Why Your Chords Don't Sound As Good As They Should - 474

Why your chords sound bad

0:00Welcome, friends, to the Play Guitar Podcast. I'm Lee, and I'm here to help you become the guitar player that you've always wanted to be. Let's spend the afternoon, that's what it is for me right now, talking about chords. We're going to be talking about something that frustrates a lot of guitar players. You learn a new chord, then what happens? You learn another one, you learn another chord, you keep adding on chords, and eventually you

0:33figure, well, this is just going to make me better. I'm going to know so many chords, I'm going to get good at playing them. The problem is, unless you practice getting good at playing those chords, your chords are still not going to sound very clean, they're not going to sound smooth, they're not going to sound musical. So the truth is, most players already know enough chords to make great music. You got the three chords, you're in the game, right? The problem usually isn't the number of chords you know, it's how you're playing them. Today, we're going to look at three reasons why your chords don't sound as good as they should,

Finger placement and angle

1:04and more importantly, what you can do to improve them. So number one, let's talk about the clean chords today. Let's go through the whole deal. Finger placement is a big one. So I think I'm going to do most of this podcast for the video folks on close-up of the guitar here, but I'll describe it as best as I can for the audio folks. So finger position, let's just, let's start with a regular old C chord, right? Where you put your finger in the fret. Now, most people just kind of figure,

1:39well, anywhere in between the fret before it or the nut, and then the fret that it's, you know, pushing down. We're pushing the string down behind the fret, right? Behind it, right? So if you're, no matter where your finger is there, you can get that fret pushed down. The problem is the farther back you go, the more pressure you have to add to the string. I like to get as close to the fret as possible. If not, on it, right? As long as I don't go so far that it starts to mute.

2:11But just as much as I can get there without muting the string, that's going to be the least amount of pressure I need to push down that string. So here is a C major chord where all of the fingers, I can feel all of my fingers touching the frets. It's very easy to put down, push down. I'm not pushing down very hard at all. And I'm not pushing it down. Oh, well, we'll get into the, into that later. So the fret position is important, right on the fret, the distance from the fret. So sometimes you're going

2:48to have a problem. And the problem is you're playing a fret like the A chord here, where it's almost impossible to have all of your fingers exactly on the fret straight across. To do that, your whole wrist and elbow, you have to kind of crane them around. It's very uncomfortable. It's not clean. So when I play a regular, regular old A chord with my first, second, and third fingers, my third fingers

3:19usually right up on the fret. But my first and second one are halfway or even farther back. So if I'm not going to bar it, which is what a lot of people do with the A, if you do that, you don't really get the high string. If I'm going to do it regular, like everyone says, what are you going to do? You're going to put more pressure on the first finger and second finger that are farther away from the fret to make them sound. Now, if you don't, that's what you get right

3:51there. Okay. Now what I like to do, one of my little tricks for that A chord is I like to use my second, third, and fourth finger. Why? Because they're not as, you know, you get more kind of room to cram all of them in there because you're using the pinky, which is, you know, three quarters the size of your ring finger, right? So now I can get my fingers closer, which means I don't have to press down as hard. So distance from the fret is important. And this happens in all sorts of

4:24different chords. The next thing that we're going to talk about is finger angle. Let's say that I just have my fingers kind of flat when I lay it down across the strings, right? If I arpeggiate the chord, if I go one note at a time, there's a lot of problems with this chord. I'm getting the Cs and everything else. I kind of get in the E. And what's happening is as I keep my fingers straight here, they're not coming straight down those strings. They're kind of laying across and

4:57they're touching strings that they don't want to. Now that's okay if you mean to do it, but if you don't mean to do it, that's going to cause problems. In fact, this first finger is laying across so much it's actually pressing down a note that doesn't need to be pressed down. It's supposed to be clean. So what we're going to be doing is trying to go straight down on the strings. And what that means is you have to kind of curl your fingers straight down and also get that thumb on the back of the neck so it pushes your hand out forward. Okay? Now I can feel I'm not touching any of the open

5:31strings. I'm not touching any of the other notes there. So getting the fingers close up to the frets and having them come straight down on the strings solves a lot of string muting and clear buzzing issues. The next thing is hand position.

