Archive for: May 2008

When you decided to become a guitar player you thought it would be fun, right? But you have discovered that the process of learning to play guitar involves climbing a mountain or two. If you have persisted in your efforts to learn guitar you might have just decided to grit your teeth and knuckle down to solid hard work. Hours of it. Hours on end. The reward is in the future. Well, the work is necessary but if there is no fun then much of the work is wasted.
If your aim is to do one hour of guitar practice per day it would be good to focus a little on getting value for money out of all that sweating. One hour’s guitar practice is not one hour’s continuous playing without a break. It is a process of rethinking your aims and constantly renewing your view of the guitar and of yourself. If you are the type of person who has trouble getting down to work, make a set time to practice and make yourself stick to it.
It is true that constant playing makes you a guitarist, but constantly trying to play scales and chords your hands are not ready for just makes you grumpy. If you find yourself thinking about how your speed is not improving or you are just not getting the chord change you have been working on then you need to take a step back and have more fun while you practice.
Maybe you can start by having several things to practice on any given day so that when you get sick of practicing one thing you can move onto something else.
Or you could simply rest for a few minutes after a grueling practice session. An ideal way to break up practice time is to be always making sure your guitar is in tune.
Divide your guitar practice time into portions, say 10 minutes arpeggios, 5 minute tuning break, 15 minutes scales, 5 minutes on a tricky chord change. If it is natural for you to sit down to practice regularly you should spice up your routine as much as you can because your biggest danger is going stale.
Every guitarist should work out a practice regime that helps develop technique, widening repertoire, performing a variety of music, and in getting your songs into your memory.
You need to have an aim or two every time you sit down to practice.
Some goals would be in these areas:
Warming up your hands
Working on technique
Learning new songs
Memorizing songs
Improving technique using music you are already familiar with.
Take time to work on musical interpretation
If you have lessons with a teacher or occasionally play for friends and family, prepare in advance as though you were preparing for a formal performance. You need to see what you need to work on to sound your best.
When you sit down to practice, allow your problems to drop away. Take a holiday from your life.
At least once a week make a point of playing the songs you really enjoy playing. Then find songs or pieces that you dislike or have trouble with.

Technorati Tags: learning to play guitar

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Today we feature a free book of guitar lessons billed as “all you need to start playing guitar”. Well, it certainly goes a long way towards filling that bill. I should mention up front that the free book is an introduction to a series of guitar lesson books that you can buy at the website, but there is no nagging and if the free lessons are anything to go by, they are probably worth the money. The free lessons are navigated by an index of lessons. You click on one of the free guitar lesson links and you are taken to a page you can read plus an mp3 for that lesson if you are comforted by the sound of someone reading to you.
The first two lessons serve as an Introduction To Guitar which simply starts off on the basics as if you came from another planet and did not know what a guitar is. The next two lessons show you how to play the guitar strings and show photographs of how to place your fingers on the fret board for a clear sound.
Next we get a basic explanation of open and bar guitar chords which leads onto a primer on how to read guitar music and where to find notes on the guitar.
After a quick introduction to guitar tab we are shown how to actually play chords. Now we get into the nitty gritty of guitar playing with introductions to alternating bass notes, arpeggios, plucking and your basic chord strumming with a pick.
The lesson on changing chords is particularly good but the significance of the detailed exposition will be lost on most beginners until they learn for themselves that there is no fast way to learn how to change guitar chords. The lessons on chords are capped off with an effective way to learn new chords which could probably benefit a guitarist of almost any level.
Get the free guitar lessons here.

Technorati Tags: free book of guitar lessons, Introduction To Guitar, how to read guitar music

Did you know that learning three chords will let you play practically any song you like? They have nifty Roman numeral labels - I, IV and V7 and are called the primary chords. The reason they are called primary chords is that they are chords that you need to know. If you know the primary chords in the key of C for example, you have the basic knowledge for learning any song in that key. The first chord is the tonic chord. The next is the dominant chord, and the third chord is the subdominant.
Details on the three primary guitar chords are found at torvund.net Three Chord - Trick

Technorati Tags: primary chords