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Beginner Guitar Chords – Handling Chord Changes

As a beginner guitar player, learning to play individual chords is one thing. Learning to change chords quickly, e.g. when playing a song is another matter entirely. Here, I’m going to give a couple of tips for helping you learn to switch chords faster, and have a couple of exercises in a PDF file that you can try out.

When you first start out playing the guitar as a beginner, there are various basic open chords that you usually learn to play. However, even when you’ve persuaded your fingers to form these various different chord shapes, the next problem is changing from one chord to another – it can seem to take ages to move your fingers from one chord shape to the next, and this can be extremely frustrating, especially if you’re trying to learn to play a song.

Here are some general tips for helping you get better at making those guitar chord changes faster:

• Practise Regular Strumming: If you’re going to practise changing between chords, the first thing is to practise getting an even rhythm going with your right (strumming) hand. To do this, just form a chord with your left hand (e.g. C Major), and keep it held down. Then count ‘1 2 3 4, 1 2 3 4,..’ aloud slowly and evenly, and as you count each beat, strum with a downstroke with your right hand. A metronome can help with getting this strumming regular, which leads me to the next point..
• Use a Metronome: A metronome is a very important gadget to use when learning the guitar, as it will help you develop a steady rhythm, and keep to the beat. Using a metronome, slow the beat right down to something really slow, say 60 bpm (beats per minute), or maybe even slower.
• Pick just a few chords to practise with: start out just with trying to change between a couple of chords, not all of the ones that you can form. Concentrate on just changing between these two, say C major and G Major.
• Try and form the whole shape at once: One of the keys to changing chords faster, is to try and form the next chord shape almost ‘in the air’, and try and aim to bring all the fingers down on the strings together, rather than positioning each finger individually. This is difficult to do straight away, but it’s what you need to aim for with practise. If you’re doing slow downstrums, you have the time between beat 4 of one bar, and beat 1 of the next to shift from one chord to the next. Aim to get all your fingers in position for the next chord before bringing them down on the strings, between beats 4 & 1.
• Find your starting speed: Experiment with the speed setting on the metronome, to find out the speed at which you can do this change between these 2 chords at the moment. It may be 60 bpm, 50bpm, or slower, it doesn’t matter. Just aim for a regular strumming rhythm with your right hand, and try to keep the rhythm at the same tempo when making the change.
• Slowly increase the speed: as you practise this particular change, you’ll find that you can gradually play it faster and faster. Don’t rush it though, and only up the metronome tempo when you can play the change smoothly on the current speed setting. Keep a record of your current speed settings, and over time you’ll see that it’s improving, i.e. you can change chords faster now.
• Don’t work harder than you need to: An important principle of guitar playing is often to try and keep finger movement down to a minimum. An example of this principle here, is that if the first chord you’re forming has finger positions in common with the next chord, it may be possible to just move one or two fingers to form the next chord. An example of this is going from C Major to A minor – fingers 1 & 2 can remain where they are for C Major, just finger 3 needs to move. This is Exercise 1 below.

OK, with those tips in mind, here are a couple of exercises for trying them out. These are the chords I’m going to use in these 5 exercises, here’s a chord chart:

These are just some fairly regular open chords. The fingering I suggest is shown underneath each chord. If you’re not familiar with them, then take some time to practice forming these shapes individually, before trying the exercises linking them together.

Here’s exercise 1:

This is changing from C major to A minor. Try and keep fingers 1 and 2 held down from the C major chord, then change to A minor just by moving your 3rd finger from the 5th to the 3rd strings, which is one of the tips given above.

And now exercise 2:

This is going from E minor to A minor. Fingers 2 & 3 keep the same shape together when used in these two chords, just on different strings. So try and practice the principle of forming the chord ‘in the air’, when you bring them across from strings 4 & 5 to strings 3 & 4, and vice versa.

Here’s exercise 3:

This is going from A7 to D major. The D major chord forms a ‘triangle’ shape. On the chord chart (above), I’ve indicated to use finger 1 & 2 for the A7 chord. As you shift across from A7 to D major, try and keep these fingers in the same relative shape, they should just move across into their positions in the D major chord, you just bring in the 3rd finger behind to complete the shape.

Exercise 4 is here:

This is going from C major to G major. Notice that for G Major, I’m suggesting using fingers 2 & 3 for the lower 2 strings, and finger 4 for the top string. This might be slightly different to what you’re used to, but the point of this fingering for G Major is that fingers 2 & 3 slide easily across from their positions in C major right over to strings 5 & 6, then just bring in your pinky (finger 4) on the top string to complete the G chord.

Finally, exercise 5:

This has two variants of the F chord, the first is F7M (or F maj7), the second is the regular F major chord. F can sometimes seem a little tricky, as you need to hold down strings 1 & 2 with your 1st finger together (a 2 finger barre). The F7M shape here has the top string open, so doesn’t have this difficulty.

The F and C shapes are fairly similar, so again, try to practise the ‘chord in the air’ principle.

Finally, here’s a link to a PDF document with all of these exercises, that you can print out for practising with:

Right click on the link and choose ’save as’ to download it. Hopefully this will help you practise changing between chords, and get faster at doing it!

For more beginner guitar lessons, the Jamorama and Learn & Master Guitar courses are specifically aimed at taking players from a total novice level, and leading them up to a good standard of playing guitar. The Jamplay site also has some great beginner guitar video sessions.

Take a look at our Jamorama review, Learn & Master Guitar review and Jamplay review pages for more info on these courses.

Chris

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