Thumb and wrist positions

5:49Thumb placement is really important. So I know a lot of you just love to wrap your thumb around the side of the guitar and just leave it there and try and get all of your chords with that thumb wrapped around there. Now the truth is sometimes I use that and sometimes I don't. And most of the time when I do wrap my thumb around the neck of the guitar, it's to mute the low string. It's not to press it down. I know Jimi Hendrix, I know John Mayer also does this where they'll use your thumb

6:23to fret the low string. That also puts your hand, you know, my hand is flat behind the neck of the guitar at this point. It makes it hard to play any kind of complex chord, right? It basically gets you an E-shaped chord like an F on the top four strings and then a low note there. We talked about the thumb muting the low string on a D chord. I don't want to hear that low E string. So I'm going to, if I hear the A, that's okay. It's part of the chord, but the E, that's a nine. We don't want that, right?

6:59So that thumb wraps around. But let's say if I'm having problems with touching other strings on that D chord, if I move my thumb back to the center of the neck, look what it does to my hand. My hand comes out in front of the guitar and is able to come straight down on the strings and everything comes out clean. For bar chords, here's an E-shaped bar chord here. My thumb now is behind where my first finger is. I'm almost pinching at the fifth fret there where the bar is, right? It helps. You don't

7:33have to push down so hard with your barring finger if you've got that stability behind you with the thumb. How about wrist position, right? Wrist position and guitar angle have a lot to do with each other, right? So, and also how high up you hold the guitar. If you hold the guitar up super high, look at that. My wrist, I don't even have to turn it at all. I get a good angle there. But the lower my strap goes, the more angle my wrist needs. And if I was really down, you know, like slash

8:09using it on the floor, take a look at his wrist when he plays those things. It's not a big deal if it's moderate. But, you know, extreme wrist angles are pretty tough there, though. But each chord is going to be different. And each chord is going to need a certain amount of angle to be able to press those strings down cleanly, right? So, wrist position, to me, deals with the neck of the guitar.

8:40And plus, you can change that from even if you have the strap at a certain distance or a certain level. I can swing the guitar around up and down using the strap. And then the closer the neck is to my body, the less wrist angle that I need to use to get the cord out cleanly. Now, let's talk about what happens. If I have too much of a wrist angle, sometimes it's hard to get those notes out clean

9:12and we start to get the buzzing sounds there, too. Okay, that's hand position. Let's talk about the

Chord transitions and timing

9:17next reason why your chords may not sound the way that you'd like for them to do. Maybe they're not connected to each other well. We're talking about chord transitions here. One of the problems that we have on the big ones is waiting until you need to hear the chord before you start to change. So, if you're playing, let's see, this week we're using A to G and then to D So, if I had this A for 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then on the one of the next measures when my G chord has to

9:58come in, right? If I wait to the last minute, it's going to take me, it might be a split second, but it's still a split second of having to make that G chord and it's going to sound late. We need to think ahead, and I've talked about this before, carving a little time out before you need the chord. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1. So, I'm using some time in the previous measure. I'm stealing a little time.

10:31I had a student once. She was a, I think about 7 years old little girl that, and her and her father were sitting in the, in the lesson with me, and I said, you need to steal a little time from the measure before. She said, Mr. Lee, you're not supposed to steal.

10:52I thought it was great. I said, well, we'll just say we're borrowing a little time. We need to carve out a little bit of time, right? So, every time we do that, we're going to think ahead. And we're going to be looking at every change, too. What has to happen between these changes? Well, I've got an A chord. I'm going to use my second, third, and fourth finger. That frees up my first finger to come down and take the second fret of the A string pretty nicely, right?

11:22And I'm making sure I make the whole shape of my hand, of the chord, before I press down. So, I've got everything in position, and they all come down at the same time. I'm not doing any of that one, two, three finger stuff there, too. Another problem that you'd have with when you are going from chord to chord is not practicing. Not practicing, not getting enough repetition with that.

