How're you doing? Justin here.
Ready for a really, really important lesson.
Now, what we're gonna learn today
is a thing called "Forcing The Changes"
and it's something that I wish I'd got shown
when I was learning to play chords on guitar
'cause I spent ages struggling with this.
And it's something that I've kinda did out of frustration once with one of my students
who just couldn't seem to get the rhythm right
and I made them keep going
and somehow I managed to force them
into doing their chord changes faster and it worked!
So, what I'm gonna do is share with you how to do that
and it can be a little bit tricky
but it's something that if you're really determined
and you make yourself go through this,
you'll suddenly make that transition
of being able to play your chords evenly,
NOT stop while you have to change chords,
and that's the point when we can start looking at adding your rhythm guitar to your chords
and it'll make sense.
So up until now, if you...
maybe you've been experimenting and trying to add some rhythm guitar anyway,
hopefully, you haven't because if you haven't,
it'll make this stage really effective.
So, what we're gonna do, and let me explain a little bit about it,
I'm gonna pick two chords first of all and it's gonna be D to E.
And what we're gonna be doing is
we're gonna be playing one bar of D and then one bar of E
and then back to D again.
And the important thing here is that
there's absolutely no way of stopping the strumming.
They have to be even. We're gonna stick the metronome on.
And what's important here is we don't want to have four strums on D:
[plays] 1, 2, 3, 4 - stop, change - 1, 2, 3, 4.
That's absolutely not going to happen.
What we have to do now is just concentrate on getting that chord change
even if the chord change is a little bit late, we're not gonna stop strumming.
So we're gonna have like: 1, 2, 3, 4, changing to E 1, - oops - 2, 3, 4, back to D -
1, 2, 3, 4, 1 - changing the chords - 2, 3, 4.
So even if the chord's not there on time, it doesn't matter.
You're gonna force the strumming to continue going
and what'll actually happen is,
the hand doing the chord changes is going to freak out and go:
'Oh, I can't embarrass him by not being able to do the chord!'
and then somehow, magically, you get faster.
I've seen that so many times now
and then I've taught this to people that have kinda gone like:
'Well, that chord change is a bit slow.' 'OK, we'LL try and force it' . And it works!
It's really quite incredible.
So, what we're gonna do now,
I'm just gonna run through now at a nice even tempo.
I'm just gonna check with my little metronome here,
60 beats per minute, here. Here we go.
Cause this is a good tempo for you as well, to put your metronome on 60...
3, 4...and this actually... I'm just gonna leave it on here.
So what we're gonna do: I want you to try this now...
...I'll turn it off for a sec
'cause that metronome is getting really annoying when you're trying to talk.
The metronome is gonna be on 60.
You can practise this without me, just on your own, doing it at 60,
but what I really want you to do is to make sure that you don't stop strumming.
So we're gonna do... the chords we're gonna do first,
let's do D, A, E, A.
It's one bar of D, one bar of A, one bar of E
and then back to A again.
So, what we're trying to do now is not stop.
So if you muck up the A chord,
then just leave it for the rest of that bar
and come back in when you should be playing the E chord.
But really, you should be able to do it.
By now you should be able to make those changes at this speed and be able...
maybe you miss the first bit of the chord, right?
The first strum is not quite as clear.
And what you learn is that you can kinda manipulate your fingers a bit
once you got it roughly to the right spot
you might find, during beat one and beat two,
you're kinda twiddling your fingers and moving them a little bit
trying to get them into just the right space
'cause they should be roughly in the right space now.
So, let's try that. Here we go.
That's the metronome at 60 so we're going D, A, E, A.
Here we go: 3, 4, [plays] D, 2, 3
now change it to A : 1, 2, 3, 4
change it to E : 1, 2, 3, 4
back to A : 1, 2, 3, 4
back to D : 1, 2, 3, 4
changing back to A : 1, 2, 3, 4
back to E : 2, 3, 4
back to A : 2, 3, 4. And so on.
Now the idea here is to not worry if the chord gets slightly muddled up
or one of the fingers is on the wrong string.
The key here is making sure you don't stop.
And the reason is, once we develop a strumming pattern
like we're gonna do in the next lesson,
where we might be doing like 'down, down, down-up, down-up' or whatever,
we wanna make sure that we can continue that pattern going
over and over again without stopping
'cause we don't wanna train your strumming hand that it's OK to stop.
Because it isn't. If you go to...if I play a little...
I'm gonna play some stuff that we haven't done yet,
some fancier kinda chord progressions and stuff,
and I'm gonna deliberatly muck up some of the chords
but if I keep the groove going, you're not gonna notice, right?
If I go like: [plays] Here's G, here's to C,
to D, back to C, back to G,
C, D, back to C.
Didn't sound bad, right?
It's that, you know, it kinda sounded a bit obvious
that maybe I didn't get the chords there straight away
but compare that to this:
. . .
It's no comparison. As soon as you stop it's like you... this blazing sign of idiot
or hopeless guitar player comes flashing up above your head.
Stopping is not cool.
That's the whole point of what's the reason that we haven't done too much rhythmic stuff yet,
we've mainly bee concentrating on chord changes,
is 'cause you have to get these chord changes fast enough to not stop the rhythm.
The rhythm never stops.
I'm sure there's some sort of disco funk song that I'm thinking of now.
What is it? 'Don't stop', 'Can't stop' - that's a Chili Peppers song, what's...
'Don't Stop The Music' or something, anyway...
How random is that?
Anyway, hopefully you've got the idea here. This is "Forcing Changes".
So I'm gonna do... just on the website for this lesson,
I'm gonna put down a few different chord progressions
which are the chord sequences that you should be working on
to make sure that you don't stop the rhythm.
This is just all gonna be downstrums: Down, down, down, down.
Four strums per bar but even like G to C,
I want you to work on that and be doing (plays) G, G, G, G
- and then change to C, and it goes: oh it's a bit wrong but there we go,
...3, 4, and then to D and we go: 'Oh, it's a bit funny - oh, two are a bit funny, uh, here we go'.
Here's the last two and then back to C.
Force the rhythm to keep going 'cause, the next lesson,
we're gonna start learning some rhythm patterns
and it's really, really, really important
that you make sure that the rhythm hand never stops moving.
So, have a little bit of a play-around with that.
I hope you get the idea of this called "Forcing Changes".
Get hip with this and then join me for the next lesson
where we start to look at some actual groovy rhythm patterns.
See you soon.