Hi @Pedram , there’s a reason it’s called “one minute changes exercise” - you’re supposed to do it for 1 minute. Your fingers (skin, tendons, muscles) have to get used to doing something completely new. If you don’t want to hurt yourself, you have to build it up slowly. Overdoing it might in the end force you to put the guitar aside for some time, so that won’t help you.
Have you finished all the videos for module 1? And are you using the practice routine Justin has created, covering all things you learn in this module? If not, do it. The idea is not to practice one thing over and over again until you master it, but to mix up a series of exercises allowing you to learn different things at the same time, while also varying the ‘load’ on your skin, tendons and muscles so as to give them time to adapt. Besides, variation is what keeps things interesting and thus motivating. If you just practice the same thing over and over, chances are you will lose your motivation, and that would be a real shame.
The exercise routine for module 1 is 20 min. If you want to practice more, you could do this routine twice a day, but make sure to leave a couple of hours between the two sessions to allow your fingers to rest. Playing guitar doesn’t seem to be all that taxing for your hands and arms, but don’t be fooled: it is.
Apart from the health reasons for keeping practice sessions relatively short, is the simple fact that there’s only so much your brain can manage in a day. Repeated short sessions, with a decent pause in between, are far more effective than one long session.
Thanks for advice. You are right. I will watch other videos in the module too.
I wanted to get perfect and then move forward, but that is not the right approach.
Hi @LadyOfTheCastle , I’m already having Blisters. I watched just a Video on Youtube and the Guitarist was playing with no effort. I’m looking at my guitar to find the right String the whole Time.
I havn’t finished all the videos yet, and I haven’t used any practice routin either. I visited " My Practice Assistant" Page but I don’t know yet how it works. I will watch the video “Module 1 Practice Routine” and then it will be probably not that difficult.
Thank you!
During the first timed minute, to my own surprise, I managed 19 changes!
During the second, third, fourth, and fifth attempts, I lost count each time and had to start over.
By focusing on both fingering and counting, my fingers were all over the place, but never where they needed to be.
It would be useful to have the ‘A’ and ‘D’ chord diagrams in the “Learn More” section below the video so I can make sure I’m placing my fingers correctly, I have not committed them to memory yet at this point
You will be doing OMC for every chord you learn and you shouldn’t be doing them if you haven’t memoeized the chords. Without committing them to memory you will be doing slow sloppy changes which won’t be helping.
Also relying on chord diagrams won’t help you memorize them either.
Hi Alex, you probably should review the lessons How to play the D chord and How to play the A chord and do more of the Perfect Chord Changes to reinforce your earlier lessons on the chord shapes.
In the meantime, you can copy the D and A chord shapes from the two “Learn More” secions of those lessons and copy to an editor to keep as a reference. Later you will do this for other chords to create a chord book. :Also it will be hard to make fast enough one minute changes if you have to look at the chord shapes each time.
I doubt it is an Apple specific problem. I’m on a Macbook Air without any problems, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work on a Pro. What happens when you try to play a video on the website? Do you also have problems on other websites, like YouTube?
Have you tried refreshing the page after you get this error? This is the advice given by Google in case you get this error message. According to people on the internet, it generally works, but you might have to refresh a couple of times.
Does this happen with all videos or just one/some? It might be a problem with the video.
Do videos on YouTube play normally?
Are you using an ad blocker? Google doesn’t like ad blockers. There have been problems before with the use of ad blockers.
Are you using the latest version of your browser? Looking at your picture, I presume you have an older mac with an Intel processor. In that case, you might not be able to update to the newest version.
Have you tried another browser? It could be a browser problem.
Have you allowed cross site tracking in the settings of your browser? This resolved a problem with videos not playing on the JG website which was actually caused by Google. I won’t advise you to allow cross site tracking though.
What happens if you click on either the video title or the YouTube logo (in the red rectangles)? This used to solve the problem mentioned in the previous point. However, it was a different error message at the time.
I can’t seem to reliably get above 30 changes a minute after a couple weeks practice. I occasionally get 30+ OMCs, but overall I’m hovering just below that, in the high 20s.
The trouble I’m having is landing all my fingers at once - they want to go down one by one. For a while it was finger 2 always lagging behind so I focused on landing it first. Now it doesn’t lag any more, but they still go down one at a time - different order depending on A or D chord.
When I try visualizing the chord and placing my fingers in that shape before putting them down, they land badly…unless I let them come down one at a time.
How do I get over this? Is it something I should focus on before moving on to more lessons, or will it eventually come to me? Now that I’ve broken 30 OMCs a few times should I move on? I worry about learning a bad habit and not being able to fix it later.
If you’re still just on D and A. Yes move to E. It goes with A and D so you can practice all three whith the OMC exercise and still be practicing the A and D so you’ll be getting better.
By all means, move on to the next lesson. The A-D change is also part of the practice session of module 2.
Also, don’t worry too much about your fingers not landing at the same time for now - that’s fine. It isn’t until module 7 that Justin gets into exercises to place all fingers at the same time (if you want a sneak peak: https://www.justinguitar.com/guitar-lessons/air-changes-aspire-to-this-b1-703 - note that the lesson title includes: “aspire to this”).
In fact, by trying to go as fast as possible and at the same time trying to put all fingers down at the same time, you’re trying to learn two things at the same time. That seldom works since there’s only so much your brain can cope with at the same time. Better separate speed exercises from finger placement exercises. By perfecting both separately, it will be a lot easier to fuse them once you get to that point. But as I said before: don’t worry about ‘all at the same time’ for now.
And once you get A D & E down you open the world of a thousand songs. Work on the 1MCs with these 3 chords and then get down to playing some songs, which is where we are really at. " @Richard_close2u " learn songs learn songs learn songs !!
Remember to keep your anchor finger down when making the change(s). Also it is worth practising the changes really slowly, trying to minimise how far your fingers, other than the anchor finger, move from the fret board. When you know you’re making reasonably accurate changes then start speeding up. Chord changes will improve and become much quicker with repetition and practice. “Dance The Night Away” is a great song using only A and D: even playing only one down stroke on the first beat of each bar, you can get quite a buzz from hearing your chord changes backing up a song. Keep on strumming.
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone - @TheMadman_tobyjenner, @LadyOfTheCastle, @stitch! It’s good to know this stuff isn’t expected to have “melded” yet. I’ve actually gotten halfway decent at melding perfect chords, 1MC, and anchor fingers - my A/D 1MC chords typically sound fairly good.
A tip for any other beginners:
If you work from home (like me), get a guitar stand and keep your guitar next to your desk - if it’s electric, don’t even plug it in - and when you’re in an off-camera meeting that doesn’t require your active participation, grab it and let your fingers noodle around on it. Practice perfect chords, anchor chords, and untimed chord changes. I like to practice placing my fingers without looking at the neck. Use those spare minutes to get little practice snippets in, it’s a lot of fun!
Hopefully by sharing my progress, other beginners can get an idea of how long it might take to get up to 60 and to demonstrate that progress is not always linear. Also, you can see where adding the E chord and doing “chord-perfect anchor finger” exercises during video meetings or while watching TV really accelerated my progress.
Thanks again, everyone, for the feedback and encouragement!
-g.
