Learning the Am Chord
Thankfully, I somehow miraculously planned only to learn one new chord this week. I don’t know what I would have done if I arrived at midterm week and had to learn a new song as well. When learning the A minor chord I started by simply placing my middle finger over the chord and started strumming. The first step for me at this point is to just get a feel for the sound and figure out how I want to hit the note when I play it. I felt like I was able to hold the note and play it in many different ways easily. I moved on to the next step of learning the chord which was adding it to my repertoire. In my mind, adding it to my repertoire means being able to play A minor along with all the other notes I have learned. This is when I started working on switching between the notes I already know and this new note. I started by working on switching between Am and F as they have similar finger placements. This was not something I struggled with very much so I spent some time working on switching between the two as quickly as I could to increase the speed and create muscle memory. I then moved on to work on switching between Am and C. At first, I struggled with this as my first finger kept wanting to move up and play the Am chord instead of my second finger. Although, it didn’t take long for me to get used to using my second finger. These two chords were quite easy to switch between as they both only require one finger. Finally, I moved on to learning how to switch between Am and G. I noticed switching from G to Am is quite simple but backtracking and switching from Am to G is where I struggled for a little while. After I spent a couple days taking some time to practice switching between these two chords I felt much more confident and was able to switch between them faster than when I started learning. This made me feel good as I was actually able to see my progress.
That is all I had planned to work on this week! Thanks for reading!
Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash
