First of all lots of great guitar players depart drastically from the standard way of holding the plectrum. Your hand and arm should be relaxed and you need to have the freedom to place your attention on getting the tone you want from your guitar.

If you have a guitar teacher, you can ask him to watch you play and correct your pick holding if need be. What’s most likely to happen as you gain some experience as a guitar player is that you will adjust the way you hold the plectrum as you get an understanding of how you as an individual want to play.

Here is a detailed video tutorial on how to hold the pick from English guitar teacher, Richard Deyn:

Incoming search terms for the article:

• holding a guitar pick (3)
• holding guitar (2)
• ebooks free guitar richard pick (1)
• how we hold the pick on rhythem guitar (1)
• how do we hold the guitar pick for practising rhythem guitar (1)
• holding the pick (1)
• holding the guitar pick (1)
• holding guitar pick for solos (1)
• guitar pick tutorial (1)
• pick holding (1)

There are lots of exercises that you can do, without your guitar in your hands, that will build up strength in your fingers. Many classical musicians shake their hands energetically just before they start to play. This gets rid of the tension in your hands that accumulates during a day at the office.

There’s a finger strength gadget called the Gripmaster that builds strength and coordination that the hands need for activities like guitar playing. The Gripmaster isolates and strengthens each finger individually for greater hand, wrist and forearm control.

Another finger strengthening exercise is to tap each finger of your left hand on a table. Start with your finger tips resting on the table so your hand looks like a spider. At first the fingers will sound on the table at different volume levels. Tap each finger, varying the order, with the aim of getting equal volume from each finger.

There are also exercises for strengthening fingers that you can do while playing the guitar. Here are some Finger Strengthening Guitar Exercises from Axel’s Blog.

Today’s video shows a very basic finger exercise that you will probably use every day for the rest of your life:

Incoming search terms for the article:

• finger exercises for guitar (10)
• what do guitar player fingers look like (8)
• guitar finger exercises (8)
• acoustic guitar tuning online (7)
• finger exercises for guitar players (5)
• guitar exercises (5)
• free guitar finger exercises (5)
• acoustic guitar finger exercises (4)
• finger exercise for guitar players (3)
• guitar finger strength exercises (3)

Learning to play a number of songs is a great way to lift your level of guitar playing. The basic idea is to learn one song well so that you can play it without rushing but don’t spend weeks and months on it. Learn when to move on. There is a fear that learner guitarists feel that if they stop practising a song they will forget it. The reality is that if you learn a variety of songs and revise them once in a while, your overall guitar playing skills will be much better than the guitar student who won’t move on until he knows a song “perfectly”. Really, when you are just learning guitar, you will not do anything perfectly until you have had some broad experience at playing.

When you start on a new song, it’s a good idea to pick one that helps you learn a new chord or technique, like learning one of the basic barre chord shapes. You can get together a list of songs you want to learn whenever you have a minute to go on the internet and search through the tab archives.

The second thing you need to have in mind when you are getting together a list of guitar songs is playing in public. You can play your songs at local venues like coffeehouses. You will probably need enough songs to fill about ninety minutes. If you think that learning so many songs might take an overly long time, you could probably get away with setting up a music stand in most venues and playing from sheet music.

This video will help you get started on learning simple guitar songs:

Incoming search terms for the article:

• learn to play guitar free (5)
• beginning guitar songs learn to play (2)
• how to play guitar free (2)
• learning to play guitar free (2)
• lern to play popular guitar songs (1)
• play a song on the internet (1)
• play guitar songs (1)
• play guitar to songs (1)
• learn to play guitar for free (1)
• learn how to play guitar free online (1)

Technorati Tags: learn how to play guitar, guitar songs

Once the feeling of strangeness has worn off, you can start hearing the emphasized beats coinciding with the sound of the metronome.

Here is a video from Berklee Music showing how to use the metronome to emphasize the strong beats of the music:

People say, “I don’t have time” or “I don’t have the patience” to learn guitar by practicing slowly. Those things are simply not true. You don’t have the time to NOT practice slowly. You will actually learn faster by getting into the habit of letting your body learn in its own time. In fact, one of the first things you could focus on when you begin to learn guitar is to get used to the natural breaks that occur when you play scales or change chords. If you practice with a metronome, you will become aware of those moments when you are not able to keep in time without rushing or straining. This is because your body does not yet have a series of muscular movements set up to go from one place on the fretboard to another. Not only that, if you calm down and let your hands and arms move at their own pace, your guitar practice will be more enjoyable and you will find yourself looking forward to the times you have set aside in your day to learn guitar.

