Use a Metronome To Improve Your Technique, Speed, Control & Accuracy

If your guitar playing is nowhere near the level that you wish it could be at there could be a variety of reasons. There are a number of skills and techniques that you must master in order to become a great musician. The focus of this article will be on technique. There is no substitute for technique when it comes to conveying your creative vision to others. You can be a brilliant musical, but if you do not have the ability to get your music out of your instrument, it will be next to impossible to express yourself musically in the way that you want to. Technique alone, like any other musical factor, is not the most significant piece of the musical puzzle, but without technique, it is impossible to play what you really want to hear.

Most musicians will agree that a metronome is a valuable tool for developing both control and accuracy on your instrument, but many guitarists do not know how to get the most out of using a metronome. I am repeatedly asked, “How do I use a metronome to develop more speed?” In this article I will address that question. Keep in mind that the approach to practicing your guitar that I describe here should be incorporated into your practice time and balanced out by all of the other musical elements. You want to make certain that all of the musical abilities that are pertinent to you to achieving your goals as a musician are constantly being improved upon.

One of the most asked questions concerning the use of a metronome is “what tempo should I begin with?” The answer to that question all depends on your present level of skill as a guitarist, the particular exercises and technique you are working on, and whether or not you are playing 8th note triplets or straight 8th notes. If your are playing 8th note triplets you will have to set your metronome to a slower speed then if you were playing straight 8th notes, because if you play 8th note triplets you have to play three notes for every click of the metronome. Where as if you were playing straight 8th notes you would only play two notes for every click of the metronome.

Before you begin to incorporate a metronome into your practice you should make a detailed list of the techniques and problem areas of your guitar playing that you wish to improve upon, and write down next to them the goals that you want to achieve concerning speed. Next you will want to evaluate how fast you can play a specific technique comfortably at. Write down the results, all of these things will help you to evaluate your present skills and show you were you must improve before you can play at the level that you wish to play at. Once you understand your present playing abilities and the exact technical challenges that you are facing, overcoming them will be that much easier. A

Purchasing Your First Guitar What You Need To Know

For many of you that are thinking about learning how to play the guitar, buying your first guitar can be confusing; there are so many options available to us that it can be down right frustrating. When purchasing a new guitar even advanced guitarists have trouble deciding on what they want or need. By following a few suggestions, you can make the whole process of buying a guitar that much easier.

The most important aspect of buying a guitar is to know what type of sound you are after. Certain guitars are better suited to a specific style of music; some guitars are specifically built to play jazz, blues, rock, or classical music, so before you buy your first guitar you must decide which style of guitar is right for the type of music that you altimetry want to play.

There are basically four types of guitars:

The electric guitar is possibly the most frequently played guitar in both rock and pop bands. Electric guitars are typically manufactured with a body that is solid. In order to get the most out of an electric guitar you will need an amplifier.

The acoustic guitar has a body that is hollow and uses wound steel strings to create the sound. You do not need an amplifier when playing an acoustic guitar.

There is the acoustic electric guitar, which is an acoustic guitar that has a pickup built into it. The acoustic electric guitar can be played with or without an amplifier.

Finally there is the classical guitar, which is one of the oldest types of guitars that were first contracted in its present day form in the 19th century Spain. A classical guitar uses guitar strings that are made out of nylon.

You can also buy guitars in various sizes. You can buy a guitar that is three quarter size and half size these are great for children. When you first begin to learn how to play the guitar it can be a tiny bit painful on the fingertips. Electric guitars and nylon strung guitars make it a lot easier on the fingertips.

The Proper Way To Tune Your Guitar - Keeping Your Guitar In Tune

Many new guitarist and some advanced players have trouble playing and keeping their guitar in tune. Here I will list a few of the more common mistakes and how to solve them.

Once you have strung your guitar with new strings you must stretch them before tuning to pitch. I normally hold down the strings at the 24th fret with my left hand and use my right hand to pull the strings away from the body of the guitar. You don’t have to pull to hard a few good tugs will do. Tune to pitch and then stretch them one more time and tune up again.

