This question came to me from Reddit;
“I’m learning B6sus right now. Do you think learning a bunch of parts of songs is a good idea so you learn a bunch of different chord changes, or is learning whole songs better and just working on them until you can play the same chords changes from those few songs at a decent speed?”
I’f you’re in the early stages of playing, I think learning a couple of songs all the way through would be better than learning lots of short parts to different songs. You’ll need something to give you that bit of satisfaction that you can play a song from start to finish. You’ll likely be using the chords you’re perfecting in those songs with other songs you’ll be learning later on.
If you’ve been playing a bit longer, I still think the best thing to do would be learn the song all the way through; but you’ll probably be learning songs that are more challenging, and learning extended chords and the like. Don’t fall into the trap of just learning that chord in isolation. When you are learning a chord you need to get the change from other chords to that chord too, so make sure you’re spending time on the chords around it as well, practising it as a sequence. You might need to spend more time on that short part of the song than the rest of the song to get your fingers around it. If you are juggling lots of songs at the same time, it could get a bit fragmented, so i’d keep the number of songs at a low number, but work to get them consistent all the way though.