For some of my students, one of the more annoying things to have to deal with are slow chord changes.
It can be frustrating for them to play a chord progression when it takes a good 5 to 10 seconds to change from chord to chord.
First of all, there’s nothing wrong with this.
This is what everyone experiences when they start learning chords.
If you’d like to speed up your chord changes here are 2 tips to help:
Practice Chord Jumps
Chord jumps are what I get all my beginner students to do when they’re working on chord changes, they’re kind of like star jumps for your fingers.
Chord jumps are when you fret a chord, lift your fingers off the strings then put them back down on the strings to fret the chord again.
This trains your fingers to make the shape of the chord before fretting it.
Understand Which Fingers Need To Move More Than Others
When changing from one chord to another, there will be fingers that need to move more and fingers that need to move less.
For example, when moving from an open C to an open Am, the 1st and 2nd fingers stay in the same place while the 3rd finger moves.
This is because these chords share some of the same notes.
That means if you want to speed up your chord changes from open C to open Am, you just need to focus on the 3rd finger.
When going between an open C and an open G (played with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th finger) the 2nd and 3rd fingers stay in the same frets and only need to move one string lower.
As well as this, the 1st finger only needs to lift off the B string in the 1st fret. But the 4th finger needs to reach all the way to the high e string in the 3rd fret.
Out of all the fingers that need to move in order to achieve this chord change – the 4th finger is by far the largest and most challenging movement.
This means if you focus most of your attention on getting your 4th finger right, the rest will fall into place.