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  • Carol-3M-Stillhand

    Member
    March 1, 2023 at 2:33 pm

    @KayMesser it sounds like you are doing everything correctly so far!! Including not giving up!

    Tons of great advice already on this thread already, it’s all good! One thing I learned along the way for developing good chord muscle memory is this exercise:

    Choose one chord to work on. We’ll say the C-Chord.

    Grab a guitar and fret your C-chord. Strum it until you get clean tone.

    Then keeping your chord fretted, just lighten up the pressure just a little bit on your fretting hand. Strum the strings (You will definately get dead strings as you lighten up)

    Then go back on with the pressure until you get a clean sounding strum.

    Keep doing this and each time release your fretting finger pressure a little bit more each time.

    Eventually you will release the pressure to the extent that your fretting fingers are no longer touching the strings. (They are helicoptering/hovering above their proper “landing” spots). Then return your fretting fingers to their proper places with enough pressure to get a good tone with your strumming.

    Keep doing this and each time release your fretting fingers, let them go a little bit higher above the strings. The idea is to train your muscle memory to just land the chord without you even having to look. Once you can land your C-Chord, try it with a G-Chord. After you have both of them in your helicopter muscle memory, NOW try switching back and forth between the 2 chords you are working with. I bet you will find it much more smooth and automatic.

    You can do this exercise with any single chord, or with any combination of 2 chords or chord progressions. Hope it helps, and keep up the great work!!!

    Disclaimer: I am still not great friends with the B-minor chord or really that dang F-chord either. This exercise works well with non Barre Chords. There I said the bad word, hahaha!