Category: How To 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

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If you are one of those people who has been playing guitar for ten years but still quakes in fear when somebody asks them to play, then you need to pay close attention. Unless you are really dedicated to learning how to play guitar, you will probably practice faithfully until you reach a point where you stop processing new information. You see, it is not because you are no good, or dumb at guitar; you just need to get familiar with the secret to helping your body learn new movements.

The first step is to set aside for yourself the time necessary to do a profitable amount of guitar practice. If you were able to learn touch typing you might remember that when you first started you made many mistakes. You were probably despairing that you would ever learn, but eventually you started making less and less mistakes. Your persistence yielded rewards.

There is no magic involved here. The first principal in teaching yourself new skills is repetition. You sit down and practice your chord changes for an hour today and do it all again tomorrow and again the day after that until you find that your guitar playing has suddenly become easier just like your typing, just like when you learnt to drive a car and, for that matter, when you learnt to walk. A baby tries to walk and fails day after day. Then what happens? Suddenly he takes his first steps and walks from that time on. No gradual process, no backsliding, just suddenly the skill has been learnt and it stays forever. The degree of excellence is dependent on how much you practice.

What chords do I learn? What scales do I practice to build this skill inside me? It does not matter, any will do. Just do it. But that is not quite the whole deal. There is the matter of HOW we do it. Practice must be done in a certain way. You take care with how you move when you are learning to drive or practice your golf swing. Some martial arts teachers will tell you that speed and force will come only after practicing for a long time with precision and a light touch.

Do not think that you are going into this ordeal alone. Your metronome and guitar tuner will be with you. In order to practice in the right way you need to check often to see if your guitar is in tune. You need to play using the metronome at a slow speed. Try 60 to start. If it is too easy you need to speed the metronome up. Of course it is always easier if you have someone you trust to help you with the discipline. They do not have to be a musician, just somebody who can tell you when you are being too demanding on yourself or when you are letting yourself off.

A word of warning. Do not think that because putting yourself in a room and practicing your guitar is a simple concept that it is an easy thing to do. You will find that you spend too much time looking for your guitar tuner, not stopping to tune when you think of it - there are lots of ways to lose focus, and it is not only you who falls victim to these devils. We are all only human. But we want to be guitar players too!

Technorati Tags: how to play guitar, teaching yourself, chord changes

I used to believe that the main element in learning how to play the guitar is simply practice. It looked like a reasonable assumption to make but later I realized practice is just one of many parts of the process of learning how to play guitar. The elements of the guitar playing recipe I wish to talk about now are patience, planning and persistence. I mostly try to avoid alot of theory and philosophy so I will try to use the qualities of persistence and patience to assist me in finding a direction learning to play the guitar.

Persistence and patience are often described as qualities but too much of any quality is not a good thing. It is simple to visualize patience when exercised too much can lead to absence of motivation and avoiding taking action. Persistence, if taken in too large a dose, leads to rigidity, meaningless repetition of exercises and the triumph of routine over flexibility. So I should not go overboard in rigidly practicing plectrum strokes or arpeggios for a certain time each day or going the other way and only practicing when my muse visits me.

A plan is the secret ingredient in learning to balance qualities of persistence and patience. A plan can be like a parent watching me and reminding me if I move away from my original aim of learning the guitar. If I have a solid understanding of the practical, real-world things that I need to begin to play the guitar my little psychological shortcomings will not hinder my progress. For example, if I want to learn to play songs I need to listen to as many artists as I can in my favorite genre and I also need to learn chords. I need to decide as I go along how to balance learning by observing other guitarists with the discipline of opening a music book and learning three more chords, or familiar chords in new positions.

I have written down my plan and I keep it in a safe place so it is always there to return to. If my memory fails, the written plan is there to remind me. If I do not practice the guitar for six months, my plan is there to help me begin again without delay.

So I write down what I think I need to progress with my guitar playing. I need to keep the guitar tuned so I download a tuner from the internet or bookmark an online guitar tuner. I need to find some sheet music for songs I want to learn to play and some chord charts so that I know where to put my fingers when I am learning these songs. Having all these kinds of resources are an important part of my plan to learn the guitar because having my stuff at my fingertips stops me from wasting time. If I am not learning the guitar from a teacher, I need to set myself an aim to achieve each week. I write down that I will have learnt a song or three new chords by next week. Next, I write down how much time I need to spend on practicing chords, learning theory or listening to music.

So if I have a plan for each week, I look at how well I have succeeded so I can see what my aim for next week will be. Once the initial work is done on creating a plan I can get on with learning to play.

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