Help with guitar practice.?

Question

I have trouble memorizing some chords and scales (acoustic)

is there any good tips to practice memorization for them?

Answer 1

While nothing will replace practice there are ways in which you can increase the results from it.

When working on chord shapes for instance. Try to find chords that are related shape-wise. A common example is G Major and a Cadd9. Or if you understand that by "compressing" (i.e. bringing the outer notes in one string) a G7 shape you end up with a C major chord and if you do it again you end up with an Fmaj7, all of a sudden things start to make more sense.

You could do the same thing with a scale. If you learn to see them as shapes and fingerings as opossed to numbers on a piece of tablature. Once you relate your scales by fingering you can find similarities that will help you with the memorization process. For instance, a 7th position major scale (scale starting on the 7th degree which could also be thought of as the Locrian mode for those who see things that way) is the same as the first position scale except reversed.

Finding these similarities and patterns still takes a pretty serious amount of work. To keep your sanity try and play some songs with the material you already know (there are plenty of 3 chord songs out there) and add chords and scales to your vocabulary a little at a time.

Needless to say, a good instructor can reduce the load on you and speed up the learning process.

I hope this helps.