The Chord Exercise That Cures Career Beginner Guitarists - 487

Practicing chords two at a time

0:00Lee here from Play Guitar Academy. If you've been playing guitar for years, but you still feel like a beginner when it comes to your chords, I have a very, very simple practice trick. It's going to help you start making progress again. It's very easy. We're going to be doing two chords at a time. The first ones we're going to work on are the open position chords. You already know these. But do you pay attention to the details within? That's what we're looking on today. We're going to start on the highest string and work our way backwards to arpeggiate each chord.

0:39Listen to each string as they come out. Make sure they sound nice and clear. And then we're going to switch to the next chord, which will be G.

0:50Well, let's move up to the next one. Let's move up to our third fret chord. So we're going to have an A-shape bar chord at the third fret. That's our C major. And then our G chord, which is an E-shape bar chord.

1:12Next, we'll move up to the fifth fret. We're going to do a G-shape. Now these are pretty tough to do. You don't have to do the whole chord. Maybe something like this. Just a bar at the top four strings.

1:25And then we're going to move to the C chord. And then we're going to move up to the seventh and eighth fret. We'll go to the eighth fret for our C chord. It's an E-shape. And then we're going to move up to the seventh and eighth fret. We'll go to the eighth fret for our C chord. It's an E-shape. And then a C-shape at the seventh fret. These are getting trickier the higher we go up. And finally, we're going to go up to the tenth fret with a D-shape.

2:07And then an A-shape. So picking through the notes backwards and starting on the highest string to work your way down. This is going to help get you out of some of your usual habits. When you strum a familiar chord, it's easy to hear the overall sound and miss the details. But when you play each note separately, you can hear exactly which notes are ringing clearly and which ones need some attention.

2:41You have to watch different colors. There's two of the roots on a row and it's small. There's two of the the notes and that they get there. There's a bridge in the master point. The house reminds you, according to the drawing board,

3:11Thank you.

3:41Remember, you don't have to master all five of these cage positions in one practice. You can start with the position that's most comfortable, work with those two chords, and expand them from there. Give this five minutes of your practice each day.

Why narrowing focus improves guitar playing

4:07Now, why does narrowing things down to two chords work so well? Especially when you've been playing for a very long time and you're not seeing progress like you should. Well, we need to take a look at some more detail. Knowing a chord and being able to play it well are two very different things. So what we do, we usually look at the shape, right? Oh, I've got the shape. I can see the shape of my fingers. Here's my C chord. Okay. That's the shape, right? Well, if you take a look at the detail, take a look at maybe this third finger.

4:42This is very common. It doesn't usually make it all the way up to the fret. Usually it's back here somewhere. Because there's a little bit of a stretch involved here. So understanding that, okay, I've got the C shape that looks like a C, but maybe this would give me a better result is going to be the thing we're focusing on today. We got familiar with playing. You got used to doing things a certain way. And when you, you don't pay much attention to it now, but it starts to sound, especially

5:14if you record yourself, you go, why does my C chord sound like that? I don't realize that when I'm playing, being familiar with these chords can hide weaknesses. So years of playing is not going to fix a lot of these chord problems. If you practice these things incorrectly over and over and over again, you're going to get better, but you're going to get better at practicing these things incorrectly, right? So practicing too many things at the same time too, takes your focus away from maybe some things that you need to pay attention to.

5:45It makes it difficult to improve anything that you're working on. If you've got going from C to G and your next chord is an A minor and then a D and then an E minor, and you've got this big collection of chords, and you're just trying to hang on for dear life, well, you're missing everything. You're missing some of the detail in between two chords. So I like to jump between chord shapes by twos, right? I like to spend enough time on the actual problem instead of just playing the song, right?

6:18So the song sounds okay, but if you're losing the details, you're going to be confusing all this variety that you're playing with actual progress on the guitar. So this is where old habits become part of your playing. You do this over and over and over again, not paying attention to whether you're making the chords sound nice or the notes ring out correctly, and you're automatically forming and strumming these familiar shapes without paying attention. This gets you repeating problems, and then you don't notice them.

6:51You get used to how it sounds when you play them, and maybe if you recorded yourself a little bit, you'd be able to hear, hey, there's something going on there that I need to pay attention to. So changing this exercise that we did, it's going to reveal some things. It's going to reveal what needs work in your chords. Let's go back to my two chords at a time. Why is this an effective practice strategy? It gives you a manageable focus. If we've got some things we need to pay attention to, a chord progression, a backing track with

7:22lots of chords is going to keep you distracted. Two chords, that's where the problem is. The problem isn't the chord itself, it's the transition between the two and not getting the next chord fingered right in time. So those two chords, instead of an entire song, are going to give you fewer decisions and fewer distractions. You're going to be able to pay attention to this more. The more attention that you give to these chords, the more available thought that you have for the quality of your playing. And that's what the problem is.

