When it sounds like a dying appliance (it's normal)
Okay. You've got five chords, an anchor trick, and a metronome habit now. Today's lesson isn't a new chord. It's a pep talk with mechanics attached, because this is usually the week people start wondering if they're actually bad at this.
You're not. Let me tell you about the F chord.
I practiced F for six weeks straight. Not a little bit each day, six weeks of actual daily reps, and it sounded like a dying appliance the entire time. A real strangled buzz, every single time, no exceptions. My wife Samantha finally walked by, heard it, and asked if the guitar was broken. It wasn't. It was me. Six weeks in and I still hadn't gotten a clean F.
I tell people this on purpose, because week three or four is exactly when adults quit. You've done the string exercises, you've got Em and Am under your fingers, you can even fumble through the G-C-D loop if you go slow enough. And then something about your changes still sounds like garbage and your brain says "some people just aren't musical" and you put the guitar in the closet.
Here's the actual mechanics of why it sounds bad right now.
What's actually happening
When you change chords fast, three things are going wrong at once, and they're all normal:
Your fingers are landing at slightly different times. One lands right, two are still traveling. For a fraction of a second you've got a half-formed chord, and that's the buzz or the mute you're hearing.
Your fretting hand tension is inconsistent. You clamp hard to make sure the note rings, then you have to release that grip to move, and sometimes you don't release enough or you release too much. Either way, something doesn't sound clean.
Your strum and your fretting hand aren't talking to each other yet. You're still doing math in your head, "next chord is C, ring finger goes here," and while you're doing that math your right hand is still strumming on the beat. So you strum into an unfinished chord shape.
None of that is a talent problem. It's a timing and coordination problem, and timing and coordination are the two things reps fix. Not overnight. Not this week probably. But they fix it, the same way six weeks of ugly reps eventually gave me a clean F.
The fix, practically
A few things that actually move the needle faster than just gritting your teeth through more loops:
Slow down further than feels reasonable. If your dying-appliance noise happens at a normal strumming tempo, drop the metronome down 20 more beats per minute than what you used last lesson. You want the change to happen cleanly, even if it's embarrassingly slow. Speed is the last thing you add, not the first.
Isolate the one change that's worst. Don't loop the whole four-chord progression if G to C is fine but C to D is the mess. Loop just C to D, twenty times, slow, until that specific transition stops buzzing. Then put it back in the loop.
Check which finger is late. Literally watch your hand. Usually it's one finger, not all four, that's dragging behind the others. Once you know which one, you can think about that finger specifically during the change instead of the whole chord.
Don't strum through a bad change to "get through it." If the chord isn't formed yet, pause the strum for a half second, let the shape land, then strum. That's not cheating. That's literally the anchor trick idea again, you're just applying it to timing instead of fingers.
None of this means force through pain, by the way. A little finger soreness from pressing strings, sure, that's normal and it's the whole point of your calluses lesson. But if something in your wrist or hand actually hurts, stop and shake it out. Tension in a beginner's fretting hand is common, real strain from bad form is not something to push through.
Speaking of pushing through things you shouldn't: I calloused my fingertips so hard one winter that I genuinely couldn't feel a hot pan handle anymore and grabbed it bare-handed. Samantha still brings that one up. My point isn't "toughen up," it's the opposite, actually. Watch your hands. Reps are good, ignoring your body isn't.
My opinion here, stated plainly: the boring, ugly, ten-minutes-a-day stretch where it still sounds bad is the actual work. Anything that promises you'll sound clean in a week is lying to you a little. You'll play the chords, badly, and then quit because badly wasn't what you signed up for. Three or four weeks of dying-appliance noise is normal and it is not a sign you should stop.
Before next time: pick your worst single chord change from this week's loop and drill just that one, slow, for five of your ten minutes. Let it stay slow and ugly. That's the assignment.