Learning how to change chords smoothly is one of the most challenging aspects of playing the guitar. Here’s my method for getting unfamiliar changes under my fingers. It’s particularly useful when you encounter a chart with a chord you don’t often play, or where you need to play a chord you already know in a different position to make the voice leading smooth.

• Write out the chord progression you are trying to master (if it’s not already written out).
• Practice going from the first chord to the second chord, as follows:
• Finger the notes of the first chord. Check to make sure all your fingers are in the right place and all the notes sound clean.
• Do the same with the second chord.
• Analyze the left hand movements one finger at a time. Here’s how.
• Look at what the first finger (index) does when you change from the first chord to the second chord. Does it stay in the same place or move somewhere? What string or fret does it go to? Describe the motion to yourself (e.g., “the first finger goes from the second fret on the A string to the third fret on the G string”).
• If it doesn’t move when you change chords, say to yourself “the first finger doesn’t move.” If this is the case, go to the second finger and repeat the procedure. If not, keep going to the next step.
• Leaving the other fingers in place on the first chord, move JUST THE FIRST FINGER to where it is supposed to go. Sometimes one of the other fingers in the first chord is already there, or the formation of the other fingers blocks it from getting there. This is OK. If this happens, remove as many fingers as you have to until you can put the first finger in its position in the second chord. Repeat this until you can accurately and smoothly make the first finger go where it needs to five times in a row.
• Now do the same thing with the second finger, third finger, and fourth finger in succession.
• Now summarize the movements. For example, say to yourself, “first finger goes from here to here, second finger goes from here to here, third finger doesn’t move, fourth finger goes from here to here” or whatever the marching orders are. Then say how many fingers you have to move in total, e.g., “I have to move my first and third fingers to change from chord A to chord B.”
• If you have to move more than one finger simultaneously, practice this by just putting the two (or more) fingers that have to move simultaneously in position for the first chord. Leave the other finger(s) off for now. Now just practice moving those two fingers to their correct positions. Go back and forth, chord A to B, chord B to A, over and over. Sound the two notes to make sure you are fretting them cleanly. When you can do this correctly five times in a row, add the remaining fingers.
• The chord change should be very easy to execute now.
• Repeat this method with each chord in the progression. Once you can play the first and second chords, practice the second and third chords, and so on.
• When all chord changes are smooth, make sure you can do it correctly in reverse order. Start with the last chord and practice going back and forth with the next to last chord. Continue all the way through to the first chord. This should take much less time, as you’ve already done the work. It’s just a check to make sure there aren’t any lingering trouble spots.
• If you’re really a fanatic, start with the first chord and make sure you can change directly from it to the third chord and back, the fourth chord and back, and so on. Then do the same with the second chord, and continue all the way through the progression.

Notes:

• Your mind is much quicker than your muscles. Be patient. Your muscles have to actually do the work; intellectual comprehension alone is not sufficient.
• Although it’s tempting, DO NOT SKIP the verbal analysis of the finger movements. For some reason this is extremely helpful to the process.
• Also do not skip working on chord changes you think you can play already. This will ensure that every chord change you need to play is smooth. Sometimes bad habits lurk in what we think we already know.
• In the vast majority of cases, the cause of a fumbled chord change is one finger that doesn’t automatically know what it’s supposed to do. Isolating each finger ensures that you find out where the problem is.
• This may seem like a lot to read and remember. But once you assimilate the process you can go through it quickly, and you can use it any time you want to master a new chord or two.
• You do want to sound good, right? Me too!! If you do the work, you’ll get the results.

Hey, NAMM Gods:  Why don’t guitar effects pedals come from the factory with velcro attached to the bottom? If you want to add a new effect to your pedalboard (most of which use velcro to secure the pedals), the first thing you have to do when you get it is to remove the smooth rubber foot pad that comes from the factory. This involves razor blades, scrubbing pads, steel wool, and/or solvents. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to scrape off factory installed rubber before I can use my new toys.

