To accompany my last post on beginner guitar, this blog will touch base
on what beginners should do before picking up the guitar. These are some of the
things that I have done myself and learned from others through out many years
of playing the guitar and playing with other musicians. This tips will surely improve your experience as a guitar or musician.
- Be prepared to practice. Do some stretching exercises. Relax; take a few deep breaths before you play. Getting in the habit of stretching reduces overuse injuries like tendinitis and back stiffness from sitting.
- Get an electric tuner at first. Then learn how to tune without it.
- Practice simple songs. Playing scales, and exercises get boring real fast when you don’t have a reason to practice and improve.
- Want to build calluses fast? Bends, hammer-ons/hammer-offs, vibrato outta do the trick!
- Tired, stressed, finding it hard to concentrate and retain info? Don’t try to learn new things when you’re tense. Also sleeping on a problem or difficult technique helps. Parts of your brain actually grow when learning an instrument. Take 15 minutes before bed, to go over any material that you are learning. Don’t worry about playing it perfectly just go through it once. Even doing this in your head without a guitar helps.
- Plan ahead. Get a beverage, ashtray (if you smoke), fan, asthma inhaler, pez dispenser, whatever creature comforts that could distract you from practicing.
- Talk to other guitar players. Lots of people play guitar. Tell people you meet that you want to learn to play the guitar better; you’ll be surprised how happy people are to share their knowledge. Jam with others every chance you get and try to pay as much attention to what the other jammers are playing.
- Don’t expect miracles, it takes years to develop the confidence to play with a group in front of an audience. Creating a unique style and “mastering” the instrument usually takes much longer.
- Practice visualization. When not physically playing guitar, close your eyes and imagine playing scales, songs, chords, tuning, holding the guitar correctly, hearing the strings and the relationships of notes.
- Warm-down too, especially if you can feel your hands straining from a long session. Musicians put a lot of stress on their hands and most people don’t think about doing stretching exercises until they feel discomfort
What are some of tips or techniques that you
guys practice? Comment below!
I think one of the things that helped me learn how to play guitar better was to play with other people, like you suggest. I would play with friends of mine just for fun, but would end up learning new chords that I hadn't played before. I would then work those into progressions and make songs out of them, however primitive they were in the beginning stages. That is one piece of advice that I have for people, Even if you only know three or four chords, write songs with those chords, experiment with different progressions and melodies to go on top of them. If you are looking to build up your song writing chops, this is a great method to use when learning guitar. While a lot of people go straight to trying to learn other people's songs, I suggest you just write your own. I didn't learn a single cover song until years after I had started playing. Have fun writing your own stuff, learn new chords and create new music.Good post Edward, there are some good tips here.
ReplyDeleteAnother excellent post Ed! I found that all your tips were spot on and would definitely help people starting off at learning how to paly guitar. I liked the fact that you mention that they should learn how to tune the guitar without a tuner. That is a skill that comes in handy to more experienced guitar players especially when your jamming and your guitar slowly gets out of tune over time. It’s much faster to tune it by ear using other strings as your reference rather than pulling out your tuner and plugging your guitar in which would kill the jam session.
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