Chord changes: 3 Simple Methods to make them faster and smoother

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds @ Mexico City, April 10th, 2012 by Jose Francisco Del Valle Mojica, licensed under (CC BY-SA 2.0)

1) The ‘Pivot’ method

• 1st finger stays in the same position (used as pivot)
• 2nd finger will move from the 3rd fret, 6th string to the 2th fret, 4th string
• 3rd finger moves off the fretboard

Take a look at the images of the G Major and E minor chords below. That first finger doesn’t move. It’s so simple, fast and effective – yet so few do it.

G Major

E minor

The reason why this is such a good method is that it makes it much easier to get all the fingers in the correct position quickly and with ease while pivoting around one finger.

Have a think about which other chord changes you frequently do where you can ‘Pivot’ from and to. Your chord changes and guitar playing will improve if you use this method wherever you can.

2) The’Minimum Pressure Required’ Method

One thing I have seen over and over again with students is that they use way too much pressure on the fretboard when playing a note. If you haven’t played guitar for long you probably do so too.

Whenever a new student plays a note that requires their fretting hand fingers to fret a string, they often squeeze the life out of the fretboard, and this only gets highlighted whenever they are playing something out of their comfort zone.

If you are squeezing the life out of the guitar when fretting a note, feeling your muscles explode like Arnold Schwarzenegger, then it’s time for us to take a step back and look at this crucial aspect of guitar playing.

You should always aim to play with the minimum pressure required. The reasons we should be aiming to play with absolute minimum pressure is that we want to relieve our hand, fingers and the rest of our bodies of as much tension as possible.

Tension in the fingers equals tired, sore fingers and that means slow, lacklustre inaccurate changes. It’s like if you were slogging it all day in the gym, and then went to play football, you probably would be too worn out to play well.

Spend a couple of minutes each day playing random notes and a couple of minutes playing the chords you know while constantly checking that you are using the absolute minimum pressure required to fret that note.

You should be constantly adjusting the pressure so you get the perfect balance between fretting the note cleanly, and using hardly any pressure. 

One super tip to make this easy, is to get as close to the fret as possible. You hardly need any pressure at all there.

When we have a huge amount of tension in our fretting hand fingers, we are making everything 10 x harder, SO STOP PRESSING so hard and your chord changes will get faster.

3) The ‘Lift up’ Method

Many beginner guitarists don’t realise this until someone shows them, but a lot of pro’s and I mean a LOT use what I call the ‘Lift Up’ method.

This is a great method and one you should use today.

On the last upstroke you strum, you lift your fingers off the fretboard with your fretting hand and start moving towards the next chord.

This buys you time to get your fingers into position for the next chord.

Yes, it is just a fraction of a second, but hopefully by now, you will have realised that fraction a second makes all the difference.

If you were to strum a very basic pattern of:

D, D, U, U, D, U

Normally that last upstroke you would play with your fingers on the chord, but now we lift our fingers off on that highlighted upstroke.

As the fingers of your fretting hand are in the air they should be moving towards the next chord while the right hand is still strumming.

It is difficult at first as you need to be moving your fretting hand on an upstroke which you probably won’t have done yet, but stick with it as it will make BIG difference.

If you want quicker chord changes and are feeling huge amounts of frustration, fear not, the above techniques will help.

Apply them as much as possible and you will notice the time it takes you to change between chords will decrease and your enjoyment of playing the guitar will increase.

If you want to get really good at your chord changes (and get past the most frustrating part of learning the guitar so you can start having fun with this awesome instrument), check out Ninja Chord Changes – a powerful course dedicated to solving this guitar hurdle in quick time.