Guitar Chord Practice Pitfalls - how to learn guitar chords, Ep. 5

In this lesson I’m going to share with you the top five guitar chord practice pitfalls and how you can avoid them. No matter where you are in your guitar journey avoiding these mistakes is guaranteed to make your chords sound better and to help your practice be more effective. If this is your first time here, welcome, I’m jared from soundguitarlessons.com, a professional guitarist and teacher from Seattle. I’m here to help you become a proficient and well-rounded guitarist so you can express yourself freely and authentically on the guitar.

If that sounds good 00:40 - please subscribe and hit the notification bell. I have new lesson videos every Tuesday and this is gonna be a good one! I’ve been doing this big series called how to learn guitar chords and this is the fifth episode in that series. There’s a link in the description to see all the episodes. I started out this series with 14 chord shapes that everyone should know and then i went into episode two, three, four, with a bunch of theory stuff - chord structure on the guitar, scale structure, where chords come from, how to label them, how to identify them - really great stuff. Really important stuff for having full creative control over music on the guitar, but I did start to get some comments from people about just how physically challenging it is to work on guitar chords and get them to sound good just from a technique perspective. So awesome. Yes, I totally hear you. Thank you for speaking up.

And that’s why this video is just all 01:26 - about technique and execution and helping through some of those challenges. We’re gonna go over the top five things that people are doing wrong in their guitar chord practice and I’m gonna show you with some popular song examples how you can do these things the right way to get your chords sounding great. We’ll be addressing these five troubling topics: Dealing with chord transitions, how to avoid playing strings that we don’t want to hear, working on the dreaded barre chord and where pressure should be coming from in our left hand, and hint you should not be squeezing with your left hand. For number four i’ll tell you a little known secret about how to make chords super smooth when transitioning in a finger picking style and lastly i want to share something that i call orchestrating on the guitar which trust me it is a game changer in addition to these five tips i want to give you something really tangible to practice so at the end i’m going to give you just a quick explanation of the very best exercise to do for working on chord transitions and i also have a free chord chart resource with a ton of awesome chord shapes that you can use to practice all this stuff with all right let’s dive in pitfall number one is waiting too long to transition getting to the next chord on time when you’re playing chord progressions is way more important than playing the previous chord the full duration of where it sits in time in the piece of music so we actually have to leave a chord early to get to the next one on time this tip pretty much only applies to strumming chords in chord progressions but it’s so important you have to stop a chord some amount early to get to the next chord on time we’re totally prioritizing getting to that next chord on time so a couple ways to do that one you just stop the sound and stop it early and then get to the next chord on time or if you want the texture and the energy to keep going you keep strumming even though you’re lifting the chord off that means you’d be strumming open strings or clicking notes and it seems like that would sound really bad but this is what is happening doesn’t matter the chord or the key it’s what’s happening in guitar playing that you’re hearing every single day any strumming guitar playing has this little moment of kind of sloppy nothingness happening still the energy the texture kind of open strings or clicking sounds happening in between chords changing and we don’t even really notice it it’s just the kind of the nature of the instrument and the style and the texture so we want to actually practice this on purpose to get our chord progressions sounding really good all right let’s do a couple song examples this is the chord progression of the song just like heaven by the cure it’s a e b minor d so i stopped right there in this moment that i’m talking about where i strummed open strings the d lifted off and that gives me this moment to get to the a really was noticeable when i stopped there but not necessarily so noticeable when i was actually playing in time but it was happening between every single chord now i’m going to do it much slower and try to emphasize those moments so you really can pick them out one of these notes from the open strings is not even in the key so it should be a really sour note yet this is still the normal thing to do so now i was exaggerating it there in reality sometimes when you’re switching chords you can slightly be touching the string still and get more of a clicking sound and not necessarily always all the open string sounds usually it’s a combination of a little bit of both and sounds fine here’s another example on the song space oddity by david bowie that has these movable kind of bar chord shapes moving around again i’m kind of exaggerating it but it’s definitely there and if you go listen to the record you’ll absolutely hear it especially on the first chord transition that and i’m doing it a little extra on the other chords because um it’s what helps me avoid squeak on this particular guitar depending on the guitar and the strings and if i have a wound you really hear that there the third string is wound on this guitar but not on an electric guitar so i might approach it differently for different guitars that i’m playing pitfall number two is accidentally playing open strings in the chord that you don’t