Why can’t they attach the foot pad backing to velcro, and the other half of the velcro to the bottom of the pedal? That way you could have the option of peeling off the smooth, velcro-backed rubber if you wanted to stick the pedal on a board, without taking a razor to your brand new pedal. The velcro would be industrially attached at the factory, automatically making a better job of it than 99% of the people (including me) who stick it on themselves. Or, if you wanted to use the pedal by itself, you could leave the rubber pad on. I don’t have access to the data to cost it out, but my guess is it wouldn’t add more than 50 cents to the wholesale cost of the pedal to do this. Probably less. I’d definitely pay a dollar or two more at the counter to eliminate the need to deface my pedals. I think a lot of other people would too.

As longtime readers may remember, I thought I had finished my autobiographical musings with the previous chapter of this ongoing serial. But guitar acquisition, like life, goes on. I made a number of New Year’s resolutions about various things, most of which are beyond the scope of this post. And one of the things I decided to do was reduce clutter in my life (and apartment). Well, between my instruments, my record/tape/CD collection, my books, my music, my amps, my workbench, etc., plus my son Liam’s drum set and instruments, plus a couple of my son Ethan’s instruments that he left behind when he decamped for the Lower East Side, there is plenty of clutter to reduce. So I decided that I would lay off acquiring any more instruments for a while. I feel as though I don’t play the ones I have often enough, even though I’m playing all the time.

Well, a day after my birthday I went to work and retrieved a phone message from my old friend Geoff Lee. “Hey, Andy, happy new year. Give me a call.” Geoff is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in a life full of amazing people. He is an incredibly gifted guitarist, sculptor, visual artist, and woodworker. But more importantly, he has learned from nearly everything that’s ever happened to him in his life, which is quite a bit. And he’s one of those people who never speaks idly. Every sentence makes you think, or appreciate. His guitar playing is the same way.

I don’t hear from Geoff regularly. He keeps very busy with his day gig and various creative projects. But every so often he makes his way north, or I make my way to Miami, and we link up. It’s like we just saw each other last week. A couple of years ago when I was playing in Miami with Toots I hung out with Geoff and his wife Jeanne both before and after the show, and got to see his house for the first time. In the garage he has a workshop, where he builds furniture, sculpture, and all sorts of objects d’art. He had just started building guitars, and he showed me several of them. I was particularly taken with his newest one, a hollow-bodied variant on a Tele thinline guitar he called Bart, after the cartoon character Bart Simpson.

Geoff is primarily a solo acoustic guitar player, though he had a punk band in the late seventies in Jersey. So I was very surprised that he had built an electric guitar, as he was currently most interested in flamenco music. “Why do you call him Bart?” I asked.

“Plug him in,” Geoff replied. I did, and was rewarded with a raw, ferocious snarl. Bart sounded exactly like his namesake: brash, disrespectful, eloquent, and snotty. His tone completely belied his looks. Bart is made of several kinds of wood (Geoff told me what they were but I forgot) and has stunning f-holes and beautiful light wood binding, as well as a stunning red stain finish and a maple neck. I played Bart for quite a while. Geoff was quite curious to know what i thought of Bart, as he is not a working electric guitarist himself. I told him the truth, that Bart was a unique and amazing instrument and it was hard to believe he’d just started building guitars. Then, if memory serves, we went off to dinner. When we got back it was too late to do more with him.

Though I’d talked to Geoff a few times since, and seen him a few months ago, I hadn’t thought too much about Bart. Before I got a chance to call Geoff back, my phone rang. “Andy, it’s Geoff. I’m sending you something.”

“Great!” Geoff has sent me several things in the past, usually pictures of his newest artistic creation, or sometimes CDs of his playing, which I love. “What are you sending me?”

His voice took on a warm tone. “I’m sending you Bart.”

“What??? You can’t do that!”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“I love Bart, you know that. But you can’t get rid of him.”

“Why not? I’m not really an electric player. And I want to make room for some other things that i’m doing. I don’t use him, and maybe you will.”

“Oh, I’ll definitely use him. Thank you. I can’t believe you’re doing this. But can I give you some money for him? Or at least pay the shipping?”

“No, I don’t want any money for him. I’ll take care of the shipping. I just want you to have him.”

“Well, can I at least make a charitable contribution to that horse rescuing group that you and Jeanne work with?” Geoff and Jeanne spend a lot of their spare time caring and rehabilitating horses that have been abused by their owners, and his interest in them has resulted in some beautiful music. I had never thought about horses being abused before he told me about it: where I grew up, farm animals were valuable assets and I never saw any of them mistreated, but apparently it happens pretty regularly.

