Mastering chord changes!

Over the past few years I have had the good fortune to teach ukulele, among other things, to a number of enthusiastic beginners. Unfortunately I have never had enough time to teach more people, but the experience has been extremely instructive for me as well. Different people find different parts of learning an instrument easier or harder, but there is one thing almost all of my students have struggled with: changing chords smoothly and almost invisibly. That is hardly surprising, because it is one of the most demanding operations for the brain. Doing it well requires a high level of concentration: your ears and your hands have to be coordinated while maintaining the correct tempo.

Every beginner goes through a stage when they happily and independently discover new chords one after another, only to hit a wall when they have to play those chords consecutively at a steady tempo. What does that mean in practice? After learning, looking up and memorising the first few basic chords – “Great, I can play C major, G major and F major!” – the next task is to place them one after another in time and play them evenly at a particular tempo. That is a large and difficult leap. The aim is to strum the chords without stopping between changes, without searching for the frets and without spending long seconds rearranging your fingers. Every one of us goes, or has gone, through this phase of learning the ukulele: the brain already knows what comes next, but the fingers do not yet obey quickly enough. And that is the key – transferring the movement into the fingers until they can arrive quickly at the next chord, even without looking.

Millions of songs with chords can be downloaded from the internet, and you can find diagrams for the most extreme chord shapes imaginable, but I had never seen a program specifically designed to help practise chord changes. So I decided to create a smarter metronome that, while ticking, tells you which chord to play next. But not just in any old way! You only find out which chord comes next during the final two beats of the bar, leaving only a few seconds to move your fingers into the next position. At slower tempos you naturally have more time, but because the metronome can throw chords at you in random order, you still cannot know in advance what is coming.

So I created such a metronome program and gave it its own website. The address is: www.chordtime.com

I launched it only a few days ago, and very quickly received a large number of appreciative messages and Facebook comments from all around the world saying how useful this little program is. I encourage everyone to try it, use it and experiment with ChordTime. Beginners, intermediate players and professionals can all configure it so that following the metronome presents a genuine challenge.

I am very happy to receive any feedback or suggestions for improvements. Thank you.

And please like and share the ChordTime Facebook page as well, where you can also receive updates about the latest developments: ChordTime on Facebook.