Smooth CHORD SWITCHING for Career Beginners - 488

Circle of fourths exercise

0:00Lee here from Play Guitar Academy. I've got a really cool exercise for you. If you're a career beginner who struggles with chords and making them sound clean, this is going to help you in all keys, and it's going to help you with the most common chord progression you're going to find all the time. This is called the circle of fourths exercise. We're not doing circle of fifths. That's clockwise. We're going counterclockwise. We're going the other way. Let me show you what we're looking at. So we're going to start with a C major triad. Let me zoom in a little bit here

0:36for you. We're going to start with a C major triad and go to its fourth, which is the F major, and then we'll go to its fourth, which is the B flat major, and then its fourth to the E flat major, and so on until we hit all of the keys all the way through. This is a really cool chord progression because these songs that you're going to play, most of the time it goes from a I chord to a IV chord. This is going to help you in all the keys that you play, and it's going to start helping you with getting your clean chord transitions. So let's take a look

1:10at the first one. So we have a C major, two measures each. fourth, three, five, four, five, five, five, uh, six, six. So let's go. For this one, how are you? We'll be quatre. How do we answer? OK. What do we answer first?

1:39Yeah. We'll go. Thank you.

2:12And we made it all the way through, back to C major.

Efficiency in finger movement

2:42The goal isn't to rush, it's to become more comfortable moving from one chord to the next without unnecessary hesitation or movement. You're going to pay attention to what happens between the chords. Are you lifting your fingers farther than necessary? Are you waiting to the last second to think about the next shape? Are you moving one finger at a time when you could be moving the whole hand together? Those are the kind of things we're trying to improve. And using the backing track to give yourself a musical setting for the exercise, you can start at a comfortable pace.

3:13Don't worry about some changes are harder than others. And when you find a difficult change, make a note of it. That's something that you can isolate and work on separately. Five minutes. That's all we're talking about. Five minutes a day, every day. And you'll see how many changes you can make smoothly and cleanly. It will get bigger and better over time. So knowing your chords doesn't mean that you can change between them. Well, chord knowledge and chord movement, two different skills. So we need to know where our fingers belong first.

3:44Okay. Getting those fingers efficiently between two chords is pretty tough. And sometimes you have to do things a little bit differently. I've got my C and we're first, let's, we're moving to the F next. Okay. I've got to think, well, what's the one finger that's going to get my hand to that new shape in the shortest amount of movement possible? So one of the things I have to do is I have to take my first finger across for the F. Okay.

4:15I understand that. But my other fingers aren't really in the right place to just push down.

4:23Now, what about my second finger? If I go from my C shape to my A string, my hand starts to look like it's going to be in the shape. We're getting to that position. How about my third finger? So I go from C. Now it stays the same.

4:42Third finger stays the same. And pinky stays the same. Third finger. Well, I'm also putting my pinky down.

4:52So I'm going to focus on my first and second finger. If I can seat them correctly, the rest of the fingers are pretty much in position.

5:02So first finger goes across and second finger comes back. Now look at my hand. That looks like an F chord to me. Right? So I'm only thinking about these two little things instead of thinking about the whole chord. But it's putting my hand pretty much in the shape where I can just press all of my fingers down. Now let's go from F to B flat. So I already have my first finger across. I don't have to move that. If I put my first finger here, yeah, we're kind of close here.

5:32But what if I pay attention to my pinky? And put my pinky where it wants to be. All the other fingers fall in the line.

5:41So I'm thinking pinky.

5:45Pinky and moving it back. That's the one finger that's going to put my hand in the shape of the new chord. And it's going to really help you do things faster and more efficiently. Thinking ahead between chord changes and getting rid of unnecessary movement. Because that movement is going to slow everything down. Another thing we need to think about is not lifting our fingers too far away from the strings. Every time I played these, I was keeping my fingers as close to the strings as possible. I wasn't lifting them up and having to re-seat them. I'm doing an economy of movement.

6:19And that's something that you can practice as well too. When you do that, when you lift your fingers up too far, it's like you're going to have to rebuild every single chord from scratch. I don't want to miss these opportunities to keep my fingers close together or use common fingers, the same finger between different chords. These things are the details that a career beginner may not pay attention to that are going to change everything for you. Now, hesitating happens a lot. You think you're not sure where you're going. You have to remember the chord shape.

6:50Then you have to remember the fingers. And you think, this is too much. Why am I hesitating? Well, one is you're not starting to think early enough. If you wait to the last minute, you realize, hey, I'm not going to have enough time to do this before the next beat comes in. And then you hesitate. Ah, I'm lost. I can't figure it out. Now, so waiting too long to think, you need to start maybe the full measure before thinking about what the next chord is, right? Then you've got plenty of time to do the movement yourself.

