Want FAST & PERFECT chord changes on guitar? Here's a new exercise to improve your guitar skills!
View the full lesson at Perfect Fast Changes | JustinGuitar
This is awesome! I’ve been playing for over 20 years but I started at the beginning and I’ve learned so much. I’ll keep this in mind because it’ll be so helpful! Also glad to know Justin is human. He too, drops his pick haha.
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Today I learned that I’ve been doing these since the beginning. Oops!
Hello @TheFlatline42 and welcome to the Community.
Don’t worry about it.
Cheers 
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what would be a good target for these? I’ve been going for 60 fast changes for basic chords. But for eg C to Fmaj7/C of perfect-fast changes I’m on about 25. How perfectly fast is enough to move on from Mod 10?
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Can I clarify on this, once I get to the stage of “perfect fast changes”, would this replace One Minute Changes as a part of my practice routine or should the two exist alongside each other, I understand that the goal is for all changes to be perfect so, for example, if I’m looking to introduce a new change to my practice like Bm to Em should I just look to make them perfect from the outset or go for the faster OMC to begin with and then introduce perfect changes later?
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When learning a new chord, I’d suggest starting with the Chord Perfect and OMC exercises first.
Once you start to get it under your fingers, then start doing PFC.
All three exercises reinforce each other. And as you advance, you may be able to start with PFC right out of the gate.
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Cheers for the feedback, sounds like the best approach for me.
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There is no target that limits when you can move on. This is simply designed to supplement chord change exercises you have already used and mainly for tricky chord changes. Keep on with the course as you use this in your practice.
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I cannot for the life of me seem to progress with chord changes. I am really slow. I do a lot of perfect fast changes and fast chord switches. It obviously worse for songs, but I think I will play with the songs on the app at the slowest setting. I am also doing the strumming course, and the good news is I am picking that up and it is coming along without making the chord changes slower.
Any other advise would be appreciated. I have been trying the air chords where I make the finger movements in the air slowly before coming down on the strings. It is still very difficult. lol
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You mention a number of different skills: one minute changes, perfect fast changes, chord changes in the context of a song, putting all fingers down at the same moment and strumming. These are all things you should practice separately, not just together. If your perfect fast changes are still slow, you will only make it more difficult by mixing in strumming, etc. Focus on one thing at a time. And yes, also play some songs to keep it fun, but you need to keep practicing those skills.
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Yes, I didn’t do a very good job explaining…lol. I am practicing all of the exercises I mention separately every day. Then I try to work in one of the things I am practicing into a song…eg strumming. Most of the time I am spending on the core exercises and not very much on the songs at this point. I suppose I expected to make progress on the chord changes more quickly. I started 8 weeks ago, and things came fast as I started. I don’t have a frame of reference and so it is very possible that this is normal. When I started I spent 20-30 minutes per day 6 days a week. I am now doing between 1h to 1.5 hours a day 6-7 days a week. I feel like I should be practicing more with an additional practice on making chord shapes in the air to try to advance as I am still finding my fingers go to putting each finger down one at a time as in the first lessons.
For 8 weeks in you are doing fine, this is a marathon not a sprint. Progress comes at it’s own pace, all you can do is follow the learning process.
One thing you can try with chord changes is to do it in time with a metronome. To play a song you generally need to get chord changes up to 60 per minute. If you can only do a change at 20 per minute, that’s a benchmark to start with, next target is to get to 25 and so on. You can only improve in small incremental steps.
Thanks Chris, many chord changes I can hit 50, but there are some tougher ones. Anything to C or big G, CAdd9, etc are a trainwreck LOL. Well actually, I can hit 30 for those.
That is probably the tougher part to understand…where should/could I be at x point in time. I get that there are a lot of factors, but it is nice to know that the effort you are putting in is going to get you to the result and how far away you are 
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If you got to grade 2 in 8 weeks, you’re learning really fast. Most people take a lot longer, so make sure you’re not in too much of a hurry. Also for perfect fast changes you don’t need to do 60 per minute - that’s for the one minute changes which don’t have to be perfect. As Justin says in this lesson: “It’s normal not to have as many chord changes as your One Minute Changes.”. Aim for 30 or 40. Remember: most songs are 120bpm or lower. 120 bpm = 30 bars per minute at 4:4. Changing chords for beat 1 = 30 chord changes per minute.
Also make sure you don’t practice too much. The longer you practice the lesser your return on investment. Practicing longer does not necessarily mean you learn faster - it can even slow down learning because of overloading your brain with too much to process in too short a time. Sometimes when you put something aside for a few days you’ll notice you’ve suddenly become better at it when you return - that’s because you’ve given your brain time to process things. I would advise you to not practice every possible chord change every night, but to pick maybe 3 per night and rotate. Limit your real practice time to maybe 40 min, and add playing songs if you want to play longer. Varying the way of learning something, like perfect changes and learning songs both work on chord changes, also helps to advance.
And lastly: not all 2 chords are common in songs. You’ll often have A and D together, so that’s an important one, but chances are small you will ever encounter D and Dm in the same song, so there’s not much reason to try and get perfect in changing between those two. Focus on the changes that are useful for learning songs.
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I’m curious if we can use a metronome to keep the changes on the flow, not only for PFC but OMC.
You can, but it might actually be counterproductive as it gives your brain one more thing to do at the same time. But if it works for you, there’s no problem.
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