Speeding Up Chord Changes
In this video I will show you a great exercise to help you speed up your chord changes, an essential technique to playing the guitar with fluency.
We will use the chords G and C in this exercise but you can use any chords you like. E to Am are probably the two easiest chords to move between if you want to see results fast.
In this chord diagram you see both the G and the C chords shown.
G is circled in blue dots and C in red dots.
First have a look at where each finger is for G and where it has to move to for C.
Next starting moving between the two chords, the second you land on the next chord start moving back to the other one straight away.
Try to move all the fingers at the same time instead of one by one. This is really tricky at the start but keep doing it and it will get easier over time.
Now to add the next step,
Strum 4 down strums per chord (4 beats). The most important thing here is to keep strumming between the two chords. Keep the strumming hand moving no matter what.
The first time, you probably won't make it but each time you do it your fingers will move a little faster.
Your fretting hand fingers are lazy and by keeping the strumming hand moving it’s giving the fretting hand a kick up the backside to keep moving and not rest in between chords.
Do this as slowly as you need!! Within a day or two you’ll be able to speed up and usually within a few days to a week you’ll have perfected the technique.
Lastly add a rhythm of your choice to make the exercise more musical and you’ll start to get a feel for really playing the guitar.
Now start trying this out with other chords, once you’ve done it with a few you’ll find that all your chord changes will be faster as you’ve trained your fingers to move independently of each other. This is a massive hurdle to overcome, so make sure you spend time on this to become a great guitar player.
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