7:21Waiting too long to think about the next movement is going to screw you up. And then that makes you react to the change between the two chords instead of being prepared for it. This is uncertainty. And this is playing through hope. I hope I'm going to make that chord. Have you ever felt that way? I hope I'm going to get there. I don't want you to hope. I don't want you to play from hope at all. I want you to know that it's going to get there and that the chords are going to come out clean. If you hope, you're going to start to create pauses in your playing, hesitations.

7:53So we're going to take this idea we did here, and we're going to use this to train smoother chord changes, to learn how to prepare before you move. So how do we do that? We practice this every day, but not for a very long time, five, ten minutes at the most. Going through this exercise that's going through all of the chords and all the keys, one to four, you're going to start to be able to see some relationships happen. As I went through that, I'm seeing keys that I've played in E flat and B flat.

8:25Yup, there's that movement I had to do there. These are very, very common movements. And I start to realize I know what chord's coming next. And I'm able to do that from over to practicing these things every day. I can visualize what the next chord is, and I can see my fingers moving right into the right place. As I'm playing the chord, and I'm going to have time to be able to do this because I've prepared ahead of time. Every day, practice this five to ten minutes, and things are going to start to move quickly

8:56and more efficiently. So what are the things that I look for? The first thing I look for is, can I leave any of the fingers that I have in that place? I don't want to move anything if I don't have to. If I share a finger, share a note, or even if I just have to move my finger over one string, minimal movement is what I'm looking for. Small and relaxed movements if I have to move at all. And then practice landing the shape rather than assembling it.

9:26If I practice these chords and I go one, two, three. That's a lot of time it took for me to play that C chord. One, two, three, four. F. I don't want to do that. I don't want to play the one, two, three game at all. I want to be able to put all of my fingers down on these chords at the same time. This is going to be the most efficient way. And how do we do that? Like we showed before, by getting a finger over top of a fret that puts the rest of your hand in the shape of that chord. If you can get that going, these chords are all going to come down at the same time.

10:00And we can do this much quicker than having to think about that. Once we can do these and put them on autopilot, when you put them in your practice, everything works out quickly.

Isolating difficult chord pairs

10:11Now, what about a difficult one? What about one that you just keep messing up every time? That's where you start to do the two chord practice routine. If you know that every time I go from this E-flat to the A-flat G, which is a very hard movement, every time I do that, I screw up. It doesn't come out clean. I don't like the way that is. I'm putting that in my practice every day for at least five minutes, five, ten minutes going back and forth between those two chords. I might make a backing track or I might be able to get a metronome and figure out what

10:43speed I can do it cleanly and which one I need to start bumping up. So, how are we going to do this? How do we make these pairs of chords part of our daily practice? What we're going to use is a musical practice vehicle. It makes it easier. That's what I did here. I used the circle of fourths going around and I can turn that on every day and I know I'm going to hit all of my major chords in the open position and I'll be able to move from them in fourths. It's going to really help to just sit down and press play and have the chords right in

11:14front of me. I would always start with a little bit of time to think. That's why I made this two measures per chord. Every time that chord change, I've got two measures before I have to do it again. It's going to give me some preparation time. In the beginning, that is gold. A backing track like that at a slow tempo helps connect you to the movement and you can feel when that chord is going to come in that you have to hit right on one on the next change. So practice a useful chord relationship and try and do it in every key. If you have a problem in one key, see if it's the same in the other ones.

11:47This one to four chord relationship, this really, really helps. This organizes the exercise and staying organized is very important. Being comfortable with the chord changes is something that happens over time. I'm looking for reliability. I'm not looking for speed. Can I, at a reasonable speed, play these chords cleanly? I have fewer pauses, fewer missed changes, clear landings on the new chords, and more consistent changes across the entire progression.

12:19But if you're struggling with any of this, struggling with where to put your fingers, struggling where your elbow should be, any of those things, one of the biggest things I want you to remember, that knowing these chords and being able to move smoothly are two different skills. These struggles with chord changes, don't assume it's just putting more chords in. Spend some time working on these movements, the chords you already know. Use this circle force exercise and pay attention to your finger movement. Give yourself a chance to improve the changes that have been giving you trouble.

12:50You don't have to make everything perfect. Not today. You're just looking for small improvements that become more dependable over time. And if you're struggling with how to do this, remember, I have something for you. It's called my guide to clear sounding chords. It tells you how to seat your fingers, where to put your thumb, where to put your elbow, how to stay away from muted notes and buzzing notes. I have it for you free. It's in the description below, or you can go to playguitaracademy.com forward slash chord guide. All one word. Okay, everybody. That was fun. I'll see you next week.

13:22Bye-bye.