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This guitar lesson is part of a 5-part series as part of TrueFire’s Next Top Guitar Instructor competition. Dyce Kimura is one of the 10 finalists, and if you like what you see, be sure to vote for him and subscribe for more lessons!

For today’s lesson we are going to cover how to play the C and A minor chords together. This is a great beginner lesson because C and A minor are practically the same chord. Both only use only five strings and only require a change in only one finger to switch chords. Please follow the charts and the verbal and visual description in the video to learn the chords.

1) First get comfortable with the chords, and try switching back and forth.

2) Try to play each chord four times each and switch back and forth at your own pace.

3) Then try to play both chords together and learn to switch quick enough to not have any pause in between the switching of chords so that you don’t drop a beat.

4) After you have gotten quick with switching between the chords, try to play C and A minor four times each with the drum machine at 70 BPMs from the link below.

It is imperative to not only learn the chords on the guitar, but to learn to play with a consistent rhythm as soon as possible. In fact, rhythm is the key difference between musical-sounding noise and actual music that other people can sing and participate with.

Now feel free to watch at the end of the video as I play these two chords four times each with the drum machine. I welcome you to join in and play the chords as they come up in the video in time with me. I’m going end this video lesson with some basic strumming of the C and A minor chords, and then I’m going to embellish a bit to inspire you with how interesting these two chords can get. Hopefully watching me “get down” a little will be entertaining for you as well! Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you at the next lesson.

Click here to get the tab and other supplementary materials for this lesson.