“Clocks” - Coldplay

An easier one this week! Perhaps for someone who has been playing for a couple of months.

To most efficiently play this piece, use my fingerings and follow what I say in the score, “Release pressure but keep 3 and 2 on strings to slide between D and Am.” This technique is known as using a guide finger, where instead of releasing all of our fingers and building the Am from scratch when coming from the D chord, we can keep two of our fingers on the string and simply shift them back two frets, thus only requiring us to:
-lift 1
-shift
-put down 4

instead of:

-lift 3, 1, 2
-shift
-put down 3, 4, 2.

This may be trickier in the short term (especially using our 4 for the Am), but the speed and accuracy potential for this fingering is much higher in the long run!

As a general principle: building chords from scratch takes a lot of time. So between any two chords, always be looking if there are:
—Any shared notes we can stay on (known as an anchor finger, for example we only need to move the 3rd finger between a C and Am!), or
—Nearby notes on the same string that we can slide along the string to using a guide finger.

~~~

For RH, this piece is good as both a pick and fingerstyle study!