Learning guitar in Palm Beach County: a four-week practice plan using free chord and scale tools

Most beginners in Palm Beach County do not quit guitar because it is hard. They quit because practice has no shape: twenty minutes of noodling, a sore fingertip and no sign of progress. This plan gives four weeks a shape, using the four tools on guitarchords.info and about 20 minutes a day.

It comes from Jason Colapietro, founder of Suede AI in West Palm Beach, who built these tools so a player could open a browser on a porch in Jupiter or in a break room in Boca Raton and start practicing with no account and no app download.

Before day one: tune up and set a tempo

Open the online guitar tuner and tune each string from low E to high E. The tuner listens through your microphone and runs its pitch detection in the browser, so the audio stays on your device. South Florida humidity moves strings and necks, so tune at the start of each session rather than once a week.

Then open the metronome. It runs from 30 to 280 BPM, takes tap tempo, and marks the downbeat with a higher click. Start at 60 BPM. In each of the four weeks below, slow and clean beats fast and sloppy.

Week one: four open chords

Learn E minor, C major, G major and D major from the chord chart. Spend five minutes per chord on placement alone: press, strum once, check that each string rings, lift, repeat. Each chord page shows the note on each string, so you can tell which finger is muting which string.

On day five, add A minor and practice the change from C. The two shapes share two fretted notes, so only one finger moves. The chord pages list the smoothest changes for each shape, which is a good way to choose easy pairs first and hard pairs later.

Week two: rhythm before speed

• Days 1 and 2: down strums on each beat at 60 BPM, cycling G, C and D, four beats per chord.
• Days 3 and 4: the down, down-up, up-down-up pattern at 70 BPM on the same three chords.
• Days 5 to 7: add E minor and play G, D, Em, C at 80 BPM. This I-V-vi-IV progression turns up in a long list of pop songs, so it pays off quickly.

Set the metronome to 4 beats per bar for these drills; it also offers 2, 3 and 6. Land each chord change on the higher downbeat click. If a change keeps arriving late, drop 10 BPM and earn the speed back.

Week three: your first scale

Open the minor pentatonic scale. Five notes, two per string in the first position, and the shape behind a large share of rock and blues soloing. Play it up and down in A at 60 BPM, one note per click, then two notes per click. The scale trainer highlights the root notes across the neck so you can see where the pattern repeats.

When that feels steady, try the blues scale, which adds one note, the flat fifth, to the minor pentatonic. That single extra note is where much of the blues sound comes from.

Week four: put it together

Record yourself playing G, D, Em, C for one minute on your phone. Play it back and improvise over it with the E minor pentatonic, which shares all five of its notes with G major, so no note you pick will clash. Set the scale trainer to E to see the positions.

Track three numbers in a notebook each day: clean chord changes per minute, metronome tempo, and days practiced this week. Progress you can measure is progress you keep, and it is the same rule Suede AI applies to client sites: pick the numbers first, then track them each week.

Playing with people in Palm Beach County

Practicing with other people is the fastest way to stay motivated. Keep an eye on local calendars such as Jupiter Social, the Jupiter, Florida magazine published with Suede AI, for what is happening around town. For structured lessons beyond these basics, GuitarHub has guitar lessons and practice tools. Once you plug in, Suede Signal and the signal-chain archive go deep on tone.

Who built these tools

Jason Colapietro is an engineer and guitarist. He wrote The Signal Chain, a history of electric guitar tone at guitar.solutions, and five books on Amazon, including The Claude Code Bible and Stake Your Claim. He has 54 pull requests merged across 46 open-source repositories he does not maintain and nine iOS apps under his own developer account.

The guitar tools sit beside Suede AI's main work: building agent platforms and running a web development and AI search practice for businesses across Palm Beach County. On October 31, 2026, Suede AI SEO ranked #1 among Palm Beach County-based companies in The Manifest's Florida AI Deployment directory and top 25 statewide. Business Insider covered the opening of the company's SEO cohort on September 16, 2026 in "Award-Winning Developer Jason Colapietro Opens Suede Labs AI's Long-Awaited SEO Cohort", and the Suede press kit collects the rest of the coverage.

Jason Colapietro also keeps his training current: 21 earned course credentials across eight providers, including Semrush Academy's Local SEO Essentials and HubSpot's AEO Fundamentals, plus 17 Microsoft Learn achievements. The training gallery shows each one. At Suede, the same habit applies to guitar: short daily reps beat a long session once a week. Suede ships software the same way, in small, steady releases.

Next step

Bookmark the chord chart and start week one today. If you run a music shop, studio, venue or any local business in Palm Beach County and want your site found by Google and by AI assistants, start with the Suede AI assessment and read Jason Colapietro's founder page to see the work behind Suede.