When a guitar string goes out of tune it is always better to lower it below the desired pitch, give it a firm pull and then tune the string up to the correct pitch.

I recommend that you buy a good guitar tuner that runs on batteries or an adapter. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get a quality tuner that will stand up to some abuse while traveling to jam sessions and gigs. My personal favorites are a Korg tuner or Boss tuner; both Korg and Boss have affordable guitar tuners that work great.

Keep in mind that if your guitar is equipped with a tremolo bridge each string you tune will drop down in pitch as you tune up the adjacent string, therefore you should over tune your guitar. Over tuning your guitar simply means that you should tune your low E string up to an F this way by the time you are done tuning your guitar your low E string will drop down in pitch to an E. With a little bit of time you will get the feel for how much you should over tune each guitar sting until it become second nature.

I f you are playing in a band you should always tune your guitar to the same pitch. The standard pitch is A 440, but some guitarist like to tune down to 430 or even 420. A lot of Heavy Metal Bands tune down to get a heavier sound. The main point is that if you practice on a guitar that is tuned to 430 and then you play a gig with a band that tunes to A 440, every thing will sound very different, your singer may have problems hitting the notes that she or he did during practice, your solos will probably sound wrong, because everything is now a half step higher in pitch. To make thing easy on you pick a pitch that you like and stay with it when you practice and play at gigs.

 http://www.riffsnstrings.com/guitar_tips/tips_for_tuning_your_guitar.htm

10 Tips For Playing An Acoustic Guitar Live

Stand out from the rest of the open mic crowd...

It's essential reading material for anyone who owns an acoustic guitar, but if you have already made the jump into the world of live performance, here are 10 tips for playing an acoustic live that will make you stand out from the rest of the open mic crowd:

1. Be nice to the sound engineer

The nice man or lady on the desk has The Power, so always be polite and respectful, even if they are treating you like a total amoeba. Learn their name, use it, and thank them before you leave.

2. Put your tuner on the floor

As well being in tune (hooray!), your floor tuner will also enable you to mute the guitar when you're mumbling between songs [Oh, and don't mumble between songs]. It might be a separate unit, or built into your floor preamp/effects unit.

3. Buy a new battery

Yes, they're ridiculously expensive, but that battery in your guitar needs to be fresh to provide signal. Change it (or them) regularly and always have a spare in your case/gigbag. Anything less is amateur night.

4. Stand up!

Unless you're famous enough to not have to and/or you're on a high enough stage where people can see you, stand up while playing. Your body is more open, you'll be more animated to look at and if you sing, the air has a better chance of coming out.

5. Bust the 'back

Your guitar may have a manual notch filter on the preamp, which is there primarily to fight feedback.

Slide Guitar For Beginners

I’m not really an expert on slide guitar, so the following stuff is just for beginners. Slide guitar is an essential part of the Blues, I had to start with it. Duane Allman’s playing on “Layla and other assorted love songs” just blew me away, the same did EC unplugged. More than any other guitar technique it depends on the right feeling. The basics can be learned within a day, but to master it you need a long time.

Most slide guitar instructions start like “and now we use the open xyz tuning”. That means you can forget what you know about the fretboard and forget both your left and right hand techniques. You have to learn everything new. To avoid this, I’ll first explain slide guitar on standard tuning, so all you need is a slide. Open tunings (see below) give a different sound and have their advantages, but they are not better in every case. The late Muddy Waters for example played in standard tuning, also Duane and EC on some songs. Open tuning is often used for Delta Blues on acoustic guitars, because you need the bass strings in correct tuning. For soloing on electric guitars it’s not that important, so you can play in standard tuning. However, you have to damp some strings, which is usually done with the picking hand. That’s why most slide players prefer fingerstyle. Damping is more important in standard tuning, because you get dissonant intervals when the strings with all their overtones ring out.

