The first two grips: C and G, and four songs that stand on them

I am learning to play the guitar and I remember the first week well. What hurt most was that I could already put my fingers on two chords and nothing came out of it. Because a chord is not a song yet. A song is the change of chord, in time, without the hand stopping.

So the first week runs on two grips: C and G. Not because they are the easiest under the fingers, because they are not: the easiest are Em and A, where the fingers sit on one fret, while C stretches the hand across three. We start here because more songs that people actually sing stand on this pair than on any other. Four of them need no other chord at all.

How to read a chord diagram

The diagram is the neck stood upright, as if the guitar were leaning against a wall and you were looking at it from the front. The six vertical lines are strings: thickest E on the left, then A, D, G, B and the thinnest e. The horizontal lines are frets, counted from the nut towards the body. A dot says where a finger goes.

The cross is part of the grip, not decoration. In C you do not play the sixth string. Catching it will not ruin the song, but the chord stops sounding the way it sounds on the record. Polish songbooks write the second string as H; here it is B, as on the tuner.

C and G, finger by finger

In C the ring finger (3) goes on the fifth string, third fret. The middle finger (2) on the fourth string, second fret. The index (1) on the second string, first fret. The third and first strings ring open, and the sixth is not played at all.

In G the middle finger (2) goes to the sixth string, third fret. The index (1) to the fifth string, second fret. The ring finger (3) to the first string, third fret. The three strings in the middle, fourth, third and second, ring open. There are several fingerings for G and that is not an error in the books; we take the one the app draws, because it leads best into C.

Put the fingers down starting from the thickest string. For the first few days you will place them one at a time anyway, and that order buys you a fraction of a second: the strum starts at the top, so the thickest string has to be ready first. That head start is bigger than it looks: on beat one only the bass string really sounds, so you may finish the grip on the way to beat two.

Then the test, the same for both grips. Play the strings one at a time and listen to each of them on its own. Every one has to ring. It is the most repeated instruction on my whole shelf of guitar books, and the fastest: a dead string usually means a neighbouring finger has gone flat, and a buzz means a finger is too far from the fret.

The change: what moves and what stays

what	C	G
lowest string played	fifth	sixth
index (1)	2nd string, 1st fret	5th string, 2nd fret
middle (2)	4th string, 2nd fret	6th string, 3rd fret
ring (3)	5th string, 3rd fret	1st string, 3rd fret
fingers that move	three	three

The books offer three things for a chord change. A common finger, one that sits in the same place in both grips and never lifts. A guide finger, one that slides along the same string by a fret. And the rule of the bass note first, for when there is neither.

C and G have no common finger and no guide finger, so the third rule is what is left. See one thing here, though, and remember it for good. The ring finger does not change fret. It changes string: it crosses from the fifth to the first, staying on the third fret the whole time, and the rest of the hand follows it.

The exercise in the app says one sentence about this pair and it is exactly about that: “The hand drops from the sixth string to the fifth and the ring finger hops from a thin string to a thick one. The most common change around a campfire”.

Lift, move, land: one movement, not three. The commonest mistake at this stage is fingers that fly off into the air and come back from a distance. Keep the hand close to the strings: one that rises a centimetre gets back twice as fast as one that takes a swing. You can drill this without playing: set the grip, lift all the fingers a centimetre off the neck and drop them back in one movement into the same place. If one of them misses, fix it and start again.

The tempo ladder starts at ♩ = 72

The exercise is called Chord Changes and it works like this: the metronome sets the tempo, you move the hand, and after eight bars you say whether the hand kept up. Then the tempo goes up. It starts at ♩ = 72, four strums per chord.

By the end of the week you want one clean round at ♩ = 72: eight bars without the strumming hand stopping. Not six rounds and not a higher tempo. The books are honest here: weeks for getting through the whole ladder, several months for the chord change on its own. A week is enough for one pair at one tempo.

One direction of the change will be slower than the other. Do not speed the slow one up. Stretch the fast one until both take the same time. Equal time in both directions is the first step towards playing in rhythm, and speed comes after it, not before.

What confused me

I thought I was supposed to practise chords: put C down, check that it rings, take the hand off, put G down. I did that for a week and at the first song I still stopped at every change. I was practising the wrong thing. You practise the crossing: the hand going from one shape into the other while the metronome does not wait.

The second one: I pressed all the strings down at once with everything I had, then wondered why the hand was late. The change goes faster when the hand lifts first and lands afterwards. The fingers are not meant to travel along the strings, they are meant to fly over them.

Now play Mary Had a Little Lamb

The strumming hand does one thing for now: four downstrokes on every chord, even, with no rush at the point of the change. Strumming gets its own lesson right after this one; today it only has to keep going.

↓·↓·↓·↓·

Mary Had a Little Lamb stands on C and G, counts in four, and the first line fits into two chords. Play it today, slowly, and do not stop the hand even when the chord comes out dirty. That is a first song, and it comes out on two grips.