Your hands are probably aching a bit and your fretting hand’s fingertips are really hardening  by now (or they may still blistering a bit if you haven’t practiced hard enough)!

You know the phrase, “no pain….no gain“. Well,it certainly applies to learning guitar... and other stringed instruments for that matter. It’s all part of the process. As you grow in you playing ability, your hands will experience growing pains, as muscles you never knew you had are developing and growing stronger.

So let’s take a look at the full length video of our practice song.

(camtasia here)

By now you know the first 8 bars of A - E changes and the next is easy, just changing from D - A - E. So to tackle those changes, set your metronome to 80bpm & practice the changes using the same rhythm as in the song. Notch your metronome up 5 bpm every 2 minutes until you reach 100.

You should be able to get this pretty quickly because you’ve already mastered A - E, which is technically a slightly more difficult change as it requires more finger movement in the fretting hand.  If you do have trouble, don’t worry….. Read the following tip, put it into practice, and then try this exercise again afterward.

Here’s a tip for learning to change chords: When fretting your D chord, just take a few minutes to think about the most economical way of changing to A. Because both chords have most of their notes on the second fret, you’ll soon realize that you just have to tuck your third finger beside your second and move your hand  up one string, and they’ll all fall into line on the A chord. At first, try it slowly without strumming. Just concentrate on what movements your fretting hand’s fingers need to make. This method can work well for any chord changes. It helps you to be conscious of what your muscles need to do.

Chord changes are, after all, eventually going to become muscle memory, and when you get to that stage you won’t even need to think about how to make the changes! Cool or what?! Now that you've made ALL the changes, you just need to put both parts together so you can play the whole song! Again, start at 80 bpm and work your way up to 100. Remember to take short breaks & loosen up your hands. Once you’re up to speed, you can practice it with the backing track, and get a feel for playing it with a band.

(mp3 link goes here)

Congratulations on completing this mini course! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed it; you’ve certainly come a long way in a short period of time!

Now that you can change chords and pick as well, you’re well primed to move onto some more advanced courses where you can learn the blues, pentatonic scales, and really cool techniques that pros like Buddy Guy, the late great Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, BB King, and many other great guitarists use, or used as the case may be.

The most comprehensive and exciting course that I strongly recommend you get your hands on right now is called "Learn and Master the Guitar," by Steve Krenz. In my opinion, it is by far the most complete video instruction course for guitar and comes with ten fully produced DVDs, five jam-along CDs, and a 100+ page lesson book, not to mention a wealth of web-based supplimental materials.

Go check out "Learn and Master the Guitar" today, and get yourself on the fast track to guitar Mastery and making your dreams and goals a reality!