When you learn to play the guitar, you will realize that most of the songs contain a combination of both basic major and minor chords, hence developing sound knowledge about guitar chords and chord progression is indispensable if you want to learn and master guitar.

You must develop a thorough knowledge about the entire concept of playing guitar chords including playing basic major chords (such as A major, C major, D major, E major and G major, which are all happy sounding chords), basic minor chords (such as A minor, D minor and E minor, which are all sad sounding chords), chord progression, chord substitutions, etc. Very often, it is seen that in spite of having a thorough grip over the subject of basic chords, and chord progressions, your guitar playing is still non-fluent and heavily punctuated.

While learning about basic chords is very important, it is also equally important to learn the art of moving smoothly from one chord to the other. Therefore, learn to speed up your chord transition with the following steps –

1. Learn how to play different chords accurately by memorizing the finger positions for each chord.
2. Learn ‘chord progression’, and train your fingers to play one chord after the other with greater accuracy and perfection. Focus more on accuracy than on the speed of chord transition. Initially, shifting from one chord to the other may be very slow, difficult and imperfect, but with time and adequate practice, you can overcome this problem and learn to play the chord progressions accurately.
3. Once you learn to play the chord progressions correctly and are able to use finger positions correctly, with little effort, then it is time for you to accelerate the chord transition process. However, learning to hasten up the chord transition process and changing chords with greater degree of smoothness is a time taking process and requires a lot of undeterred patience and constant practice from your end. Although changing chords may seem to be an arduous task for beginners, entailing a lot of hard work and patience, you can successfully conquer this difficult area with practice.

You can learn & master guitar chords, progressions, substitutions as well as chord transitions with regular practice. The trick lies in minimizing your finger movement when moving from one chord to another. You also need to improve your finger dexterity and finger agility in order to develop muscle memory in your fingers and to train your fingers so as to make your picking, strumming and chord transition more smooth.