Tag Archives: beginner

Practice – Chord Changes

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Apparently the hardest part for beginners is changing between chords.  I can assure you, this rumor is correct.  The callused fingers are nothing compared to trying to get your left hand moving quick enough to catch up to your right hand.  Justin guitar has an exercise called One Minute Change where you set a timer for one minute and see how many times you can go between two chords.  The goal is to switch chords 60 times in 60 seconds.  This takes time and practice to get to; most people start with about 15 changes in a minute.

I start off with D and A, set the timer on my phone and start counting.  It doesn’t sound quite as pretty, but I get through 29 changes in a minute.  Nice for the first try!  I switch to D and E and then E and A and get through a similar amount of changes.  Now I can switch between chords!  Now it’s time to learn a song… but wait!  It’s almost the end of the month!!  Nooooooo!

Practice – Anchor Fingers

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So, I really haven’t been spending as much time as I should practicing chords and moving through the beginner program at http://www.justinguitar.com, but have I mentioned I’m trying to buy a house, and I worked 6 days this week, and I’m very busy and important??  Oh.  I’ve mentioned that already?  Well, it’s true. 🙂

Today, I took 15 minutes out of my aforementioned very busy schedule to learn anchor fingers.  If you keep your first finger on the string, it’s easier to move your other finger to their positions when you change chords.  I practice the 3 chords I know while keeping my first finger down instead of picking all my fingers up and trying to find the right strings again.  It does make it much easier.

Practice – The A Chord

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Alright, so Justin says you should be practicing 15 minutes a day, every day.  Well, I know I have 15 minutes a day and it should totally be easy… but I’m a busy girl… and I like the snooze button.

So, today ran in the Shamrock Run 5k in downtown Portland.  My girlfriends and I dressed up in tutus and knee high socks and ran on the Columbia Sportswear team.  There were so many people!  It way mayhem.  We finished in about 45 minutes and went to get our celebratory Saint Patrick’s Day free beer. We waited in line to get into the beer tent for about 10 minutes, only to realize that all the people in the beer tent were in line to get beer!  Another 1500 people stood in front of us and sweet victory.  Obviously free beer tastes better than beer you pay for.  Der.  But after calculating how much a free beer is actually worth… x > time/hungriness… carry the 1… fuck it.  Let’s go to Genie’s.  Bacon infused Bloody Mary’s, eggs benedict, and Stumptown coffee wins every time.  Sunday brunch > everything!

So, after a brief appointment with my real estate agent, a much needed couch nap, and a Girls marathon with Katie… I learned the A Chord.  Wahoo!  It looks like this:

Chord-O-A

 

Practice – The D Chord

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The first chord taught in the beginner course of http://www.justinguitar.com is the D Chord.  Pretty easy.  Looks like this.

Chord-O-D

 

Oh yeah, I know how to read that!  The line on the left represents the string on the top, going all the way down to the string on the right, which would be the one on the bottom.  The “X” at the top of the picture means you do not hit that string when strumming.  The “O” at the top means you strum it as an open string.  Then you place your fingers on the fret where the black dots are.  Now you know the D Chord, too!  You can strum it together, and then pic all the strings individually to make sure they are all clear.