So when you see a professional guitar player’s hands moving up and down the fretboard at blinding speed, it might inspire you to go and do some practice, but if you try to force your hands to match the speed of a practiced guitarist, you will be working against yourself. Not only do you need to practice slowly but you need to learn HOW to do it and WHY you should do it. And it’s not because somebody has told you it’s a good idea, it’s because you have found out for yourself through trial and error.

The next thing you will need to learn for yourself is the importance of repeating your guitar practice over and over. When you can play something through in time, without stopping, that’s the beginning. Your aim should be to play your piece without thinking. You will be repeating movements no matter what you do, so it’s best to get into the habit of repeating chord changes and guitar scales in a relaxed, intelligent way so that you get the most benefit out of the part of the day you use to learn guitar.

Here is a video on chord changes which is also an illustration of how to practice slowly:

There is often no lead guitar or vocalist on your backing tracks just the backing that you can play lead guitar in front of. Using backing tracks you will be always playing in time and you will find that you are looking forward to your guitar practice because you enjoy playing with a band in your bedroom.

When you have obtained some backing tracks to help you with your guitar practice, start using them right away. And if you find after a week or so that you are beginning to practice without using your backing tracks, make an effort to go back to using them. It’s natural to lose your initial enthusiasm, but it would be a shame to stop using such a valuable tool with so much potential for making you a really good guitar player.

Backing tracks need to be used in conjunction with your planned guitar practice sessions. If you are learning a solo or some licks from a CD or guitar tabs, play them with your backing as soon as you have the material in your memory. You might have to play your solo more slowly but don’t spend any more time than you have to playing new music without using the backing.

Don’t turn your guitar practice time into extended guitar solos. If you have a track of say, six minutes at your disposal, use it to practice licks and short solo breaks, the age of the twenty minute solo is long gone. Also, make use of your backing tracks to improve the basic aspects of your guitar playing like your timing.

Most of us do not make use of our music recorders as much as we should. It is sometimes a shock to hear ourselves play on record. Sometimes the shock is pleasant, sometimes not. It is never a neutral experience and that can lead to us “forgetting” to record our guitar playing. You will be really doing yourself a favor by disciplining yourself to record yourself once a day.

Using free backing tracks is one of the great benefits of modern technology. It used to be that you practiced alone until other friends or band members found the time to get together to jam. With backing tracks you can jam any time you want. Here’s a video that illustrates how you can use backing tracks at home:

Incoming search terms for the article:

• backing tracks guitar free (2)
• backing track to ten guitars (1)
• best free backing tracks (1)
• buy guitar practice tracks online (1)
• Free Backing tracks Ultimate Guitar (1)
• free online backing tracks (1)
• How to make a guitar backing track (1)
• where to buy backing tracks to play electric guitar (1)

Technorati Tags: Guitar backing tracks

Here is an instructional video on guitar improvisation:

A lot of the great improvising guitar players never had much formal musical education but whether or not you accumulate a bunch of theory, when you come to improvising, you forget your musical knowledge and play whatever you have in your pocket. There are many scales, modes and picking patterns you can learn but practicing improvisation can be done any time with a limited amount of resources.

And here is a video of a guitar player improvising on an acoustic guitar:
Jazzy Improv on acoustic guitar

The beginning of practice for improvisation on the guitar is playing without hesitation. Pick the scale you are going to use. If you play over accompaniment tracks, pick the track you will use for your backing. And start playing. When you get stuck and stop playing, take note of it and start playing again. You probably won’t be able to do it right off but if you are alone in your room, there’s no need to worry about what anyone’s going to think, so just keep making noise, keep trying to get better but don’t stop. Try practicing in this way for about fifteen minutes a day for a week. You will be a different guitar player if you make it to the end.

