When your learning guitar and preparing for being able to play songs it’s really important that you don’t try to rush into playing guitar songs too early and before you are ready. You’ll get much better results by taking a little a more time to practice the essential basics and creating a really solid foundation from which to work off.
After learning your chords and some strums you are going to be tempted to go into learning songs almost immediately. The advice here however is go into and intermediate step whereby you’ll run a series of practice progressions for a week or more just to get used to what you’ll encounter in many of the songs you’re about to learn. This is the step many beginners skip and later pay the consequences for.
These progressions for guitar are specially designed to make connecting your chords easy and combined with the Universal Strum numbers they will create an effective learning curve into songs. By taking the time to complete this intermediate step you could well save yourself a lot of unnecessary frustration.
On the website you’ll find a great section of practice chord progressions you can do, they are located in the Practice Module. Once you complete the initial 4 guitar lessons on the Beginner Level your next stop should be the Practice Module where you’ll be able to download all the drum loops used on the DVD ranging in tempos from 50 BPM to 150 BPM (Beats Per Minute). Combining the use of these drum loops with the chord progressions given in the practice charts will prepare you adequately for what lies ahead in song playing.
It’s a good idea to start off slow and gradually increase the tempo of the drum tracks every few minutes. Stay on the same practice chord progression for a while and avoid jumping around too much as this will not provide you with the best quality practice time. Many of the progressions are very close to what you’ll typically encounter in songs so it’s well worth spending a week or two weeks just to cycle them around before you go to the Song Book section on the site.
You can not only change chord progressions but also the strum numbers you use to play them. For example, you can take chord progression number 1 and first perform it with strum number one, then change tempos and perform it again but with strum number 3 this time, or how about a shuffle strum and so on. A lot of mileage can be extracted from each progression so use it!
