Play a Blues Song on a Guitar - Changing Chords

Hi! I am Franklin Taggart. I am a guitar player and a guitar teacher. I've been playing the guitar for over 30 years. I would like to show you today how to put three chords together to form a song. We are going to be playing a very simple blues song on te guitar with the chords A7, D7 and E7. It would be helpful for you to have those guitar chords memorized before we began.

You are going to need to have a guitar that's in tune and if you play with a pick you can play with a pick. If you use your fingers to play you are going to need to strum with your thumb. So, that's all you are going to need to get started, so let's get started.

What I would like to talk about now is changing chords on a guitar. Changing chords is something when you are beginning to play the guitar, it might be a little bit tricky to learn and I have an easy way to tell you how to think about changing chords on a guitar. When I change chords on a guitar what I like to do is I like to change shapes of chords instead of moving individual fingers.

So, when I make an A7 chord I don't think about individual finger placement I think about what shape it is. Those two fingers together on those two frets make an A7 chord, so I am just moving the shape. So, there is the A7 chord. Let's say that I want to move then to a D7 chord, the D7 chord has its own unique shape as well, kind of a little triangle.

So, I make my fingers into that triangle shape and put them all down at the same time and play the D7 chord. So, if I am switching back and forth between A7 and D7, I make an A7 shape and then I make D7 shape and just change the chords shape-by-shape, that makes it lot easier to do. So, as you are memorizing guitar chords, don't just memorize where you put your fingers, memorize the shape that your fingers make and it will make changing chords a lot more easy and efficient for you. Thanks for listening and that's how you change chords on a guitar.