The Guitar

You can use both acoustic and electric guitars, as long as they don’t have nylon strings. If you want to play much slide guitar, prepare a guitar just for this job. That means using heavier strings (no “super slinky”…) and a high action (distance of the strings to the fretboard). If you have an extra guitar only for slide, you can also try out the open tunings. If you have only one and play sometimes slide or want to switch between slide and normal playing, use the standard tuning.
Resonator guitars (i.e. a Dobro) are great for acoustic slide guitar, they give a loud, metallic “Delta Blues” tone due to the metal cones build in.

The advantage of slide guitar is that you can play it on old guitars with worn-out fretboards or even cheap guitars with bad adjusted frets. You don’t need the frets!

Fluff from Guitarist Facts Chooses PreSonus Interfaces to Bring the Heavy

Hello, my name is Ryan, but my friends call me “Fluff.” I make guitar-related gear demos on YouTube in my home studio for companies all over the world. Pickups, speakers, guitars, pedals, microphones, you name it. I also produce the occasional record and re-amp guitars for rock albums, and record about five days a week. For all of this work, I rely exclusively on couple of pieces PreSonus gear that I simply would be lost without.

I should probably mention that I try to capture every kind of guitar tone, from brutal to chiming. In order to produce a wide array of tones, I need an interface that offers flexible signal routing, low latency and high-quality instrument inputs, as well as low noise on the outputs. The PreSonus FireStudio Project is

Guitar History – Five Interesting Historical Facts

Five things that you may not know about the guitar and its history

The guitar, as we know it today, is perhaps the most popular modern instrument. It is perhaps the versatility, and range of available today that has seen it become the central instrument in the vast majority of popular music. You may be far less familiar with its history, however. It’s far longer, and far more interesting than you might think.
Here are five interesting facts about the guitar, which you may not know…

Back to Basics - Learn How To Play Guitar

So you want to learn how to play guitar do you? Well congratulations, because in my ever so humble opinion, learning to play the guitar is among the most rewarding things that you can learn. The goal of this article is not to turn you into some kind of overnight rock star, but rather to give you a bit of an introduction to the guitar, give you a couple chords to work on to get started.
But first… a question I come across all too frequently:

Can I Learn How To Play Guitar?

I had the good fortune of learning guitar when I was a teenager; however I’ve found that there are many people out there who are much further along in life, and are now wondering if it is even possible for them to learn at their age.
I’d like to answer that with a resounding YES!

YES! It is possible for you to learn to play guitar, regardless of your age. The oldest student of mine that I’ve heard from was 93… just starting to learn how to play guitar, and LOVING IT! The biggest

Using Accents In Your Guitar Strumming

This lesson is going to take a look at adding accents to your strumming patterns. To do this we will take a look at a simple strumming pattern that will uses some basic accents. Throwing accents into your strumming patterns can help make your rhythm guitar playing much more expressive, dynamic and interesting.

When you accent a strum you are basically just playing that particular down or upstroke a bit harder than all of the other strums in the pattern. Accented notes are usually indicated by a little arrowhead symbol right below the notes. This may seem like an overly simple topic but I think that a lot of players underestimate the creative power of using accents in their playing.

Let’s take a look at a simple example to get the idea of how to start using accents in our strumming patterns. Play a simple sixteenth note strumming pattern with the “and” of each beat accented. You would count the strumming pattern like this “1 y and a 2 y and a 3 y and a 4 y and a”.  When you strum the “and” of each beat just dig in a little more and hit the strings harder in order to accent those strums. Make sure to use alternating down and upstrokes.

This example is pretty simple but it does a good job of getting the idea of using accents across nicely. Accents are a simple but often overlooked way to make your strumming patters more interesting and dynamic. When you are coming up with your own strumming patterns, or learning new ones from your favorite songs, don’t forget that you can kick your self-expression up a serious notch simply by using a few accents here and there. If you are playing with other musicians make sure to keep an ear out for what they are playing. The accents that other players use will often dictate the accents that you should use in your playing.

http://www.taylorguitars.com/blog/lessons-tips/using-accents-your-guitar-strumming-nate-savage

Developing Your Guitar Strumming Timing

You don’t have to be the world’s greatest strummer to make great sounding music. In fact, if you can play a simple strumming pattern solid and in time it will make you sound like a real pro. In this lesson on strumming we are going to take a look at a simple exercise that will help you develop your overall sense of timing.

