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5 easy tips for beginners and intermediate players to help you guitar playing advance faster
There are a lot of ways to play the guitar, and any number of teachers all with different approaches. This lesson is essential 5 tips that I have used to help push my guitar playing forwards that have worked for me, and that I feel will work for you no matter what style of music you are playing.
Tip number 1: When you are starting off, use familiar music as a guide
It doesn’t matter what technique you are using, you will need an example of it to help you realize what you are actually aiming for otherwise you will be flying blind. Say for example you want to get you finger-picking technique to become much smoother and crisper so that you can pull off some more complex licks using finger picking: the guy to start with would be Mark Knopfler formerly of the band Dire Straits, who uses finger-picking all the time. The tracks like, “money for nothing” or “Sultans of swing” have some very good guitar playing on them. Listen to them and try to get you playing to sound as similar to that as possible; after you’ve done this you will have learnt some of the tricks that Mark Knopfler used and will be able to take them pretty much wherever you want them to go. This will work no matter which guitarist you use as a guide; really dig deep into what they’re doing, memorize their style and be attempting to copy it you will be learning the tricks they know. Be sure to develop your own style by looking at loads of guitarists and looking closely at as many of their tricks as possible, giving you much more room to work.
Tip number 2: Sometimes your fingers aren’t the problem
If your guitar is nothing like what somebody else is using, and your amp is nothing like what somebody else is using, then it will be no surprise to find out that that you do not sound like somebody else. Different people have their equipment set up to different degrees and all have their own preferences. If you are not happy with what you are getting then change the setting son your equipment until you are happy, or if you simply can’t get the sound you’re after, you may want to change some of your equipment. Be careful though, as sometimes the problem can simply be in the connecting cables, not the amps, pedals or guitar. Check those first and you might save yourself a couple hundred of pounds.
Tip number 3: Don’t speed things up to quickly or you’ll crash
One of the most common mistakes I find in my students is that they want to play fast, but simply don’t have the co-ordination in their fingers to do so yet. The reason that a lot of guitarists can play fast is that they have played at a reasonable pace to allow their fingers to memorize the fret-board, and then they’ve slowly sped their playing up. They always try to push past their limit while they’re practicing, but slow things down until they can play it perfectly, then slowly speed it up again so that they still have the accuracy when they are playing quickly. This is often the main difference between a good guitar player and a bad one; the good players start slow and accelerate, the bad ones go too far too fast and simply crash fist-first into their own fingers.
Tip number 4: Never stop practicing any technique
Let’s say you have practiced alternate picking a lot and you’ve gotten pretty good at it, but you want to learn how to use tapping. Does that mean you should stop using alternate picking until you’re good at tapping? No, quite the opposite in fact. Keep pushing your alternate picking as it will feel like you’ve accomplished something: learning a new technique from scratch will be frustrating and you’ll need all the confidence in yourself possible if you are to succeed at it. Trying to work tapping in along with you alternate picking will also be a good idea as you fingers will be doing something familiar to them while trying to learn tapping, making it that much simpler in the long run as there is some common ground there. Keep learning new things, but never forget your old tricks, as they’re most likely the one’s you’ll need most of all.
Tip number 5: Do the best you can to listen to as many different styles of music as possible
All of the great players are the guys that have looked at hundreds of players over the years and learnt from every single one of them. They’ve gathered the experience that all of the other players have also built up and ended up literally redoubling their abilities by doing so. The whole seven string craze in heavy metal was actually sparked off by guitarists like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani commissioning seven string guitars to open up more notes on the fret-board; but these metal bands sound nothing like Vai or Satriani, because they’ve taken it a different route. There are going to be techniques used in heavy metal that blues guitarists won’t normally use, and there will be tricks in reggae that classical guitarists won’t even know about, and that’s because they simply have had to play in a completely different way, so will have a different way of thinking about music as well. If you steal ideas from one person it’s theft, but if you steal ideas from everyone then it’s researchJ. Reggae players use slap, and metal players can tap, but while classical guitarists pluck, all you’ll need is some luck.
I hope that this lesson has helped some of you guys and girls out there.
Take care and I’ll see you next time!
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