“We’re not involved in that group any more. The head of the group was diverting some of the horses for her personal use. Jeanne actually resigned from the board over it. We still work with horses, but not there. That organization you work for does fine work.” He’s right, it does. “Why don’t you make a contribution to them in our names?”

“I’ll do it. When is Bart coming?”

“I should be able to send him Saturday. He’s coming in a hard shell case. It should be safe. Call me when he shows up, and send me a picture of you playing him, or Liam.” (That reminds me, I haven’t done that yet.)

“Great, we’ll let you know as soon as he’s here. By the way, did you know that it was my birthday yesterday?”

“No, if I ever knew, I’d forgotten. But that sure worked out, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“You already did. I know you’re at work. I’ll talk to you later.”

Sure enough, as promised, Bart arrived early next week. Liam, of course, was tremendously excited by the story. When the package came I let him open it. Bart was even more beautiful than i’d remembered, and just as aggressive. We both played him for quite some time. Geoff had asked me to check his wiring, as electronics is not his forte, and I found a loose ground wire. And the pickup and string heights required some adjustment. But after an hour or so of tweaking Bart was ready.

I had a studio session next on the books, and I didn’t know enough about what Bart could do yet to try him out there. But that Friday I had a gig at Kayara Hall with Derrick Barnett, which offered a perfect opportunity to give Bart a trial by fire. I brought a second guitar just in case something went terribly wrong.

Derrick is a flashy dresser and loves great-looking instruments, so he was quite impressed with Bart. Plugged into my blackface Twin, Bart was absolutely ferocious. He has more treble than any of my Telecasters; I had to turn the treble on the amp down to five and roll off some highs on his tone control as well. His hollow body makes him quite responsive, and he feeds back readily. I’m not sure his back pickup is quite in the right place, but once Flip gets hold of him for a setup, Bart will see regular usage. I’ve got a new amp also, a little Epiphone with one knob. It’s a bit bassy with some of my guitars, but I think Bart will match up well with it once I get a chance to try him with it.

It’s great to have Bart, but he and his cool tweed case do take up space. So I was thinking about what to do with some of my other instruments. The really valuable ones i don’t want to sell, and the cheap ones I couldn’t get back what I paid for them for the most part. I thought about which one I used least, and it came down to a choice between my Squier Strat with the purple pickguard and the OLP Van Halen knockoff. But Super Cat really likes the OLP and I have a gig coming up with him soon, so I don’t want to get rid of that. I don’t really want to get rid of the Strat either, but I have a great Strat, and recently played another cheap one that I like better…which got me thinking. Oddly enough, one of my MySpace friends is a guitar player who currently has no instrument. He has recently taken one of his children into his house, and is too strapped to do anything about getting a guitar right now. A good guitarist, a guy who was a working pro, without an instrument. That’s just wrong. Hmmmm…someone gave me a guitar, maybe I should give someone else a guitar…the more I thought about it the more I liked it. Plus his kid is around Liam’s age and it might be really cool for him to be exposed to a guitar during this period of transition into a new house with new people and new rules…so I asked him if he’d be interested in the guitar and he definitely is. So it looks like I will be saying goodbye to the purple pickguard Strat.

I looked into shipping it to London and the price was more than the guitar is worth, even with the cool knobs and Fender noiseless pickups I put into it. So I asked around. Fortunately, my friend Earl Appleton, one of NY’s top reggae keyboardists, has family in London and is going to see them in March. I explained the problem and he, like the good guy he is, volunteered to take it with him. To say goodbye to the Strat, I played it all last week, and it kicked butt on my gig with Laury Webb on Sunday night. He’s getting a really useful axe! And I won’t feel so bad if I come across another cheap Strat and decide that it may have to follow me home.

I’ve given away a couple of other guitars in my life, and I really feel good about having done so. It turned out that neither of the people who received them did much with them, but what matters is that they were exposed to the instrument, and had a chance to see if it was for them. I think this time will be different, and that the guitar will really get played a lot more than it does with me. I really do believe that good instruments want to be played, and are not happy when they aren’t. Speaking of which, it’s time I got Bart out and played him again.