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Benefits from my Friday Routine
One week, Tony asked us to share how we use and benefit from the lessons through out the week. I have gotten an awful lot of benefit from the Friday Transition Lessons.
It turns out, that even though I may have used a certain chord in a song, I don’t know it as well as I thought. Many times, I will be transitioning to that chord from one particular chord throughout the song. But if you ask me to start on a different chord and transition to it, it’s like I have to learn that chord all over again. For instance, the Bm chord. In all the songs I played using a Bm, I always started from the D major chord and then went to the Bm. But if you asked me to go to a Bm from an A7, all of a sudden I couldn’t do it, at least not cleanly and quickly enough to play in a song.
Since I joined TAC over 2 years ago, I have paid particular attention to this lesson and worked on the various transitions. This has made my chords much better in general. That would have seemed like all I could have asked, but that wasn’t all I got from the Friday lessons.
The Friday Transition Lessons taught that it wasn’t just the shape of any particular chord that was important, but also what chord you are coming from. So when learning a new song, I would isolate chord pairs and practice them slowly until I was fluid with that particular transition.
But now, I have started using the Friday Transition Lessons to gain another wonderful benefit. I pay attention to the particular way I make the chords making up a chord pair. Then I try to figure out if I can make those chords in a different way that would make the transition easier.
So, today’s lesson got me to make the Am chord with my middle, ring and pinky fingers. That makes going to the Bm and back again a cinch.
When making the A7 chord, I use either the index and middle or the middle and ring. When transitioning to the Bm, I found that if I use the index and middle fingers, then I can simply slide the middle finger from the 2nd fret to the 3rd fret and the other fingers seem to find their places automatically.
This caused me to revisit the infamous D to Bm transition. I found that if I use the same finger to lead, all I had to do was move the middle finger diagonally from the 1st string, 2nd fret to the 2nd string, 3rd fret. This was a very quick and sure transition and again the rest of the fingers found their way seemingly automatically. I have been practicing and using and struggling with the D to Bm transition for many, many years. This seems to be the secret for me when making this particular transition.
I hope this helps someone else.
MG 😀
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