Too Many Guitar CHORD / ARPEGGIO Shapes To Memorize?
As a music theory educator I have my pet peeves, and one of them is guitar books with just too many chords
“But Tommaso, you sell a course called Complete Chord Mastery! Are you telling me that you are not teaching chords in there?”
Fair objection!
My problem is with books that tell you: “and now learn all the chord shapes in the following 53 pages and I’ll see you on the other side”…
(You think I made this one up? It’s an actual quote…)
How the H-word are you going to remember 53 pages of chords? BTW, in this book, each page contained 7 lines of 6 chords shapes… that is 42 chords shapes per page…
53 pages of 42 chords shapes = 2.226 chord shapes.
ARGGH…
…or worse… the tell you to use the ‘cAgEd SyStEm’…
Double ARGGH.
The problem of these solutions is that they do not “connect” the chords together. The chords are shown as ‘just shapes’.
And if you do not ‘connect’ the chords, then the only thing you can do is to learn another shape.
And then another.
And then another…
Until your brain runs out of short-term memory (read: headache) or you give up.
And then a couple of weeks later you realize that you do not remember anything of all that… no wonder your motivation takes a hit.
If instead you “connect” the chords… then the fretboard ‘opens up’ and you start to ‘see’ you way around your guitar
So, how can you learn all the chord shapes and the connection between them - and possibly have fun while doing it?
Because if you don’t have fun learning, then you won’t retain much (yup, there’s science about it)
Allow me to offer you not one but two solutions:
P.S. and yes, what you see here is also a little preview of the method I use in my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course. So if you find yourself watching the video and thinking: “WOW this finally makes sense!”… you know what to do ;-)
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