Guitar: Quick Chord Change: An Open Learning Guide

In some songs you have to change the chord within a bar. You can recognize this in songs with notes by the fact that there is more than one chord between two bar lines.

Even if you can't (yet) read notes, it is also advisable to buy songbooks with sheet music.

You can always use the bar lines as a guide. You can see from the bar lines how long a chord has to be played and where the "1" for the next beat (or bar) begins. You can recognize rests that beginners like to skip, or you can see, as in the example above, that the G and C are changed within one bar in the first and third bar.

This lesson is about how to play two chords in one bar without losing the steady rhythm or having to switch to a different beat pattern (e.g. western beat).

Note: With the "campfire beat" you don't change exactly in the middle of the bar, i.e. not on the "three", as you would normally do with the "railroad beat", the "western beat" or the "4/4 beat"; instead you change an eighth note earlier, i.e. on the "and" at the upbeat.

Practice the "fast fingering change" very slowly at first. The "fast" only refers to the number of chord changes during a bar, not to the speed of the bar itself. Just because you change faster, you don't have to get faster in tempo.

Once you have mastered the preliminary exercises, play exercises 1 and 3 one after the other.

This is also an important rhythm from Latin American music. The three beats of the tresillo can also be found at the top of the campfire beat (quintillo). These beats are actually emphasized more strongly, but it's not worth paying special attention to them at the moment. Chord changes usually take place on one of these 3 beats, which means that we don't change exactly on the 3 in this rhythm. The 8 beats of the eighth-note feeling (including the air beats) have a quasi 3-3-2 division, which you will encounter more often as you get deeper into the subject of "rhythm".

The brackets show you that the two chords are changed within a bar. Without brackets, the chords are played for one bar (or until the next chord change). Brackets are rather unusual and are only used here as a first learning aid. Feel free to draw such brackets in your own songbook if you have to change chords within a bar. If possible, start by practicing songs with the familiar, constant chord progression G Em C D. Only then should you move on to the other songs. Some examples only partly contain bars with a quick change of fingering and sections with chord progressions that are not so regular, which is a real challenge when practicing for the first time. Hold up such examples to later repetitions after you no longer have any fundamental problems with the "quick chord change".

Source and licence

Text adapted from Guitar/Quick Chord Change by Wikibooks contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.