One person’s ‘fast’ is another persons’ slow, so let’s look at how you can improve the speed of your chord changed. Firstly, how fast are you right now? Most people don’t know the answer to that question but there is an easy way to find out – invest in a metronome. All good students of music should have a metronome as it can come in very handy. Set the metronome to the tempo of your desired speed and play your desired chords changing chord every four beats. If you can’t keep this pace without making mistakes, slow things down until you can change consistently and evenly without mistakes. This is how fast you are right now.

In order to speed things up we want to make life as easy as possible for us. To do this, we want to get rid of any unnecessary finger movement and instead focus on moving from our first chord to our second in the most direct manner possible. Practice moving your fingers in a few different ways until you can see the best way to move them. This will require some practice because depending on which chord arrangement you’re playing, the movements will be different.

My favorite tip is to practice moving without putting any pressure on the strings. Instead just place your fingers where you want them to go and practice the movements over and over until you can get your fingers in the right place each time. Next, when you start applying pressure forget about strumming for a while and just focus on making those chord. What a lot of people do is they work tirelessly on getting one chord perfect but then get frustrated and given up with others. Don’t rush your practicing and it will pay dividends.

My last tip is ‘air chords’. We’ve all heard of ‘air guitar’ before, right? That’s probably why most of us started to learn electric guitar in the first place! Well air chords are where we make the chord in the air before our fingers reach the fret board. This way we get used to making the correct finger position and by the time we reach the strings we’re ready to go.

Just remember that playing guitar well is all about muscle memory. The best way to improve muscle memory is practice. Until next time, keep up that chord practice!