would time yourself for 60 seconds. And whatever that is, you write it down. Okay? That is your number, that's your score. And then what we're going to do is we're going to build that over time. So you keep, every week or every day, you keep coming back and you challenge yourself to push back that number. Now what I recommend is you get a Metronome app. Okay? So on my phone, I have an app. It's called Metronome Beats. I have an Android. There are ones on Apple too. You just need. It's just a click track. So let me play this. This is going to be at 60 beats per minute. So one chord change per second on a clock. And this is what it sounds like. Okay. It's just a little click that goes back and forth. But this is the secret weapon or one of the secret weapons I get my students on as soon as possible. Because when you're going on your own time, you tend to go at a comfortable speed. All right, and the thing with getting faster, here's a little tip for you guys. The things about getting faster with your chord changes is when you want to go for speed, you have to sacrifice a little bit of clarity to push yourself out of your comfort zone versus when you're trying to make all your chords sound perfect, you have to slow down. You have to sacrifice speed because you have to go slow. Because if you hear a muted string, you have to go and find which string muted and fix that. So when you're practicing your chords for perfection and making them sound good, you have to go slow. But when you're trying to do speed drills, you will get a little Bit sloppy. Understand? If you're trying to go faster and you're pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, it's not going to sound perfect. So what do I mean? Say you're someone. Your top speed on the metronome is 55, and you're trying to do 60. All right? We have this E minor to C chord change. So it would be like this. It would be click, click, click, click. Okay? And that's all you do. You sit there one to two minutes, and you do that back and forth. You're like, great. That's comfortable. I'm going to jump up to 70 now, which is probably a big jump. I usually jump, like, anywhere from three to five beats per minute. But this is what your chord changes might sound like at 70. You might be going.

And you're like, lauren, that sounds horrible. That's actually a good thing. Okay. Because if you notice, even though the chords sound horrible and a little bit muted, my fingers are getting in the right spot. Spot. All right? And this is a big. It's kind of. What do they call that? I guess the best word I can come up with is a disconnect. It's a disconnect in your brain to think, like, I'm practicing, and if it doesn't sound perfect, it's wrong. We. You know, we don't want to practice things wrong. So if you're doing these chord changes and your fingers are landing on the wrong strings, that's too fast. You got to slow it down a little bit. But if they're landing on the right strings, but the finger placement is muting other strings, that's acceptable to me. I've done chord changes with students, and this is what their chords sound like.

And I'm like, great, let's move on to the next one. And they're like, that sounded like crap. And I'm like, it's okay. Your fingers are moving. The whole point of this is to force you to move faster. So 70 might be really hard, but now you come back to 65, and it feels easy. So you always want to be pushing yourself faster out of the comfort zone. A lot of students. This is where a lot of students get stuck with their chord changes, is because they're like, well, it sounds perfect x 60. And then I go to 65, and it starts sounding like this. And they say, think that's a bad thing? That's not a. That's not a bad thing. As long as your fingers are getting on the right strings, you need to push yourself out of your comfort Zone. And in order to get more speed, you have to sacrifice clarity. So pick two chords. E minor, C, E minor, G, E minor, D. Whichever ones, I recommend starting with four chords, C, G, E minor and D, because you can play lots of songs with just those four chords and do all the different chord changes for those. So C to D, C to G, C to E minor. So you work them all back and forth just for one to two minutes. You got to practice all those chord changes back and forth, back and forth. And I always tell people the goal is to try to get them as close to 80 beats per minute as possible. Now if you're older, you might need to do that 60 to 80 range. And ideally, if you're going for like a gold star, it's 100 beats per minute. That's pretty fast. So once you start doing that exercise, we're starting to work on the muscle memory. Your fingers are going to start, believe it or not, they're going to start knowing where the chords are. So I can make a C chord in the air. I can make a G chord, I can make a D chord, E minor, A minor. My fingers have muscle memory. I don't need to touch the guitar to know the C chord shape. I can just do it G and then I can put it on the guitar and it's there. I have muscle memory. I've been playing for over 20 years. I would hope I have muscle memory. So usually you can start developing some muscle memory within the first two to three months doing all those chord changes and exercises. So the next thing you want to work on is finger push ups. Just really, really reinforcing that muscle memory. So let's take this E minor chord. All right, you're trying to learn the E minor chord. Now a lot of people, for example, let's take a C chord. A lot of people, when I show them this with the C chord, usually what happens, because it's, it's an angle and it's stretched over three frets. They remove their fingers and like all the fingers flatten out like this. They can't hold their fingers in that C chord shape. So. So they take their fingers off the strings and it flattens out because they just don't have the muscle memory or the finger control quite yet. So what we would do. All right, I'll just use the C chord as an example, is we would start by barely lifting, I'm barely lifting my fingers off the strings, but you can see they're moving. They're barely coming off the strings. Okay. And These are just little finger push ups. We're doing nothing with our strumming hand, okay. And we're just going back and forth and we're pressing, pressing down on the strings. So my fingers, I'm working on repetitions here, all right? Bruce Lee said, I'm not scared of the man who knows 10,000 kicks. I'm scared of the person who knows one kick, has practiced it 10,000 times. You're going to have to do these chords a lot of times, a lot of repetitions to get that muscle memory in there. Especially if you're an older learner, it takes a little bit longer for those neural pathways to develop, alright. So you just got to focus on getting those reps in and then once you start getting comfortable. Now I'm lifting this maybe a quarter of an inch off the guitar. Now if you're in the metric system, I'm probably doing like, you know, 3 millimeters, okay. I'm lifting them a little further off the strings, but they're still just hovering over the strings. Okay. And then eventually you can start going maybe about an inch, all right. Or maybe a few centimeters away from the neck of the guitar. Okay. And then I straighten out my fingers and I return them to the guitar. Can you see how I'm working on this? I'm trying to get these fingers to maintain shape further and further away from the guitar. And then eventually the last step that you got to do is you drop your hand down, you bring it up to the fretboard, okay? That's the final step. If you can do this, you've developed great muscle memory. But all I'm doing, doing nothing with the strumming hand, I'm just developing repetitions on my fretting hand. Alright? So start small, stretch it out even further. And then eventually you can drop your hand and play any chord that you want to by touching the strings. Now, just so you guys know, as a note, to this day, some of my fingers do land sooner than the others. So if I'm doing a C chord, usually I can get all three down. But if I do a G chord, almost always it's my third finger hitting first. So that still happens, but it's like a split second difference. It's not like you do in the beginning. They're hitting almost all at the same time. And that's what you want to do. You want to get your cords to a point where you can start moving all the fingers at the same time. So if you guys found these exercises super helpful, I really want you to go check out this video over here. Right? Show you my top secret finger exercise for getting faster fingers within the next week.