If you have a metronome, set it to 100 bpm. If you don’t have a metronome you can simply put on one of your favorite tunes; most songs are recorded with metronomes nowadays so it’s pretty safe. Now, choose any chord you like and strum straight quarter notes to the beat. Remember to alternate down and upstrokes. Play the quarter note strumming pattern for four bars or so. Once you have strummed several bars of quarter notes, switch to eighth notes for four more bars. Move on to eighth note triplet strumming for the next four bars. Kick it up one more notch by playing sixteenth note strumming for four more bars. Work your way back down all the way from sixteenth notes, to eighth note triplets, to eighth notes, and finally back to quarter notes.

I actually stole this exercise from a drummer friend of mine and let me tell you, this is a great way to help you develop your strumming and overall sense of time. This exercise really doesn’t take long to do and it is very effective. The first time you try this exercise you will probably immediately notice how good, or not so good, your timing really is. Don’t be discouraged if you timing isn’t so great at first. A little consistent practice with this exercise works wonders.

http://www.taylorguitars.com/blog/developing-your-guitar-strumming-timing-nate-savage

Improve Your Guitar's Tone For Better Performance

1 Pick Out a Winner

Many underestimate just how much their choice of pick affects their tone. Not so with jazz legend Jimi Hall, who carries a pocket full of them in different gauges: light ones for strumming, heavier ones for single note picking. Indeed, switching from a medium to a heavy pick, while requiring an adjustment of technique, can do as much as to thicken your tone as installing a humbucker in the place of a single-coil pickup.  (Meanwhile, opting for a light-gauge pick on a strummed acoustic in a band setting well help the part sit better in the mix.) And you can't complain about the cost-there's no cheaper way to change your tone.

2 String for Your Style

Strings come in flavors as well as gauges. If you're seeking a classic jazz sound, flat-or half-rounds will get you close to it without to spring for an arch-top.  And if you want to sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan, .009s ain't going to cut it-try using at least .011s. You'll also want to tune down a half step, not only to further deepen your tone but also to ease the added string tension that come with bumping up your gauge.

3 Learn to Unwind

If you play really loud or with gobs of gain, stay away from over wound pickups-they'll only muddy your sound. A lower-output pickup, on the other hand, will help maintain clarity while the volume and gain, or both, supply all the girth and sustain you need. The greatest rock tones of all time-including Eddie Van Halen's "brown" sound were created with relatively weak pickups.

4 Go Wireless

In other words practice without plugging in. The reason being, you want to make sure you're not using the mask of high gain to cover sloppy or uneven playing. Try to get the best sound possible out of your instrument before you plug in, with just your fingers, and the rest will follow.

5 Speaker Up

Perhaps you like the way your old combo feels when you play, but just aren't crazy about its tone. Well, before you trade it in for a new one, first consider changing its speakers. A more efficient speaker model can make a huge difference: in addition to taming nasty high end or beefing up the lows, it can actually make your amp louder.

15 Guitar Tips for Non-Guitarists

When professional musicians set aside time to practice or take lessons, it is usually on their primary instrument. But in the world of the working musician, doubling on another instrument every once in a while is common, and there’s few instruments more common than the guitar. I’ve watched many talented musicians pick up the guitar and struggle to get comfortable with the instrument. Because of it’s popularity (and now video games with guitar-shaped controllers), a lot of people think the guitar is an easy instrument to just pick up and play, but I’m afraid that’s not the case. Perhaps it’s the guitar teacher inside of me, or the fact my friends often ask for pointers, but here are the most common guitar tips I give to non-guitarists starting to play guitar.

