Lazy Player/Difficult Chords

Witters

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Hi Folks,

Are there any players here that for want of a better word - lazy?

Lazy, as in minimum effort in learning and playing anything, so opt out of stuff that use hard chords, or simply use easier chords in place of the hard one’s?.

I personally am as lazy as anything in this department.
Before I knew you could change chords (within reason) I tried learning every chord out there and got into a heck of a state through frustration.
In the thread “Why did you start playing the Ukulele” I mention this a bit but wondered if there is anyone the same as me?

I have always had trouble with the B chord for instance, and had to throw that one away and replace it or I would still have been banging my head against a wall.

Its not that I just play 3 chord stuff only, although you could build up a complete repertoire of 3 chord songs and providing you play them right, there is a lot of people out there who would think you’re a genius.

No, what I mean is are you a person like me who just cant play some of these difficult to do chords, so don’t use them, bother to practice them, and never will?
 
I thought like that at first. Especially with guitar. But as I kept playing, I'd get bored and start using the tougher chords. 2 years in, I don't really try to avoid any chord, because I know that even that hardest ones will be second nature within a week with practice.
 
What I find interesting about my laziness is that chords like Bb seemed a pain at first and now it seems more natural than an open C. As you work with a chord and muscle memory improves, it will start to seem easy. But that's not an excuse to give up laziness. Lazy chords are often deeper and sound better to me, like the two string D7. And after examining it more closely, the proper D7 is actually easier to play. So sometimes lazy chords become harder to play as you get better.
 
I got into playing when I was already an old dog. I avoided any songs with hard chords. After a short, while I got better and some found songs that I really wanted to play but had harder stuff in it, and learned them. B's and E's are now a breeze. I think the same thing will happen with you whether you plan it that way or not. Just keep playing.
 
Hi Folks,

Are there any players here that for want of a better word - lazy?
I think most of us have chords we dislilke because they're awkward or even difficult, so we'll try to avoid them.

I don't like the E chord on a uke, for exampl, so I try to transpose keys to get something I prefer. It's not the pitch - I play a lot of blues in E on the guitar. Just the configuration of fingers on the uke that irks me. Not lazy - merely want to be comfortable when I play.​
 
Yeah, lazy was the wrong word but I know what you mean.

Having not played any instrument before part of my “lets get going and see if I can make any decent sound out of the Uke” was realising almost straight away that most of the stuff I like has minimal easy chords anyway. Whoopeeeee…
The songs that don’t have easy chords left me with a “OH MY GOD” expression and although I practiced them I found that the fun side of things was going out the window and frustration started to set in.

I followed a rather heated argument on another forum about this and one person insisted with venom that you must PRACTICE and LEARN ALL CHORDS!!! Otherwise forget it!!!

Sorry, I am a bit old in the tooth for all that nonsense and I’m never going to be a Jake, or any top player and love the Uke for its simplicity in being able to learn almost at once something and progress from there.
If that meant putting the difficult chords on hold then so be it.
I could always come back to them later as suggested above.
And one thing I love doing is altering things around. When I found this large chord book part of the advise from the writer was to try different chords which sent me up the neck more than I had ventured before, and these chords were not to difficult - so that has opened things up no end.

So far though I am still avoiding the tough one's though so I am a very lazy so and so:D
 
"No, what I mean is are you a person like me who just cant play some of these difficult to do chords, so don’t use them, bother to practice them, and never will?"

What makes me crazy is all the different names for the same chord = substitutions - synonyms. I don't learn chord names or forms just for the sake of knowing them. It's just the type of music I play requires all of these fancy chords.
 
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I couldn't do D's properly for the longest time. I would reach over the other side of the neck with my thumb and bar the first three strings at the second fret. Then I just started forcing myself to learn it properly and now it's a breeze. Now I want to learn how to do the G chord with three fingers instead of two. My friend tells me it's easier to switch chords like that.... I dunno
 
I'm still lazy with the E chord and I play it with one finger, muting the A string. ;) Can sort of play it the "right" way, but why waste a finger fretting a redundant note? There are actually so many work-arounds to playing the E chord that you can spend more time learning new ones than learning how to play the traditional one the right way.
 
I experiment a lot with transposing songs to minimize the number of awkward chords in them. I don't mind a couple of knuckle-crunchers per song, but if the whole song revolves around a chord that is really hard to play, I move the key of the tune, looking for a friendlier key to play it in.

THIS SITE is wonderful for quick transposition experiments.
 
I look at it as a challenge. The right chord is the right chord and I'll work at it so that the song sounds like it should. For some transitions that are too awkward I am also not above finding an alternate version of a chord that's easier to hit.

For whatever reason I have trouble with Dm7 (2213). I've got long fingers so Dm7 played as (5210) actually works better for me in some cases.

I'm unlikely to ever become a world class player myself, but it doesn't stop me from pushing myself & learning all I can to be the best I am capable of becoming. What's the point otherwise? But I've never really been much of a dilettante where music or much of anything is concerned.
 
