Category: How To Practice

The guitar is admired like no other musical instrument. Listening to and watching talented guitar virtuosos perform amazing feats of dexterity as they make their instrument sing in a way that touches the hearts of their listeners makes us want to emulate the guitarist’s achievement. But this is the glamorous side of guitar playing. When we are pulled out of our everyday selves by musical excellence, our egos want to attract the admiration of crowds of people just like the guitarist does. We could be inspired to be guitarists today, and tomorrow we want to be circus acrobats. Such is the fickleness of the human psyche.

If you learn to play guitar do you get any real and lasting benefits? Is there a lifetime of substantial rewards that lasts beyond the first thrill? Well, yes, and they can be roughly divided up into physical, emotional and mental benefits. A life devoted to the guitar has meaning beyond the extraction of music from an inanimate object.

If you learn to play guitar you are refining motor skills which we all have in a small way. Most people’s motor skills are developed to the point of being able to ride a bike or get dressed in the dark. Learning the guitar enables us to meet challenges of a kind that no other musical instrument can offer. The opportunities to refine your motor skills are endless as you learn more chords and scales, more music which demands instant coordination between the left and the right hand with a control of the fine muscles that no other instrument demands of you.

Of course, nobody can spend an hour or two a day maintaining a relaxed posture while holding a guitar and practicing barre chords without lifting their level of fitness. This aspect of learning guitar may depend on what kind of teacher you have because many amateur guitarists have actually done serious damage by trying to play the guitar with too much tension in their bodies.

You will not believe it unless you try it, but a long guitar practice session enhances your mental capacity. The act of trying to interpret a piece of music on the guitar awakens the parts of our brain that delight in asking questions and solving problems. Once you have settled down to a serious study of guitar music, you will find that organizing your guitar practice, finding time in your day for restringing your guitar and learning new music has taught you how to organize the other sides of your life. That is assuming you do not have a housekeeper.

Now to the emotional benefits of learning to play guitar. The study of any kind of music brings about an emotional change. There is a distinct difference between listening passively to music and trying to play it. If you think of yourself as a not particularly sensitive kind of person, you might be surprised at the shades of feeling you are capable of as you make your own interpretation of a piece of music. It is a whole new game of soldiers when you are experiencing music in separate passages that need to be strung together to make a whole new song or instrumental with your personality stamped all over it.

Today’s video features a guitarist who has obviously taken fullest advantge of the benefits available to guitar students.

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An alarm clock. Discipline.

You need an alarm clock to learn how to play guitar because at present you may not have any discipline. But if you use the alarm clock diligently, you might develop discipline.

Decide on something you want to do but at the moment you cannot. Let us say for the sake of argument, changing from the Am chord to the G7 chord smoothly.

You set the clock for ten minutes. When the alarm goes off, you stop your practice.

Immediately.

Take a break, have a cup of coffee, check your email, whatever.

Now go back to your guitar practice.

The total length of time you practice is up to you but the important thing is to practice in short bursts punctuated by breaks where you can refresh your energy in some way. If you prefer to play for hours at a time, that is fine but ask yourself at the end of each day, “Am I improving on the guitar?” Right now you need to take other people’s advice on how to practice. If you develop some discipiline in this simple way you will gradually find your own direction without having to seek advice from Ricky or Uncle Google or anybody.

Technorati Tags: learn how to play guitar, guitar practice

If we try to work on our guitar playing technique regularly we naturally want to see some improvement in our playing. In fact for many of us out expectations of improvement go way beyond our capacity to learn. Working directly on guitar speed, for instance is futile if we are sitting down and trying to play fast. Focusing on accuracy is the key to lifting the quality of your guitar playing. If you do not heed this bit of advice your efforts to play the guitar with any degree of skill will be severely limited. The aquiring of new motor skills depends on repetition whether you consciously put this fact into practice or not. If you are practicing scales or riffs and chord changes without the required attention to relaxation of the muscles and slow, methodical practice, the resulting sloppiness will show in your playing. Instead of glossing over the mistakes you make during your practice, make your fluffs your friends. Every missed note is a message from your future guitar player telling you to pay more attention to the quality of the music you are bringing into the world. If you continue to ignore these messages your mistakes will become a feature of your guitar playing. Maybe even the main feature.

Here is a video guitar lesson from Justin Guitar dedicated to working on economy of movement.

Technorati Tags: guitar playing technique