How to learn to switch chords faster (and why grades are beside the point)

Use data for good, not evil. (NASA archives, 1957)

Because we don’t give grades, it might appear that we are no longer measuring or scoring students.

On the contrary, we’re measuring and scoring all the time – and more importantly, teaching our students to measure and score themselves. “Rulerless” does not mean that we don’t measure anything. It means, rather, that we measure according to our own criteria, based on the results we are seeking. As we do so, we can gather highly useful, actionable data about the performance our students and ourselves as teachers. This data not meant to rate or rank anyone. It’s meant to help us become who we want to be.

You can really go down the rabbit hole with this, making your metrics increasingly granular and finding all kinds of ways to gather and evaluate data. This can lead us in unexpected directions and allow us to quickly improve the nuances of our performance, not just “can you prove that you read this,” or “can you replicate this procedure.” We can fine-tune our results based on what we pay attention to. As Drucker put it, “What gets measured, gets managed.”

Let’s look at a common challenge beginning guitarist and ukulele players face: switching between chords. The conventional advice is to simply practice and it will get better. However, that’s not always the case. That’s because, after a while, we are practicing to reinforce what we’re already doing, as opposed to fostering improvement. If we want to actually improve, we need to systematically adjust (that is, change) our performance. It’s very difficult to do that if we’re not measuring it. So here’s how we approach the problem:

The goal is to switch between chords precisely as required by the music, rather than when the student’s fingers get around to it. At first, the student hesitates for an unspecified period of time between chords. But if we slow down enough, the student will no longer appear to hesitate, because the time between beats is slow enough that she can get to the next chord on time. Then, we will make that gap between the beats smaller, so gradually that it will be almost imperceptible.

For our example, we will imagine that the student is working on switching back and forth between G and D.

We set the metronome to 60 bpm (beats per minute). We’ll count, along with the metronome, a steady “one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four…”

The student will play G on beat one, strumming it only once. She will then spend beats two, three, and four switching as quickly as possible to D, playing it precisely on the next “one,” then spend beats two three and four of the next measure switching as quickly as possible back to G, and so on.

The goal is to be precise and clean, strumming exactly on each downbeat, neither late nor early. The student should aim to place all of her fingers down at once and wait until all fingers are in place to strum the chord.

Once this is comfortable, we bump up the tempo just a tiny bit (perhaps to 62) and repeat. When the student begins to show signs of fatigue (demonstrated by a decline in precision or any frustration whatsoever), the session ends.

We continue the process of gradually getting faster until we reach 120 bpm. This may take more than one session, more than one day, or even more than one week. This is where the data is especially helpful: It can be tracked on a spreadsheet. If the student gets from 60 bpm to 90 bpm in one day, she should try starting at 75 bpm the next day and move up from there. Over the course of multiple practice sessions, we will see an increase in speed.

The next step, once 120 bpm is reached, is to drop back to 60 bpm. Then, we play only two clicks per chord, again progressing gradually until we reach 120 bpm. Then, we drop back to 60 bpm again, switching chords with every click.

The student is now switching chords every second, which is pretty fast. She can continue to play and get gradually faster until she reaches 120. At this point, she will be able to switch between these two chords in a half-second, which will allow her to play the song smoothly without hesitations.

As you might imagine, this approach yields significant measurable improvement. Every day, the student can bear witness to her improved speed relative to the day before. This is not precisely linear, because there will be a warm-up period each day; however, we can clearly see the performance improve over time.

Once you see the possibilities for being able to gather data from your own performance and measure your effectiveness, it can get kind of addictive. You can turn boring things into fun things, inspiring an effort and focus that you might not have realized that you (and your students) were capable of. Simply by paying attention to the things that will make a difference, measuring them, and adjusting as you move forward, you and your students will make progress that is self-evident. In that context, traditional grades are utterly irrelevant.