You learned the chords to a song yesterday and today they’ve vanished from your brain. Sound familiar? Colin has dealt with this exact problem — both in his own playing career and while teaching bands full of students who all learn differently. In this guitar practice lesson, he shares the tricks that actually make chords stick.

Learn Songs in Sections

Don’t try to memorize a whole song at once. Break it into its natural parts — intro, verse, chorus, bridge — and learn each section separately. Colin demonstrates this with “I Hear You Knocking” (the Dave Edmunds version): the intro uses F#, A, and E, and it only happens once. That’s a self-contained chunk you can master before moving on.

For the verse, he works in four-bar phrases. A 12-bar progression splits cleanly into three groups of four bars. Learn the first four bars, then the next four, then the last four. Each phrase is small enough to hold in your head, and once you’ve got all three, the full progression clicks together naturally.

Use the Number System

Instead of remembering chord names, think in numbers. Structuring your practice sessions around this system makes learning faster. In any key, the chords relate to each other as 1, 4, and 5 (plus minor chords). In the key of E, E is 1, A is 4, and B is 5. Colin finds he can remember numbers faster than letter names, especially when learning multiple songs for a gig.

This approach also means you can transpose on the fly. If you know a song is a 1-4-5 progression, you can play it in any key without re-memorizing the chord names. That’s practical knowledge that pays off every time you play with other musicians. Understanding how chord relationships work makes memorization almost automatic.

Write It Out

Building solid finger exercises into your warm-up routine also helps with chord transitions. The physical act of writing a chord chart — even a rough one — embeds the progression in your memory far better than just playing through it. Colin writes out the changes section by section: intro here, verse there, chorus below that. No strum patterns, no tablature, just the chord names (or numbers) in their correct bars.

When he’s transcribing a song for his students, writing out each section forces him to really internalize the structure. Teaching the song to someone else right after you’ve learned it has the same effect — explaining the changes out loud locks them in your head.

Listen and Identify

Here’s one of Colin’s best tricks for maintaining a large repertoire: load up all the songs you need to know on your phone or music player, then listen to them and call out the chord changes as they happen. You can do this in the car, at lunch, or anytime you’re away from your guitar.

Point to each change as it passes. Say the chord name out loud. “That’s a G… there’s the C… back to G… now D.” This mental practice reinforces the song structure without needing your instrument. When you’re maintaining a couple hundred tunes for a gig — four 45-minute sets — this kind of passive review is essential.

Put It All Together

The combination of sectional learning, the number system, written charts, and listening practice covers every learning style. Some people are visual, some are auditory, some need the physical act of writing. Use all of them and the chords will stick.

When you sit down for your next session, try applying these techniques to whatever song you’re working on. Break it into sections, number the chords, write it out, and listen to it away from the guitar. The combination of all four approaches is what makes chords stick.