Online Guitar Lessons

Make a Game of Your Guitar Practice and Surprise Yourself
 by: Jeremiah Thompson

So you want to be improve your guitar playing?

Well, like any thing, guitar skill progress takes time and practice, but many of us have much difficulty practicing regularly because it is so easy to let other things take priority over our guitar lessons.

First, you need to absolutely make up your mind that you want to improve your guitar playing and then make sure that your progress is truly is a priority for you.

Make a list of the most important things that you need to focus on in your life right now and honestly assess where guitar fits into your list.

Ideally, you want to be engaged in a guitar lesson for at least an hour a day in order to make any significant progress.

However, you may have to conclude that at this point you are not going to be able to devote even an hour a week to the task.

If that is the case, try to spend some casual time reading guitar-related publications or listening to your favorite guitarists to nurture your love of the music. When your priorities change and you have more time, you will then at least still have a strong interest in becoming as good a guitarist as you can. Listening to Eric Clapton or other greats will only kindle your interest and may even cause you to reprioritize your guitar lessons.

Once you see where your guitar practice fits in with the rest of your life, make a true appointment with yourself. Put your practice into your schedule. Get it in your planner or it won’t get done!

Okay, now that you are regularly spending time with your beloved guitar, what should you do?

First, make sure it is quality time. Don’t have the television on or be hanging out with friends. Then, make sure you are working on skills that you need to sharpen.

If you spend time strumming popular solos and cranking up your amplifier, you may have some fun, but you will not improve your skills.

Think about the chords and scales that you struggle with. Grade yourself on them on a scale (no pun intended) of 1 to 10 and then re-evaluate every week or so. Re-grading every practice or guitar lesson is not appropriate because it is unfair to measure progress that frequently.

No one improves in a straight line. You may hit a certain chord great one day and then have two of the strings sound very unclear the next day. However, if you work diligently you will make progress when measured every couple weeks or so.

Do the same thing with scales and even notes depending on your current skill level.

Once you have a way of measuring your progress, you will be inspired to continue with your regular practice regimen and guitar lessons.

As an advanced step, after you have made progress with a certain group of chords and scales, you should find a song you like that uses many of those elements and work on that as a way of applying your improved ability.

This can be very rewarding.

You may even want to start with the song and work backwards, but make sure that you do spend a great deal of time on the fundamentals before you get serious about the song.

The key to all this is regular consistent work and a measurement of results. Achieve this, and you will enjoy your practice time more and more. Challenge yourself to be at a certain grade by a specific time.

Make a game of your practice efforts and you will surprise yourself!

About The Author

Jeremiah Thompson is an amateur guitar player and true lover of the instrument and its rich sounds. He loves writing about the subject and contributing to his website, http://www.seeguitars.com.

jeremiah@seeguitars.com

---

If you want to do some serious guitar picking you need a fairly heavy pick. I recently read a post on a forum where a guy said he uses a dime for speed picking. This might be a trifle extreme but it illustrates how far you can go in the pursuit of individual style. Whatever you choose for a pick, hold it between your index finger and your thumb. That might seem obvious but we need to be on the same page. And let’s get something straight right away – you need to pay attention to how you hold the pick. The sound you get is cleaner if you are holding the pick parallel to the strings. Angling the pick gives a softer attack.

You pick guitar strings with the pointy part of the pick, and the idea is to pick clean and fast. But it takes practice. There are a few different ways of looking at developing picking speed. One school of thought says you keep your wrist rigid, starting the movement from the elbow. You can also just use the index finger and thumb in a circular movement but your body is probably going to want to move from the wrist.

Any mode of picking you actually use will be a mixture of the above methods reflecting your own body’s way of working. Here is a good place to mention pain. Don’t play through it, you will injure yourself. If your wrist or hand or arm hurts – stop. If it hurts when you start again tomorrow, maybe you should see a doctor. It’s best to look after your body and live to pick guitar another day.

For playing fast you need to develop your alternate picking technique. Start with a downstroke and do alternating down and up strokes. Don’t try for speed at this stage, you are just getting your muscles used to the picking movement.

Many guitar players mute the strings that they are not actually playing so no unnecessary sound is picked up. Place the meaty heel of your hand on top of the strings, in front of the bridge. If you are playing metal guitar, you will be going for the chugging sound that some pressure on the strings will give you. If you want to hear the notes ringing while you are playing fast, lessen the pressure of your hand on the strings.

Another consideration for a guitar picker is the dynamics of the sound produced by picking near the neck or near the bridge. You are possibly already aware that you get that Duane Eddy twang by playing close to the bridge, and the sound mellows as you move your picking hand closer to the neck.

Of course you are going to be in need of further exercises for getting your up and down strokes flowing automatically. You can get these from a teacher or from an internet search. For practicing muting and experimenting with different sounds, you should already know some songs you want to fool around with.

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

Tags: guitar lessen, Online guitar