Holding the Guitar

Whether sitting or standing and using a strap, the guitar should be in roughly the same position. Despite what you see some guitarists in rock bands doing, the guitar is much harder to play when it’s hanging at your knees. Consider the type of music coming out of that guitar before you model your technique after the person holding it!
Note: This article will assume you play the guitar right handed, meaning your left hand pushes down on the strings and your right hand holds the pick or plucks the strings.
Every beginner’s guide to the guitar is going to start out telling you how to hold the instrument. My general advice is to first pretend that you are holding a guitar and pay attention to where your hands, wrists, elbows and arms line up with your body. The guitar should rest comfortably within the natural posture of your body. If it feels wrong, it’s probably wrong.
Tip: Sit down in a comfortable chair, sitting up straight with your shoulders in line with your hips and your knees straight in front of you, relaxed so they are slightly open. Let your left hand hang at your side, completely relaxed. Now bend at the elbow, raise your hand, and rotate your wrist so that your palm is facing nearly up. Your left hand should be almost over your left knee. There should be a slight curve to your fingers and thumb. The neck of the guitar should pass through your hand in this position comfortably. If you were to look down at yourself from a birds-eye view, the guitar will be at an angle, only touching your right leg and the right side of your stomach.
The exact position of your right arm will vary based on the size of the guitar and guitarist. The only advice I can give without seeing you hold the guitar in person is make sure you are not contorting your shoulder or elbow to reach over the top of the guitar. This is especially true for smaller body types playing larger acoustic guitars. To compensate, bring your left elbow forward, pushing the neck a little further from your body so the body of the guitar pivots back under your arm a little more. You’ll have to get used to not being able to see all the strings when you look down.

Session Guitar: 10 Life-Saving Soloing Tips

Hi, gang!

Seventy percent of my time as a session guitarist is spent soloing and/or coming up with parts. These can also be considered mini solos or licks. Or, as we call them from a songwriting POV, hooks. A memorable little snippet that repeats through the song. Or maybe just a part to wake listeners up during the second verse.
Now, how do I come up with something out of nothing? I rarely get to hear the song before I am called to play on it. I like that word "play." That's what I am doing. Playing around with various ideas. No one expects instant magic, but it has happened. Sometimes it's quick and easy, and sometimes it's like pulling teeth. You just never know. So how do I do it? Where do the ideas come from?

One word: EXPERIENCE.

Let's remember one thing right off the bat. When a person is hired to play, they are usually hired because the person who did the hiring has heard them play already. There is usually a sense of confidence. When these jobs come in the mail, I try to send back several solos and parts. Give more than is asked of me. Now how do I do it.

There are several tried-and true-methods I call upon to get me started. Here's a brief list of my top 10 life savers!

01. I SING THE SOLO FIRST. 

We guitarist use our hands. We fall into patterns. Now sometimes that's a good thing. But if you want to be original, sing it. It takes away your finger patterns and muscle memory and forces you into uncharted territory and new licks.

02. DECIDE ON A RHYTHM PATTERN. 

Begin with something slow and think whole notes, then move on to 8th notes. Change the feel and work with triplets. End on 16th notes or faster. Create a build. Tension. Or just stick to a main pattern and keep coming back to it.

03. USE LIMITATIONS.

10 Essential Principles for Learning Guitar

The guitar is a great instrument. It’s fairly portable, relatively inexpensive, easy enough to learn the basics – and you can take your playing as far as you want. Lots of people – from kids to grandparents – learn the guitar every day. And if you’re one of them, here are ten things you need to know.
On a recent Open Mic we asked the question, “What advice would you offer someone considering learning the guitar?” Lots of you answered, and your main points are included in this article alongside my own thoughts. And please feel free to add even more advice in the comments. Thousands of learners will appreciate it.

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1. Practice!

This might seem obvious, but it never stopped anyone giving this advice when I started learning.
I started learning music when I was 20 – keyboard first, then guitar later. I was keen and enthusiastic, and constantly asked every musician I met for advice about the best and fastest way to learn. Every person gave me just one word of advice: “Practice!” It drove me crazy as hell – I wanted more – but it was good advice.
A big part of learning to play the guitar (and any instrument) is finger memory – motor skills. Your fingers need to know what to do without your brain needing to tell them. And that comes just one way – practice.
How much do you need to practice? I still stand by the advice I was given at the time: half an hour a day, or an hour a day if your really serious about learning. And the daily part is important – practice every day. One three hour session a week just isn’t going to cut it. Remember we are trying to develop finger memory, and that comes by regular, constant practice.
Most of you agree. Here is the advice you gave in the Open Mic:

