While some “bad” habits and unconventional techniques can be the very things that endow us with a unique style, others are the barriers that prevent us from realising our musical ideals.
With this in mind, I’d like to share with you five practical, personally tried and tested ideas to revamp your playing by re-examining the rudiments of how you connect and interact with your instrument.
Mea Culpa
I’m not a great guitarist, and probably never will be. I’m neither a technical wizard, great through sheer application and effort of will, nor an inimitable one-off, endowed with an unfathomably idiosyncratic style. Then again, most of the players I admire aren’t the image of perfection either and, come to that, even many of the “great” players have noticeable flaws: Jimmy Page is famously sloppy, Kirk Hammet has a notoriously iffy vibrato technique…Point is, being a good guitar player means being exciting, interesting, passionate and musical. It doesn’t mean being perfect and, besides, if there really was a one-size-fits-all foolproof recipe for perfection, we’d all be virtuosos.
But don’t quit your practice regimen just yet! Just because you don’t have to be perfect doesn’t mean you don’t need to work on finding and expressing your style, and even if you’re not interested in the traditionally
“technical” disciplines of jazz, classical and shred metal (a weirder trio is hard to imagine!), it doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from borrowing some of their ideas.
So, here we go. No crazy scales, no pythagorean gobbledegook. Guaranteed.
