finger movement on chords

It's not wrong as such, some people might not like it, but it may change as your fingers get faster! Sometimes it woks to play open stringfs whilst changing notes, and this is also frowned upon by some people but hey, I won't tell anyone :P

Tim:

Its common to place one finger down before another, when you are a beginner or early intermediate. It gets much closer to all the fingers hitting the fretboard at the same time, the longer you play. How long have you been playing?

been playing 2 years, i move pretty fast and smooth i just noticed that place them in order 1-4 or 4-1 most of the time.sometimes i just sit and try to place them down all at once and it's like iam a 2yr old trying to learn motor skills..

Tim,
I think you'll find that the finger placement will come along on it's own with practice. As the songs get more chords in them, and the tempo increases, you'll have to "stick" them. That's the magic of practice. That's why a journal is a good idea. When we see progress, it drives us (IMHO) to keep advancing.

"stick" i'll remember that. thanks for info guys i will just keep plugin away

Tim:

Its common to place one finger down before another, when you are a beginner or early intermediate. It gets much closer to all the fingers hitting the fretboard at the same time, the longer you play. How long have you been playing?

I get my fingers down separately for some chords and I've been playing 32 years

Best,

A :-)

I do this on chords that I'm not as familiar with. It wasn't really a problem until I noticed that I couldn't put my third finger down until my first and second fingers were down, I couldn't fret the chord out of order. Which can be a problem if you screw up your first fingers, instead of screwing up a note in the chord you will screw up the entire chord! :x

Hey man, its freaky - As I was about to open this post of yours, I was thinking of posting exactly the same question, since I was practicing this last night.

Anyway, I have exactly the same problem as you, except in my case, it really is a problem since my fingers don't seem to move fast enough. So, with the little practice i was doing, i seemed to be getting some results.

What I did was this:
Finger a chord, then lift the fingers slightly off the fretboard while keeping exactly the same position, then bring them down all together. This should be easy enough.

The next thing I did after this was to try to change from one chord to another VERY slowly, but before planting the fingers down, making sure they are all in position.

As I said, I seemed to be makin slight progress with this, but I only practiced it for about ten minutes last night. Also, I'm a newbie, so take everything i say with a pinch of salt :). It may or may not work for you - just a suggestion to try.

I wrote an article about the method that I use:

https://www.guitarnoise.com/article.php?id=561

Hope it helps.

Great article Greybeard.

I do something similar to that and to what Velsing mentioned when I find certain chord changes a little sloppy. I take the 'problem' chords and just go back and forth between them really, really slowly, letting my fingers 'rehearse' the move so they're all moving in slow motion from their original position to the next position, all at the same time. It's sort of like watching or thinking of a slow motion dance, with the four fingers taking the place of arms and legs. Just back and forth very slowly. I don't even strum the chords at this point and just focus on how (and where) the first finger is going, how and where the second finger is going, etc.

And as was mentioned, there are still chords that I plant one finger down on first, especially barre chords where I'll slam the barring finger down first so I'll get some sound at least, but that's usually when I'm trying to play a song or keep up with a metronome or backing track. When I have time later, I go back to slow-motion and work out the movement.

Ideally, as GB mentioned, you have a mental image of the next chord you want to play and so by the time you need to change to it, your fingers already have their 'targets' set.

I agree with everything DemoEtc said, about starting very slowly and very accurately.

NoteBoat here once pointed out that Practice doesn't make Perfect - that's misleading advice. What it does is make things more Permanent. So if you do something wrong or badly over and over you are just entrenching your mistakes or bad habits.

I expect everybody does it slightly differently, but my order looks something like this:

I also find that if I need (for instance) 100 practices to get it solid, then it pays to spread them over several days or weeks. If you try to force the issue too quickly you reach a point where you make no more progress without a break. In fact you can start going backwards again. So having several things on the go, and not being too pressured about one seems to work best.

There's also a progression in how I think about the chords:

But each stage can take weeks, months or years. So it's good to be relaxed about it and not to try and force the pace, or get frustrated when it seems too slow. It's never as quick as we'd like, for any player. :)

good instructions chris