Would you like to be able to incorporate new chords you learn into your favourite songs?
Or maybe you are trying to learn a song, and there’s a lot of new chords and you don’t know how to learn them quickly?
Getting a grip on a new song
How come some people are able to pick up new songs so quickly (some instantly), and other people struggle for weeks?
That’s because there are a lot of components to a song. And for some people, they already know all of those components. But as a beginner guitar player, you have to learn each component separately, which is why it takes so much longer.
On top of learning all of those points, you also need to memorise it before you can enjoy playing the song fully and feel confident about it.
Let’s focus on learning chords
So why do most people struggle to learn new chords quickly?
A lot of people approach learning a song by playing it start to finish rather than memorizing each individual chord and practicing chord changes in between.
If you go through a song without understanding what the chords are you are playing, and memorizing and knowing how to play each chord. The brain has very little capacity to memorize so much information.
To get faster at learning songs, you need to first establish the key pieces of information that’s going to help you learn the chords for a new song.
Practise doing singular chords like a C chord till you can do it in your sleep, and then separately, the Em chord etc. and then integrate it into your song.
Then you will be able to recall the song as – C, Em, G, D for example, rather than continuous tab or panicking about changing into each chord.
And then the chords become usable in other songs as well.
Where to go from there?
From learning individual chords, you can move onto learning chord progressions. Chord progressions are simply repeats of a few chords.
Popular music often repeat 4 chords over and over again.
Which is why once you’ve learn the order: C Em G D, and you know the chords. You basically have 80% of the song learnt!
How cool is that!
That’s why some people can pick up songs instantly and learn it so quickly. They already know the chords, they can figure out how the chords are repeated, and they can mimic a similar rhythm and strumming to the song.
And this is how you can start to built up the ability to learn songs very quickly, and also learn new songs for songs very quickly too.
About author:
Guitar Tuition East London helps beginner guitar players from around London to find the joy in learning the guitar. When you start as a beginner, often the guitar can seem tough and difficult. With simple exercises, anyone can start to learn to play the guitar and start playing their favourite songs. So that they can start expressing themselves as a musician and play with other people confidently.