Questions on playing the C Chord pre-February 2023

It’s taken me 9 months to get anywhere close with the C chord and can just about get this now. Playing songs with the chord in it is the key as it forces you to do the changes.

Thanks for the support and suggestions… much appreciated

Same as what’s been suggested previously, I found I got the greatest benefit from playing songs with the c chord in them. Before you know it your fingers will unconsciously be making clean c chords

C is one of the tricky ones.
I was sweating for months to play it without muted strings and buzzing!

Glad I’m not alone in my journey

@Hhbt I’m at exactly the same point as you - module 5. I can nail the C chord nearly every time in chord perfect practice, but when I come to play songs I often miss it and it sounds a bit dull.
I’ll be moving on when I have other parts of the module up to speed and the C chord sounds a bit better during song play.
Everything else has gotten better as I’ve moved along so I’m assuming C will too. :crossed_fingers:

That’s great for you! How long have you been on module 5? It’s been 5 days for me

A little longer - I started on the 14th. I keep a record of when I start each module and to date I’ve been about 2 weeks on each one, or a little longer.

You’re right… I need to not rush it… to spend the time I need to get confident with the lesson that I am on. Thanks

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@JaseMac
Stitch offers good advice.
Just one important caveat to the point about filtering by chords.
Selecting only C, Am and G shows only 5 songs:

The reason being this in red:

Your better bet is to filter by grade:

Or by Tags:

Hope that helps.
Cheers :smiley:
| Richard_close2u | Community Moderator, Official Guide, JustinGuitar Approved Teacher

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Hello @thforbes and welcome to the Community.

Each successive module will take longer to learn, practice and embed.
Take the time needed to build a strong foundation.

Hope that helps.
Cheers :smiley:
| Richard_close2u | Community Moderator, Official Guide, JustinGuitar Approved Teacher

So I’ve been working on getting a clean C chord for a good month and half to two months. In a vacuum, I can play it no sweat. I can do 40 or 50 on 1 minute changes. But man on man I haven’t been able to clean my c chord up when playing actual songs. I might hit it clean 25% of the time and maybe even that’s exaggerating.

I’ve actually moved on to grade 2, but continue to work on this C chord with very little progress. I think part of the issue is my fingers are really short. Hands are really small so i’m trying to learn a good way to play them. Just wondering if anyone else had this kind of issue. I’ve considered picking up a short scale guitar to see if that helps… But, I figured I’d ask around here and see if anyone else had a similar issue with C and if it was just a matter of pushing through or maybe a technique thing?

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Hi Javier,

I’m relatively short (5 feet 4inches) and have pretty small hands. I too had issues with the C chord when I was in grade 1. What helped me is focusing all of my song practice with songs with a C chord in it. (I used what’s up by 4 non blondes). I now do clean C chords about 99% of the time and have 0 problems incorporating it in songs. I bet it’s just a matter of persistence and patience.

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Make sure that your thumb is in the correct position (on the middle of the back of the neck) and arch your fingers as much as possible to clear the strings, my hands are smaller than my wife’s yet I can still play clean chords on a Classical guitar which has quite a wide neck, just wait until you need to play a G7!!!

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Thinking that my hands were the wrong shape for guitar was what made me give up guitar the first time in my teens. It’s just not true - don’t think that way.

If you can play a C chord clean in isolation, you can learn to play it clean in songs. It’s just practice, and slowing down. Remember practice makes permanent? Try to slow the songs down, or do one strum per bar, and try to get those changes clean, if slow. Then speed up the strumming. It will come with persistence, like @alexisduprey says. And once you have it, it will be automatic.

Some chords are hard ones to learn. Some are easy. C is the first hard one - later you’ll learn other chords that make C look like a piece of cake :wink:.

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Yeah mate, it just comes down to technique and practice. You’ll get there before you know it. Maybe post a quick clip. It may illuminate something that the folks here can help with.
Re the small hands query, there’s plenty of 6 years olds on Youtube shredding it better than all of us with their tiny mitts. :smile:

Cheers,
Shane

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I’ve got long fingers, and am still not happy with my C chord changes, after working on it for several months now.

Made worse because I had to give up on muting the big E string with my ring finger, and switch to thumb muting. Feels like I’m starting from scratch, and can be quite frustrating.

As others have said, posting a video would be a really good idea (this is definitely a case of “do as I say, not as I do”…I haven’t posted one on my C chord struggles either :()

On the other hand, nobody picked me on the C chords in my Behind Blue Eyes video, so I guess they sound OK to the listener. But they don’t feel good to play.

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@javierdlopez

As Darrell mentions, check your hand positioning:

image

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Been working on it… Still not “perfect” but much improved. The app is really what’s been keeping me going, actually.

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Well done Javier, perseverance always come through. Couldn’t agree more with your comment about the app, it’s a god send!

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