Category: Guitar Practice Tips

It’s not the following of guitar tips and advice that counts - it’s HOW YOU FOLLOW THEM! If you read somewhere that you should practice playing your guitar for an hour a day, then spend that hour finding what is interesting to you in your practice. Don’t say scales aren’t interesting or that practicing arpeggios is mind-numbing. If you relax and see where you need to begin with your practice then your personal enthusiasm will take over - you’ll see what you need and what you have to do do to get it. Maybe in your practicing of scales you’ll notice you need to work on your upstroke, so then that’s the focus of your practice time irrespective of what scale you’re practicing.
So play your scales and arpeggios, practice new songs, but do it with interest. If you’re not in a particularly enthusiastic mood at the moment spend some of your guitar practice time thinking about what you want to get out of playing the guitar, and what effort you need to put in. Five minutes of guitar practice carried out with some emotion behind it will have more meaning than an hour of drudgery spent waiting for the clock to say you can go now.

Technorati Tags: guitar tips, guitar practice

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Once again we leave our beloved comfort zone to explore how new challenges can help us lift our guitar technique. Maybe you can expand on this idea of finding classical music passages to use in your guitar practice.
“If your looking for great exercises to help your picking, one of the best places to look is in classical music. Some of the greatest composers have written pieces that have some amazing technique building passages in them. Listen to non-guitar music and try to adapt the ideas that you hear in it to guitar. Its probably easiest to start with a somewhat similar instrument, like the violin, as I have done today. I have given you a few to help get you started. The first three are violin parts and the fourth is for organ. For more alternate picking help check out my John Petrucci Alternate Picking Lesson.”
http://guitarteacher.wordpress.com
. . . and from the same blog, a nice lesson on power chords:
“Power chords consist of a root note and its fifth. A fifth is an interval of seven semitones. Since we already defined a chord as three notes played simultaniously, a power chord is technically not a chord because it is only made up a root and a fifth and sometimes the root played an octave higher. So power chords is actually a big misnomer.”
http://guitarteacher.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/an-intro-to-power-chords/

Technorati Tags: guitar technique, guitar practice, Power chords

Make a certain time each day as your guitar practice time. Playing guitar is a physical activity that has a lot in common with sports. Whether or not we play material that needs a great deal of precision, regular practice will keep our hands, legs, arms and backs in practice for guitar playing, so that most of our time can be given to learning new songs or plotting how to impress our friends with our staggering new techniques.
If you can’t practice your guitar every day or at a particular time of day, at least plan for it to be at a time when you are reasonably fresh. If you have a heavy work load or a lot of study to do, throwing in some guitar playing for fifteen minutes or half an hour will help you with your work and study too. The key to fitting in regular practice with a busy life is having your guitar sitting somewhere close by so you don’t need to dig it out of a closet or from under the bed. Keep your pitchpipe handy or a shortcut to your guitar tuner program on your desktop, and any books or tabs you need can be sitting on the floor under the guitar.
If you feel like you don’t know what to practice you probably need some new material. Even beginner guitar players need a little more new stuff than they can reasonably handle, just to keep the juices flowing.
Also you could look at your guitar playing as a collection of techniques you need to practice individually every day. Our left hands should be able to do chord changes smoothly. That means whether or not we feel we need to practice chords, a good habit to get into is to run through the chords to a song or two. If you’re using first position chords to play the song, use barre chords just for the hell of it. Or vice versa. Now play some chords as arpeggios.
If you have never formally studied scales you can still practice them by looking at what notes you play in the melody to a particular song. Find the notes in a couple of positions higher up the guitar neck.
Keep your practice fresh. Playing the same stuff in the same way every day will lead to makes us stale. Throwing in variations to any kind of routine is always good.
Whenever I think of practice routine I’m reminded of the classical guitarist who had to do a stint in the army. He made a list of some pieces that gave him the opportunity to practice all the basic techniques he needed. He was able to run through these pieces every day in the barracks so that he wouldn’t lose his technique.

Technorati Tags: guitar practice, guitar playing