7:53You've got quantity. You can play a lot of songs, but the quality of it is in the details. This is going to create opportunities for you to do some very useful repetition going back and forth between two chords. Especially, say you've got a song where you're great on most of the song, but there's one movement between chords that's a really horrible thing. Spending five minutes of your practice just going back and forth between those two chords, you're going to knock that out in a few days instead of playing this over and over and

8:24over again for years. Returning to the same chord shapes frequently is going to help you make sure that these become on autopilot. And what this allows you to do is recognize problems that keep showing up. If you're not having to think about all the other chords, just two going back and forth, you're going to start to see these problems. You're going to start making corrections instead of just playing these over and over and over again by habit. And what that does is shows you what progress feels like when you start knocking down these

8:54little problems and little details that you've had. If you can compare how you sound today with yesterdays, you're going to start noticing some things, keeping track. It doesn't have to be a video. It can be just audio, but you'll be able to hear cleaner notes and fewer adjustments needed the farther you go. And it's funny how these little small wins give big confidence.

Refining finger placement and pressure

9:17So let's talk about getting more out of these little two-chord practices. Let's talk about changing the way that you practice familiar chords. Why did we do it this way? Why did I do descending arpeggios? Because it interrupted how you play these things. I guarantee you're not practicing them that way. Not many people are, but you're hearing them differently and you're paying more attention that way. This is going to interrupt those automatic habits and get you focusing on what you're actually doing. Then we're actually listening to individual notes instead of the strumming pattern.

9:51Strumming pattern can come later. If you have notes that aren't coming out clearly, it doesn't matter how good your strumming pattern is. We need to get those fixed. These problems that we've been finding have been hiding for a long time. So we're going to turn listening into correcting. We're going to listen to what we play and allow ourselves to listen. Since we don't have so many chords, we can pay attention and identify the exact problem that isn't clear. Then we're going to experiment with finger placement. How close are we to the fret? You know, getting to the fret as close as you can without going over is going to give you

10:26the easiest way of pressing down the fret. It's the least amount of pressure that you have to have. If you put down tons of pressure, your string's going out of tune. We've got a distance between the top of the fret and then the wood on the fretboard. If you press that string all the way down to the wood, you're making the note go sharp. And if you're doing it differently on each string and then maybe have some strings that are open, you don't do it at all. You've got a chord that no matter how in tune your guitar is, that chord is going to be out

10:56of tune. So experimenting with that finger placement and pressure and even the angle, experiment with your thumb too. Some people, it's comfortable to wrap the thumb around. Some people, it's on the back of the neck. But as long as you get those fingers coming straight down on the strings and not laying across other strings, you're going to get some really good results. As long as you use minimum pressure, it's also going to be better for your hand too. And now what I gave you in the sheet was all of the different cage positions between these two chords. You can start to push yourself a little bit.

11:27Once you get one nice and clear, move up to the next one. Maybe go to the third fret and try those two bar chords and see how you can get those sounding good and maybe do it backwards like we did today. And you can choose other two chord combinations as you're playing improves too. Say you're working on a song. So do the first two chords for a while. The next day, do the second two chords. And the next day, do the third two chords. Make focused two chord practice a part of your regular routine every day. You're going to see some serious results. If you've been playing guitar for a long time and you feel like your chords should sound

11:59better by now, don't assume you need to learn more chords or more songs or more complicated exercises. Sometimes you just need to narrow things down. For rhythm guitar, we're just going to start with two chords. Listen to what you're playing, make small corrections, and give yourself enough repetitions to recognize that you're improving. Remember, you don't have to fix everything in one session. Five minutes of focused attention on two chords can give you something specific to improve every time you pick up the guitar. I have something for you.

12:30If getting your chords to sound clean has been a struggle, I've put together a free resource to help you with that. It's called the Guide to Clear Sounding Chords. And it walks you through some of the things I talked about today, the common problems that keep chords from ringing clearly, along with practical ways to fix them. You can get your copy at playguitaracademy.com forward slash chord guide, or check the link in the description. All right. Thanks for hanging out with me today on the podcast and the lesson combined. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Bye-bye.