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Monday, September 1, 2008

11 Common Ways to Improve Your Guitar Playing

You play guitar for a while, you're on track and then out of nowhere, suddenly, does not seem to matter what you do-you simply can not seem to make any progress!

Here are some tips to help you get your guitar playing back on track.

1. Put the guitar away for a day, week or even one month.

Go for a total and complete abstinence from the guitar. You might even want to take a step further and also to avoid listening to music too.

When taking a break from music, playing guitar and usually will begin to get those strong "gotta play" urges.

When you resume playing guitar you can look with fresh eyes.

2. Learn a song from a different style of music.

Let's say your favorite guitar playing style is rock. Learn to play jazz guitar, singing a blues song, a country song, a reggae track, or a classical guitar, singing, etc.

You can find something in a very different style than usual, you can play or learn something that is similar or related styles.

If your ears are in good condition know the song by ear. Otherwise, find a sheet music for the song.

Bear in mind that a great source for underutilized sheet music is your local library. If you live in a small town visit the nearest major town library. Also remember for college and university libraries.

3. Mathaina guitar theory.

I remember when I started to play guitar. You could not have paid me to learn guitar, theoretically. Everything you wanted to do was to learn my favorite songs and improve my technique. But then I realized that my plays could only go so far and if we do not have idea about what I did.

After more than 25 years of teaching, I can safely say that for most guitarists, the greatest discoveries and rut busters from learning the guitar a theory.

The big issue is that you do not have to go in this hardcore. Simply learning the basics of guitar theory will have a huge impact on your playing.

When you do not know guitar, theoretically, is like wandering around in a huge mansion with the lights off. With knowledge of the theory guitar is like you find and switch on the lights turned!

4. Emphasis on guitar technique.

Another great thing to do to catapult your guitar playing to the next level, is to focus exclusively on your guitar technique.

What you do is set aside either an entire practice session, or an entire week of practice sessions and do nothing but work on technique.

So, we'll work on alternate picking, hammer-ons and pull-offs, tapping, sweep picking, finger-picking exercises and stretching.

We do any work on songs, or anything else-you just practice technique.

After you have made your return to your regular practice routine.

5. String ignore do some exercises.

Still in the field of technology, a big rut-buster is to work for ignoring string exercises. These exercises are more guitarists seem to forget to use.

String skipping exercises will improve your pick-hand technique, the goods-hand technique and coordination.

6. Learn to play horn parts on the guitar.

This is an excellent. I am not talking about learning to reproduce the sound of car horns on guitar, I am talking about learning to play SAX, clarinet, oboe, trumpet or parts on the guitar.

The first thing you will discover, especially if you learn some jazz pieces, is that most lines horn does not sit very well with the guitar. What I mean by that is that they do not sit very well under your fingers. So when you play a Charlie Parker sax solo guitar for you really need to work!

The other cool thing to do with horn sections is to try to match the wording as much as possible. This will give you all kinds of fresh ideas for your playing lead guitar.

7. Learn guitar piece for piano.

You have three choices. You can learn the chords and melody for piano part and to arrange for guitar, or you can create an arrangement whereby you both.

When you do what you do afterwards so-called "chord melody" style. Create a system in which you play two chords and melody together. Classical guitarists do this all the time and you'll hear solo jazz guitarists use this technique.

It is kind of like «one-man-band" approach to guitar playing. It's fun to play and always sounds cool!

8. Learn a piece for violin and guitar cares.

This can also be much fun. Take a Bach, Mozart, Paganini or track and arrange parties for violin guitar. These songs sound really cool for guitar and will have a great technical guitar work.

9. Mathaina guitar new scales.

If you know the scale is only the minor pentatonic, it's time to look at the larger world of guitar scales. As you learn new scales will give your fingers a few new challenges and more importantly will give yourself some new tools for creating killer guitar solo.

When you think about it, a guitar solo is just a melody that uses one or more guitar scales that work well in the evolution of reach.

So if you want more variety in your solo guitar, guitar learn some new scales.

Also, be sure to learn about these multiple guitar fingerings scales. Different scale fingerings will give you a different melodic ideas. The other cool thing is when you know many ways to play the same scale as the guitar, you can connect them together and cover the entire fretboard in the key. This is a way for the creation of these large fretboard-burning licks.

10. Practice guitar scales new ways.

Yes, learning new guitar scales are great, but merely to exercise the front and back are quite boring. Practicing scales in thirds, fourths, fifths and sixths are good. But we must also practice using different scales and more elaborate melodic patterns and sequences.

11. Learn some new guitar strings.

Let's face. In most popular songs, 80% of the parts involved playing guitar chords. This means that the overwhelming majority of your playing, especially if you're in a band, has to do with chords.

So spend some time working on new guitar strings.

Get a good guitar chord book, if you do not already have one, and decide that they can learn new chords 3 each week. This means that you will learn 12 new guitar chords each month. As you can imagine, this would add quickly. In one year we have added 144 new guitar chords in your vocabulary.

The key when you can learn these new guitar strings is that we must find a way to use them.

If you learn a new chord, and therefore have no way to use it, is like learning a new word and never will be able to use it in conversation. In a short period of time will have forgotten the word. The same is true with strings, if you do not use them you'll forget how to play.

Just play and enjoy what your doing and practice hard you'll get better and better in your guitar playing.

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