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</div><div>Typically your transitions are slow because the chords are not yet ingrained in your subconscious.
It takes time. Basically you want to move the finger positioning routine from your conscious to your subconscious mind or what some people call muscle memory.
There are practice steps you can do to accelerate the process. The brain creates these routines based upon the amount of the attention you apply when learning and the how often you repeat the process.
The secret for me is to do dedicated, isolated practice for 10 mins every day, for a little over a month.
My steps are
– position my fingers and pick each string, if I have a muted string then slightly reposition the offending finger and repeat the above until every string rings out clearly.
– keeping my hand positioned I will then press down hard on the strings and then release the pressure, but keep contact with the string. Repeat this 20 times
– I then lift the fingers off the strings about 1/4” and repeat step 1.
– once I am consistent with that I will place one finger at a time, starting with my index finger, then middle, then ring. Do that 10 times, then start with the middle finger, then index, then ring. The start with ring finger, middle, index. I go through all permutations of first and 2nd and 3rd finger down. Then I move to trying to place 2 fingers at once and then adding the 3rd. Go through all of those permutations. Then go for all fingers at once.
You should notice slight improvement each week and then one day suddenly all your fingers will go to the right position. It takes me a month of this daily practice to get where the chord is automatic.
Once I have the chords automatic I work on doing transitions. One of these is to see how many transitions I can do in a minute, without strumming. Over 60 is the goal but in the beginning it’s closer to 25-30. These are often sloppy and not perfect chords.
Once I reach 60 (often a few weeks). I then add a strum and now strive for perfect sounding chords after each transition. This typically knocks me back down to the 30-45 transitions per minute range and I will work on this for a few weeks to get it back up to 60+.
Being methodical in the approach is the key for me and it can take months to get there.
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