Guitar Fundamentals:

Strumming, Switching Chords, and Singing 

You want to sound good.

I mean, that's the whole point, right?

You don't want to spend months learning guitar just to be able to slowly change between a handful of chords. You want to pick up your guitar and have it actually sound like music. You want your strumming to feel natural. You want your chord changes to be smooth. You want to find the groove of a song instead of just mechanically playing the chords. And eventually, you want to be able to sing while you play without your playing completely falling apart.

But nobody really tells you how to get from “I know a few chords” to “I actually feel like a guitarist!”

That's where these lessons come in.

The way you hold the pick. The way your strumming arm moves. How you approach chord changes. How you practice. How you find the rhythm. How you coordinate your voice with your guitar. How you actually made music. 

And once you understand them, playing guitar starts to feel a whole lot easier — and a whole lot more fun.

For the first several months I played guitar, I just sort of pretended chords and strumming didn't exist.

Everybody acted like the basic open chords (G, Am, D, B7, etc.) were easy. Like a tiny little baby could play them after 15 minutes of practice.

But I could not play them. At all.

I'm being 100% serious - I would spend three minutes carefully placing each finger one-by-one, double-checking the chord chart and triple-checking my finger placement, and then carefully and deliberately strum the strings once when I was good and ready... And it would still sound like garbage.

But I stuck with it.

Meanwhile, my older brother mastered those open chords within a few weeks and started moving on to way more complicated stuff. So it wasn't as simple as "chords are hard."I, specifically, was bad at them. Clearly, guitar wasn't meant for me.

But I stuck with it!

As the weeks and months continued to pass, I got increasingly interested and passionate about music. I started to think making music might actually be my future career.

BUT I STILL COULDN'T PLAY CHORDS!

But I stuck with it!

And then, miraculously, after months of anguish, hours of practice, and a few honest-to-goodness sleepless nights of pure guitar-fueled anxiety, it finally happened:

I gave up.

I stopped playing guitar. It was too hard, I was too slow, and it was embarrassing that I had tried for as long as I did.

This is a true story. Every word of it. And it's actually about me — this isn't a trick where I reveal that this is actually the story of Jeff Bezos's childhood or something. This was my experience.

Here's the thing, though: I really wanted to be able to do it.

So after about a week of not playing guitar, I started playing bass. A couple weeks after that, I picked up guitar again. And a few weeks after THAT, the chords finally started happening for me.

The moral of this story is not "never give up."

The moral is that chords are hard.

Experienced players have forgotten how hard they were. They tell you chords are easy because they ARE easy — FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN PLAY THEM!

I would, however, like to urge you to keep trying, keep fighting through the frustration, and most importantly, don't let yourself believe that you'll never be able to do it.

If you're really struggling and would like some extra guidance, solid practice exercises, a bunch of encouragement, and a clear path, Guitar Fundamentals: Strumming, Switching Chords, and Singing just might be what you need. 

I re-lived all the frustrations of those early days of learning guitar while making this course, and made sure to include everything that would have helped angsty young Stuart back then.