11:54Most people, they say, oh, I got it. I don't need to practice that over and over again. You don't have it. And yes, you do need to practice it over and over again. Think of it this way.

12:09Okay, sure, you can do this a few times. But when you're playing a song, it generally lasts for, you know, three and a half, four and a half, five minutes that you'll be having to be able to do this. Now, if you're not working on endurance with chords, because believe me, play a night of music, you're going to see those chords are going to wear you out over time. If you're not working on endurance, that's one of the big problems. But the next thing is, repetition is something that's boring.

12:40I don't want to hear the same thing over and over again. Well, I guarantee you, if you come hear me play in any song where there's a repetitive chord progression, I never play it the same way from one verse to chorus to the next to the next to the next. It evolves over time. It might be the same chords, it might be the same part, but I'm doing little things to make it interesting. If you don't practice that, then when you have to play in front of people and you play that A to the G to the D

13:11and you do that for three minutes, it is going to sound boring because you're playing it exactly the same way because you haven't worked on embellishing that. So I might change the rhythm. I might do it upstrokes.

13:39Who knows what I would do by the time I got through with that song, right? Why? Because I practice it. And it's going to work out naturally because say you, okay, I'm going to practice my A to G to D for the next five minutes. You're naturally, your brain's going to tell you, I'm tired of doing it the same way. I need to change it up a little bit. You're going to start coming up with ideas that might be your style of music. How about that?

Anchor points and economy of motion

14:08Another thing to look for is anchor points. So let's see here. And the A and the G and the D, the way I'm playing it, we don't have any anchor points. Yes, we do. We do have anchor points for that. Let's get in close here. From the G to the D, I'm going to be playing a four-finger G. So that is first on A2, second finger on low E3, third finger on B3, and pinky on high E4.

14:39High E3, excuse me. High E3. And so my third finger's on the B string at the third fret. Well, that's also where it's going to be for my next chord, which is a D chord.

14:50So I'm going to make sure to leave that finger down in between the transitions between these chords. Right? Because why lift everything off if you're just going to put the same finger on the same string back again? That's one extra thing you have to do. It's going to speed things up if you don't. Common fingers. It's just like barring. You know? So if you take the Rolling Stones sound

15:21where they do an A shape with their first finger barred, and then they add kind of the top of a C chord to that back and forth. Well, I've got that common finger in between the two. I don't need to change every time I go back. All I'm doing is leaving my first finger down like I'm playing an A and adding to the third fret B string and the fourth fret D string my second and third fingers. Now I'm getting kind of like it's like a one chord going to a four chord. Back and forth. Back and forth. Okay. So that's common fingers.

15:52Where am I? There I am. Economy of motion. That's what I've been pretty much talking about already. Making sure that I'm not keeping my fingers too far off of the fretboard. I'm looking for places where I can reduce movement and reduce time to get to any of these things. And also maintaining the groove. You might be fine.

16:20You might be fine on one chord. Let's say you're playing the A. Now, the one in this strumming pattern is very important.

16:37And I did it on purpose. I went for that open string A first. Why? That's buying me time to get my fingers. So I'm not just strumming the whole chord. I'm strumming part of the chord and then finishing it later.

16:56Now, I want to move to the G chord here. Now, I'm going to put my second finger down on the G. But that gives me time to put the rest of my fingers down before I have the strum.

17:08And then on the D, the same thing.

17:13Now, if I was doing upstrokes, I could do that. I can make sure that my fingers are on the high strings because that's going to be the first thing that I hit. And it buys me a few split seconds to seat my fingers in the different places. But once we do that, keeping the groove is not experimenting so much. If you have a solid strumming pattern

17:44and and you start improvising with your rhythms, a lot of times it's going to be pretty tough to get those chords down in time when you're splitting your thinking between seating the chords and coming up with more interesting rhythms. Try just a simple rhythm and stick with it until you can really get those chords under your fingers. Now, another thing too is making sure though

18:15that these easy rhythms are done first before you perfect everything else. Okay, so if I've got 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 1, 2, 3, 4 If I don't have my fingers down, if I'm getting buzzing strings, if I'm getting muted notes, I am not going to mess with that basic rhythm

18:46until I have those down.