I look at it as a challenge. The right chord is the right chord and I'll work at it so that the song sounds like it should. For some transitions that are too awkward I am also not above finding an alternate version of a chord that's easier to hit.

For whatever reason I have trouble with Dm7 (2213). I've got long fingers so Dm7 played as (5210) actually works better for me in some cases.

I'm unlikely to ever become a world class player myself, but it doesn't stop me from pushing myself & learning all I can to be the best I am capable of becoming. What's the point otherwise? But I've never really been much of a dilettante where music or much of anything is concerned.
Sometimes its not the right chord anyway - just because its in print does not mean there is not something better. I suppose if your happy with how it is fine.

If I was a younger man with the knowledge I have now, I would have lessons and learn how to play, but the whole point for me now is to be as good as I can be for what I want to do - and that's have fun.
 
When I started playing I played songs with easy chords, then when I got the hang of them found songs that had a new chord in them and when i got the hang of that found songs with another new chord, and so on. It's a slow process, but I'm getting there. Now I find that the chords I thought I wouldn't be able to play are easy for me.
Try not to get frustrated, what does it matter if you're having trouble playing some chords, you'll get there in the end.:D
 
Sometimes its not the right chord anyway - just because its in print does not mean there is not something better. I suppose if your happy with how it is fine.
..

Since I spend a lot of time transcribing stuff for our ukulele orchestra from recordings and fixing incorrect internet tabs that folks bring in and going through songbooks, I'm usually pretty confident that I've got the right chord to reflect what the song is supposed to do at that moment. (even if I have to reverse engineer a name for a particular chord based on the finger positions I've worked out that sound correct.) I put time and effort into this and I'm good at it. The structure of whatever arrangement we make of the song will be ours, but the underlying chords start with the original.
I also trust that when Cole Porter calls for an F7+5 he put it there for a reason. You could play something simpler there, but it's going to lack a certain amount of depth in relation to what was intended. So it's well worth it to me to learn it right and it gives me another chord to add to my arsenal when it arises again in another song. (Bm7b5 keeps popping up all over the place for me these days.) I want good enough to play the things I want to play too. And some of those require I learn "difficult" chords. So I do.

You do not.

That's great it works for you. Have a ball.
But please do not scoff at others who feel passionate enough to put a little effort into their playing.
 
...one person insisted with venom that you must PRACTICE and LEARN ALL CHORDS!!!

It was a major breakthrough for me to learn that if you know guitar chords, you already know the uke chords. A uke is a guitar with the two top strings taken off, and with a capo at the 5th fret. So a D chord is a guitar A chord played on the bottom four strings, uke G = guitar D, uke C = guitar G, etc. I learned this from a PDF put together by a friend from the Ovation club:
http://www.roundbackguitarforum.com/workshop/Ukulele-For-Guitarist.pdf

It's easy enough to learn chords on a ukulele, but keeping this in mind helps with uke chords I don't know, and with inversions.
 
Since I spend a lot of time transcribing stuff for our ukulele orchestra from recordings and fixing incorrect internet tabs that folks bring in and going through songbooks, I'm usually pretty confident that I've got the right chord to reflect what the song is supposed to do at that moment. (even if I have to reverse engineer a name for a particular chord based on the finger positions I've worked out that sound correct.) I put time and effort into this and I'm good at it. The structure of whatever arrangement we make of the song will be ours, but the underlying chords start with the original.
I also trust that when Cole Porter calls for an F7+5 he put it there for a reason. You could play something simpler there, but it's going to lack a certain amount of depth in relation to what was intended. So it's well worth it to me to learn it right and it gives me another chord to add to my arsenal when it arises again in another song. (Bm7b5 keeps popping up all over the place for me these days.) I want good enough to play the things I want to play too. And some of those require I learn "difficult" chords. So I do.

You do not.

That's great it works for you. Have a ball.
But please do not scoff at others who feel passionate enough to put a little effort into their playing.

I do not scoff at anyone Sir, so please do not imply that I do.

This thread was started to ask a question if anyone was in the same boat as me (lazy). It is obvious that you are not, in which case I have no problem with that and why should I.

But I hope you respectfully acknowledge that I am a fun player rather than a serious one, so I look and find the easy way if there is one.
 
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Hmmm, yes and no. Yes, I avoid songs with chords I find difficult at the moment. No, I'm not planning on skipping harder chords completely. All the chords I know now were hard for me to begin with, so I figure I'll get the others eventually.

If your happy skipping certain chords, then by all means skip em. I think everyone should play for themselves. If your happy then I'm happy.:)
 
The Bb seemed impossible forever on the uke(baritone and guitar.) After months of random practice on other chords, Bb doesn't seem so hard. You'll get the hang of certain things only after a period of time...and after some practice.

I don't think you can learn something complicated just by working harder. Sometimes it takes a while.

Remember -- Alexander's Rule of Repetitive Motion: Put enough people to work on something odd, and some of them will get pretty good. (This explains the NBA, quilting, curling and ukulele playing.)
 
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