[Beth Hess]

Lonesome –  Any tips on how to quickly move from E to F/C in a half a strum would be appreciated. TX

[Jonathan]

Hey Beth!
So sorry it took me so long to respond to you. I’ve still been setting up the forums and haven’t noticed that anyone had access to them yet! Ha.
But thanks for being the first to post in here, that’s super exciting.

Now, to your question. I’m assuming you’re talking about the song “Lonesome town”, right? In that song, you’re using the Folk pattern, which for beat 1 of each measure you are only plucking the 1st note of the chord. This is helpful, because you don’t actually need to have all your fingers ready in a half a beat. The main fingers that need to be ready are fingers 3 and 4, since finger 3 is going to be on the A string (the 1st note of the chord). That’ll give you an extra beat to get the rest of your fingers down.
But also, I would suggest for practice, since you know this transition is giving you a hard time, practice just this transition, back and forth, from E to F/C and back again. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and just do that over and over again. Don’t even do it with a strum pattern. You can of course strum once for each chord, to make sure your chord sounds clean, but don’t try to also strum a pattern on top of it. Keep your focus on the chords and getting the transition from one clean chord to another.
Let me know how it goes!

You never fail until you quit!

[Beth Hess]

Thx.   Practicing just those two chords back and forth has helped.