Perfect Your Guitar Sweep Picking Technique

If you are reading this piece then I am assuming that you have been practicing some sweep picking techniques and are struggling to improve it. If this is the case then read on, as I explain how you can avoid the four most common technical errors that many guitar players come across when they attempt to improve on their sweep picking technique.

Normally if you a problem in anyone of the four areas as described below you will have problems in all four areas to some degree. The good news is that as you improve in one area the others tend improve. Read on and you will understand why this is.

Separating the notes:

Many guitar players have troubles separating the individual notes of an arpeggio because they do not release their fingers from the notes that have been previously played, the results are that all of the notes ring together. Though keeping your fingers on the fret board goes along with the theory of minimum motion of the fingers, it goes against the rules of clean sweep picking: all notes have to sound individually and clearly! It is very tempting to want to reduce the motion of your fretting hand as much as possible, but you also have to make certain that the notes sound cleanly.

The secret is to find a balance between raising your fingers off of the fretted note after you have picked it, while being careful not to let your fingers come up so far from the strings of your guitar that it makes it hard to bring them back down to play the next series of notes. You need to learn how to lift your fingers slightly off of the strings after it has been struck to stop it from sounding, You will also have to learn how to mute that string with your picking hand.

Even though releasing your fingers from the fretted notes that you have just played is not an application of “minimum of motion”, it is required that you do this in order to play the technique clearly and cleanly. Although this makes perfectly good sense when reading about it, a lot of guitar players have a hard time with finding the correct relationship between the economy of motion and playing notes cleanly, not only when it comes to sweep picking, but all other techniques as well.

Slayer's Kerry King's Top 3 Playing Tips

There's no one on Earth quite like Slayer's Kerry King. For over 20 years, the metal guitar master has defined and refined the meaning of the word 'heavy.'

 "Heavy is a sound," King told MusicRadar, "but it's also a state of mind. Basically, if you don't think heavy, you're not going to sound heavy - simple as that. Luckily, Slayer has always been about total impact and complete sonic overkill. You can't get any heavier than Slayer, but if you wanna try, good luck with that!"
During our conversation, which covered everything from Slayer's upcoming album Painted In Blood to answering many of your questions, King offered his 3 top playing tips. "I'm not saying that if you follow these rules you'll suddenly wind up sounding like me.
"In fact, you shouldn't try to sound like me. But we'll get to that..."

1. Don't worry about staying in key

"There's nothing that says playing out of key is wrong," says King. "Of course, if you're thinking of what's traditionally accepted and bound by the 'rules of music,' you might disagree. But to me, anything that sounds good is right. Or anything that sounds weird is right. Bend the rules.
"I never would have written some of my cooler riffs if I got all hung on what notes are in tune or what notes go together. Take In The Name Of God, which is totally edgy. It starts out with an open E chord and then I slide my index finger from a B to a B-flat. I think the overall tuning is in C#.
"Now, normally everybody would tell you that the sound of an E chord and a B-flat note don't go together, but to me it sounds awesome. Bottom line: whenever somebody says 'You can't do that, because it's musically incorrect,' just give 'em the middle finger and say, 'Fuck it, I like it.'"

2. Learn when to put the guitar down

"Man, when I go home from a tour, I don't touch the guitar sometimes for a month," King says. "I chill. I get involved in my hobbies, I kick back, I don't think about music.
"A lot of people will say, 'That's wrong. You've got to practice every day.' Why? Who said so? Some

Practical Tips To Becoming A Pro Guitarist

What does it take to become a professional guitar player and musician? The answer remains a huge mystery for the vast majority of people.

The first step is to learn about the industry that you are seeking to enter into and don’t listen to anyone that hasn’t actually “lived in the industry”. If you want to tour the world, don’t take advice from anyone who has not done that. If you want to sell records worldwide, don’t take advice from anyone who has not done it himself/herself.





So, rather than trying to explain exactly how to become a pro guitarist and make it in the real world, I would like to share some practical tips that can save you time and help you grow faster. These tips can help you achieve the skill level of a pro guitarist.

Practical Guitar Tips

1. Play guitar all the time. Always have a guitar handy and try to play every day for at least 30 mins.

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

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.

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.