• “Practice, practice, practice. There’s no substitute for actually playing music.” (vladh)
• “Practice practice practice.” (lisote)
• “Be prepared for hard work, playing the guitar is hard at first and requires patience, determination and above all time. If you are prepared to practice half an hour a day you will start to get results within a month or two and you will be playing your favourite songs which is when the fun really begins.” (Jon)
• “Persistence. To begin with your fingers won’t like it & it can be frustrating, but with regular practice (said countless times, 10/20mins a day is better than a 4hour practice once a week) it will suddenly click & feel very natural, almost so that you’ll find it hard remembering what it was like in the beginning.” (Simon)

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2. Find a Way to Stay Motivated

Physiology of Guitar: 5 Practical Ways to Improve Your Guitar Playing

Like many guitar players, I’m self taught. While I believe that we autodidacts develop a degree of independence and creativity in our approach that eludes some schooled players, the cost of this is that we also tend to develop an impressive array of bad habits.

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.

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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.

Six Beginner Guitar Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Play the Guitar

A lot of us want to learn how to play the guitar, but we have no idea where to start, and for some of us we don't want to pay out $15 an hour for a music teacher; I know I didn't. So when I started playing music ten years ago, I decided to teach myself.
Teaching yourself how to play the guitar is not only fun, but in the long run you will learn a lot more about your instrument, save a lot more cash, and the overall experience of learning on your own will be a lot more rewarding. The downside is that you will need to really stay focused and push yourself to keep moving forward; otherwise, you won't learn a thing.
In this guide I will try to help you to break down your lessons into six easy steps so that you can create your own practice sessions that work best for you. It really isn't that hard, but you have to stick with it. If I taught myself how to play the guitar, then so can you.

1. Buy an affordable guitar

The first thing you need to obviously do is buy your first guitar. I would recommend that you don't pay more than $100 on your first guitar. You may ask "Why not?"
Because who knows how long you will play the guitar. You might just give up within the first month, so why spend $200 on an instrument that will just sit around on display? If you aren't going to play it, don't spend a lot of money on it. My first guitar was under $70, and it was perfect. It didn't have any damage, there was no fret or truss rod problems, and the sound quality was surprisingly very nice. Whoever made my guitar took the time to do it right. The point is that you can buy a good quality guitar for very little money. All of those people out there that say "Buy a guitar for $200 because you get what you pay for" are sadly just saying that to make you waste money. Test some guitars out in store and try to find one you like that has the lowest price tag.

If you stick with playing the guitar, you can always upgrade to a better one in the future. I once heard a professional musician play Flight of the bumblebee on a $1 Recorder, and he made it sound epic. As you get better at playing the guitar you will discover that your first guitar will actually start to sound better over time as you perfect your skills. It's not the instrument that makes a good musician, but the musician that makes the instrument.

10 Ultimate Guitar Tips

Improving on the guitar, for many guitarists, is the reason for playing the instrument in the first place. The warm, self-satisfied glow inside when you finally see the benefit of all those hours of practicing can't be beaten – but all too often those hours are meanderings in the dark: aimless and not actually all that enjoyable.
But it really shouldn't be that way. So this lesson (complete with tab) is designed to put some life back into your learning.

To bring you this lesson, MusicRadar's sister magazine Guitarist asked some of the top guitar tutors in the business for their wit, wisdom and home truths about what it takes to really improve your playing. You'll find 10 of those tips below.

1. Golden Rule: practice with a metronome

Great players have great timing, so practice with a metronome – every single time you practice. (Mike Goodman)

2. Know the intervals

Most guitarists don't know the notes on the fingerboard – which means there's no point venturing into the world of musical theory as you won't be able to apply it. Here's an exercise that'll get you knowing the intervals between notes in no time… The exercise cycles through the four triads in one area of the neck: witness the intervals as they change and then use the roots, 3rds and 5ths as a reference from which to work out where the other intervals are. (Mike Goodman)