Recovering from mistakes

18:48The next thing is recovering from some changes. I've had to do this a lot.

18:55Sometimes you forget what chords you're supposed to play next, right? So if you're recovering from mistakes, if you're recovering, it means that everything's falling apart. 1, 2, 3, 4 So I tend to do it by sections or by chord progression. So if I have an A to a G to a D and let's say I screw up on the A and before I know it the G chord's playing,

19:26I'm not going to play that G chord. I'm going to sit out and then I'll sit out for the rest of the chords in the chord progression until it comes back to the beginning again. 1, 2, 3, 4 I'm going to come in on the I chord on a strong beat. It'll make it sound like you meant to do that and that's what it's all about, right? Being a professional musician is not showing someone your mistakes while you're playing through the changes.

19:57Okay, so we're getting through this pretty nicely. We're learning some of the things we need to do to clean up our chords. We're learning some things we need to do to figure out our chord progressions better.

Learning versus training

20:10But let's talk about, well, what do we do in the meantime? How do we practice chords the right way when we've been practicing them the wrong way? Well, let's make a big difference between learning and training. Learning is great. Learning new things.

20:29Accumulating knowledge. Collecting chords is what we would call it in this instance, right? We're collecting chords. Okay, well, we've got, I've got my open position chords and now I'm doing my bar chords. And they're basically open position chords that are slid up, right? So, and I'm getting used to being able to do these. Some of them are tough, but I'm not going to worry about how tough they are. I'm going to move on and start learning some jazz chords, some four-note chords, right? And I'm going to, and before you know it, you have this huge collection of chords.

21:01And in all of them, they sound a little hinky. They sound a little,

21:07we've got some buzzing. The things aren't going so well, right? So we end up repeating mistakes over and over and over again, even on new information. We haven't split up the difference between learning and training. You need to put both of those in your practice. If you're learning new chords, that's great, but throw them into a cycle of all the chords you know and start training on them. What's training?

21:37Doing them over and over and adjusting until you get the desire that you want. So what are we going to actually practice? So this week in the dojo, we're doing these chords here. We're doing the A to G to D. Now, if I was a beginner, and this is what, I would just try to get the chords. If I was an intermediate, I would try to go back and forth. If I was an advanced student, I'd start to try to play these chords in other places on the guitar. Oh, okay.

22:07Well, how do I play an A at the fifth fret? Oh, well, that's an E. How do I play a D there? Oh, that's an A shape. How about a G? That's a D shape there. So I have a system of going through, this is the type of practice that I'm going to do. I'm going to go through my chords, go through my chord progressions. Number one, I'm going to work on clarity. Let's make sure each note comes out. I would do this until you don't have to think about it anymore,

22:39until they all come out clean. And then after that, let's go down here. We're going to start working on changes, moving from one chord to the next in time. Beat one being the main thing. And that's what we're doing over in the training dojo at Play Guitar Academy. You have new practice things every week. Not everybody can get in this. Once you get one of our toolkits, then you get invited to come into the Academy Dojo.

23:10And I have these things in all five of the different places that you need to practice for you every week, no matter if you're beginner, intermediate or advanced. And so the practice is ready for your development instead of being lost and hoping that you're going to get better. If your chords don't sound as good as they should, remember, the solution is probably not learning more chords. It's usually one of three things. One, your chords aren't clean. They're not connected. Your rhythms aren't working

23:41and your practice isn't developing those skills. The good news is that every one of these problems is trainable. We're going to start doing small improvements. And you can do this at home. Just work on these three different problems that I've been going through today and make sure you do it every day. Get that repetition in. If you'd like a step-by-step system for improving your chord playing, I have my guide to clear sounding chords. This is a free guide. It's in the link is in the description. And I will see you next week in the next podcast. Bye-bye.

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