How to hold the guitar is another whole area that needs intensive work if you are going to have years of guitar playing without doing yourself an injury. This is one of many videos on the subject:

It will always be valuable for you to go back to the basic principles behind the physics of guitar playing. So bookmark these videos and keep them for when you feel that you’ve gone stale in your practice.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, How to hold a guitar pick, How to hold the guitar

If we play well onstage that means we have learnt to play automatically. We practice with careful attention but once we know our music we can play it without consciously aiming our attention at what we are doing. For a guitarist, playing and singing involves performing automatic movements and automatic repetition of words and music we have memorized.

This depends on how we practice. We are all familiar with the sensation of having warmed up during a practice session or when we are jamming, and we begin to take some risks. We start to play a little faster than we are really capable of. We try improvising, and maybe playing some stuff we are not entirely familiar with. This is a performance situation where a little “skin of the teeth” stuff enhances your playing.

But that is not the way to practice. When we are practicing we should always aim to be a little slower than we think we can be, keeping some energy in reserve. If we feel that we have warmed up and can let the dog off the leash, that’s natural but we should only be doing that with material we have practiced really well.

So, slow practice is one way to overcome stage fright, trying to duplicate the intensity of when we are in front of an audience is another way. By recording or videoing our playing, we are testing how well we have learnt the music. The slight nervousness we feel in front of the video camera shows up any flaws in our practicing.

One thing that plagues classical guitar players in particular but can be a problem for any player is the anticipation of a difficult maneuver. A rapid change from the first position to the seventh or an awkward scale passage often means excessive slowing down to accommodate the difficulty or, as many amateurs do, play through blindly and hope for the best. This is a symptom of poor preparation and practice. If you practice your piece at a slow enough pace to take all the hard bits into account, the hard bits will become easy. It’s just a matter of our mental attitude.

By practicing slowly we are working within our capabilities, but if our fantasies about impressing people with our guitar playing become the dominant factor when we are preparing for a gig, this could lead to unexpected stage fright. If we are going to impress our audience, it will be with the real technique and musical insight that we have acquired in our practice time. If we let our fantasies rule us, we are setting unreasonably high expectations for ourselves.

When we are onstage we need to let the results of our careful practice show themselves. Start the gig with some material that is not too challenging. If you play your first couple of numbers well, your audience’s appreciation will help you overcome stage fright and with your body warmed up, you will be ready to let loose a little.

Technorati Tags: Stage fright, overcome stage fright

Our bodies are capable of remembering our movements. It’s called muscle memory, and we need to learn how to work with it. Muscle memory helps us drive a car, catch a ball, chew gum and walk at the same time, and practice guitar. But we must be sure in our heads of what we are doing or what we’re about to do. That’s the only way we can teach our bodies. The more we are able to direct our attention on what our bodies are doing, the quicker we can set in motion our muscular memory.

When we practice the guitar we are using many muscles and some of those muscles don’t want to practice guitar. We enlist the cooperation of these muscles by practicing slowly. We can try and relax muscles that we don’t need to play the scales or change the chords, or whatever we are working on at the moment, and use only the amount of muscular tension that we need.

The most helpful reminders to focus our attention are the mistakes that we make during our practice. Our mistakes are the body’s way of telling us to slow down. So, if you find yourself fluffing notes, don’t get all tense and frustrated, just repeat what you have been practicing, only more carefully. If you practice mistakes your body will learn mistakes and it will be hard to unlearn them.

When you practice your guitar you need rest just as much as if you are engaging in some strenuous physical exercise. The longer you practice the more you drain your mind and body of the capacity to learn. If you are able to practice for hours at a time be sure to take five or ten minutes break about every thirty minutes. If you have decided to practice a chord change or scale, don’t just repeat it over and over again. Take breaks of ten or 20 seconds between each repetition. That way you won’t tire yourself so much.

Every scale, chord shape or chord change means corresponding muscular tension. Try and divideyour practice up into small muscular movements. You can do this with any kind of practice, but it’s easier to explain in terms of practicing scales. Instead of playing a scale all the way up or down, try breaking it up into just two or three notes at a time with a small break in between. Try this for a couple of days every time you practice and see if you start to get some benefit from it.

In today’s video Paul Kleff talks about how to make your guitar practice time more efficient and effective and developing guitar technique.

Technorati Tags: practice guitar