How to Practice New Chord Progressions & Strum Patterns

As you continue to learn new songs on your guitar, you’ll encounter chords or strum patterns you’ve never played before. In these videos, you’ll find Peter Vogl’s game plan for efficiently practicing new chord progressions. We use a basic strum and chords in these songs, but these exercises can be applied to any new song or advanced technique that you’re learning.

For our first session, we’re going to use Em and B7 as our chords in this example. We’ll start by learning how to play each chord correctly. Next, Peter will show you how to practice changing between these chords. Finally, we’ll start slow and gradually speed up the pace as you practice making the change along with Peter.

In the second session, we’ll learn a strum pattern to play over the same chords. We’ll start by focusing on just playing the pattern correctly and ignoring the left hand. Once we have that down, we’ll practice the pattern along with the chords at increasing speeds

By isolating the chords, changes, and pattern, you can really focus on your technique and make sure you’re playing everything correctly. Trying to jump into each piece of music at full speed can cause you to develop bad habits. This type of focused and detailed practice will allow you to identify trouble areas to work on and improve as a guitarist.