Swapping to chopping progress

Coal Porters on the Stade, Hastings, 26 Sept 2015

As well as changing from open to Bluegrass chop chords I will also be abandoning the capo as far as possible. I have also changed plectrum from a rather flexible 0.50mm to a stiffer 0.60mm which works better for chop chords and will also be better for picking individual notes.

The prospect of changing all my songs all at once seemed daunting, so I started with the three-chord trick for songs in G. I was already familiar with using X523 for G and 523X for C, so I just had to learn 245X for D. At first I tried to play this D chord with the first, third and fourth fingers but then switched to the first, second and third fingers. It's more of a stretch but less of a mental challenge. I'll try to develop the G into a 7523 G later.

Next up it was songs in the key of D, requiring the D, G and A chords. Having done the D and G chords it was just a question of adding the extra two fingers to the 2200 A chord to create a 2245 chop version. In terms of fingering shape this A chord is closely related to the 245X D chord so changing between them is easy.

Other keys I need to play in are A, Bb and E, but they are simply obtained by moving the chord shapes for G and D further up the neck. This requires more accuracy. If you're playing chop chords in first position and you accidentally hit an open string you can get away with it, but if you do that further up the neck they won't be in the same key and may sound out of tune. In order to flatten the learning curve I'm currently shoe-horning A songs into G and E songs into D.

The G/A and D/E songs account for over half the songs in my current repertoire. That leaves a couple of C songs, several minor/modal songs, and a few songs that really call for seventh chords or relative minors if I am playing solo. I've worked these out. All I have to do now is smooth out the chord changes.