actually want most people are familiar with this challenge if you’re playing a c chord you don’t want this low e string in there usually technically that is a note that’s in the chord but we do not by default want that to be the lowest note so we want to mute it by touching the bottom of the string with this third finger here that sound is fine you’re not going to hear that come through even though it’s on its own you really do hear it as a bit of a harmonic so muting the string by touching it somewhere is one of the ways the other way is that you simply just have to not strum it so on a d chord we have to get used to aiming for actually aim for the top three strings in order to make sure you don’t accidentally hit don’t aim for the top four strings even though the top four strings are what the chord is if you aim for the top four strings you’re gonna hit the fifth string or even more so i aim for less and then get that in there another thing you can do is really of course practice very accurately playing just the root and then strumming after that certain kind of stylistic sound but really good for starting to get used to pinpointing a specific string so in the just like heaven progression that i just played in the a chord i need to just be really careful not to play the e some people will mute with their thumb i don’t do that at all it’s fine that some people do i don’t e is everything b minor i have to touch the bottom of the string with the first finger there’s that sound but you don’t hear it come through with the chord and then of course d in that progression i just need to be really careful not to strum the bottom two strings pitfall number three squeezing your grip with your left hand this is the big one we should not be squeezing our grip that is really the wrong word if you feel like that would describe what you’re doing not good i have a student that calls this the grip of death i really like that it’s like when we’re focusing more on the notes or the music or whatever else we just like get tighter and tighter and tighter so let me be clear pretty much all the time all players are using more pressure than they actually need let’s do a pressure test real quick i’m going to take a fourth string eighth fret just kind of anywhere maybe somewhere you don’t get too much of a harmonic push down just click click click click and push push down slowly and slightly slowly slowly as soon as you get a clean note a full clean note not a buzz note full clean note don’t push down anymore and it’s amazing how much pressure that actually takes that is the amount of pressure it takes to play that note how often are we playing with that much pressure it’s just a reminder doing that every once in a while is like oh that’s what it takes and we’re like squeezing gripping and the grip of death so we can always relax more even if you think you got that going you got that under control there’s more room to explore that and go deeper and try to get a sense of how relaxed can we be you want the least amount of pressure possible for what is actually needed to make the sound you want now of course it takes pressure and it takes tension to especially like we’re going to talk about the bar chord it takes energy so i’m not saying it doesn’t you just want to use what’s needed and not do extra i like to think of it a lot like walking like standing up and walking requires muscles and balance and yes of course you’re using muscles but you can do that in a relaxed way you can walk and be relaxed so you’re using just what you need to to stay up so if we’re doing the grip of death here while we’re playing it’s a little bit similar to if you’re walking and you’re flexing your legs as hard as you can while you’re walking it’s like that would be really debilitating and uncomfortable that’s kind of what we do when we’re playing really tensely so if you’re not supposed to squeeze where does the pressure come from the pressure should come from as much as possible the weight of your arm you have this whole if you just grab this and let your elbow hang you have you have this gravity working for you how much are we using the gravity to our advantage it’s there the arm wants to kind of fall back so if you if you keep it there there’s a certain amount of weight happening for us we want to use that to our advantage so i don’t need to use my thumb for anything there’s a full cord there no thumb i’m in a little bit sitting in an awkward way but here’s a full bar chord no thumb so the thumb is fine i think of it more like an animal’s tail like it helps you balance a little bit and get around but it should not be stuck or squeezed or gripping at all i can definitely go into more detail about bar chords and kind of how to work on them step by step because i know they’re a big hurdle so if that’s something of interest to you let me know in the comments pitfall number four this is my favorite one putting left hand fingers down on strings that you’re not even playing this is happening all the time it’s kind of more of the efficiency stuff like only put only put a finger down on a string that you’re actually playing only fret a note that you actually need this mostly applies to finger picking or individual note picking or arpeggiating chords because it’s not if you’re strumming this is why people are used to chord shapes because if you’re strumming you have to jump to a chord shape all at once well that habit transfers over to playing individual notes or finger picking or arpeggiating and it’s it’s this habit where you jump to all those notes because you think of a chord shape but yet the pattern or the melody or whatever the arrangement or the piece is might not even need some of those and this goes to another level as well which is not only do you not want to put down a finger if you’re not going to use that note it seems so obvious you actually want to put the notes down that you need as you need them so you want to you don’t even want to jump to a chord shape and then pluck those notes you want to put that note down every individual note only right as you need it so here’s what i see happen all the time someone might be playing a nice finger picking pattern on a g chord and you see me playing your g chord there well notice this if i lift off two of my fingers it doesn’t change at all what i’m playing because i’m not playing those strings i’m not playing the fifth string of the top string so this is a g chord right now and i think of it as a g chord i don’t need the whole shape to think of a g chord so you do not want to put a shape down if you’re not actually playing those notes so let’s use a song example the song shallow by lady gaga from the movie a star is born beautiful song the chords are e minor seven d over f sharp g c c add nine g d kind of a lot going on there the chords sound beautiful you can play them as chords the problem is if you want to do the finger picking part that’s the exact arrangement from the intro of the actual song and you hold these whole chord shapes for everything you’re you’re adding way more left hand action than you actually need if i play the real thing just only playing the notes that i need when i need them it’s like this all right pitfall number five is not being dynamic and in music dynamics means volume changes but i actually mean the general term of dynamics like not really having motion and not changing so there’s three versions of this that happen one is definitely the volume two is the timbre and you’ll see what i mean in a second and then three is playing all the strings all the time and not choosing individual strings this is the stuff that i call orchestrating on the guitar it’s like we have a little orchestra and we want to take advantage of all the possibilities that we can play with here so for this idea of not playing all the strings all the time if i’m playing a g chord and think of like kind of two parts of the orchestra like low high low high and you can definitely get into the middle as well that’s so different than if i played everything and went so now i have low low high as for volume it’s obvious you can kind of work on getting louder more aggressive or softer and lighter but uh accenting i think is the most powerful thing so you want to play light or play loud but i think if i add in some accenting into that as well there’s a lot you can do there and finally the timbre option on the guitar if you play over here next to the neck you get a warmer sound if you play over here by the bridge you get a brighter sound in classical guitar this is called dolce and this is called ponticello if i add that to the mix with this g chord groove that i had going it might sound like this now i’m exaggerating and kind of doing it a lot but so it might seem like a lot of switching back and forth but i use those color options all the time while i’m playing so here’s a song example i’m going to play heart of gold by neil young and kind of use some of those dynamic options that i’m talking about so i want to give you a very specific tangible exercise i’m going to give you this one chord practice exercise that kind of rules them all but before i do that i just want to ask which one of these pitfalls are you guilty of falling into let me know in the comments or are there some that you weren’t aware of at all let me know is it waiting too long to transition between chords is it you’re playing open strings that you don’t actually want on the chord are you squeezing your grip too much with the left hand that’s the big one are you putting left hand fingers down when you don’t even need them because you’re not even playing those strings or are you playing in a way that’s not dynamic that doesn’t have variety and timbre or variety and volume or variety in the string choice that you’re playing let me know in the comments and do it for other people too so they know that they’re not alone if they’re struggling with that same thing okay quickly this is just the specific way i want you to practice between chords nothing really beats this if you need to work on chords it’s just a matter of time and doing this you have to isolate back and forth between two chords seems really obvious but really that is just the thing back forth back forth back forth but i want you to choose two chords to do that with as you work on anything challenging for you and do it in the specific way you’re going to strum a chord i’ll use a c major seven and then you’re gonna pluck all the notes to make sure they’re all there and then you’re gonna strum the next chord and get there now first you do this however you slow you need to strum pluck through strum this is a minor add9 and then do it in time so that’s phase two you got so you have to you can make it in time however you want being able to do that with any two chords that you’re learning is kind of the milestone to be shooting for if you want a bunch of fresh beautiful chords to practice i have a free chord chart called chords with color you can just use the link in the description or go to soundguitarlessons.com chords with color you get that both those chords that i was just playing now are in there and lastly a few videos ago i had a chord quiz challenge where i put a blank chord diagram on the screen and ask people to submit their answer so i just want to say huge shout out to ruben reyes for answering and he got the chord right i won’t even say the answer because if someone wants to watch that after this and give it a shot then you can do that but thanks ruben i appreciate you and thanks for watching i’ll see you all next week with a lesson on mapping out and identifying chords in minor keys remember consistency is everything when it comes to practice just keep showing up keep playing keep practicing and let it add up little by little by little that’s it see you soon thanks so much .