Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Guitar Lessons For Beginners’ Category

Effective guitar practice depends on using your guitar tuner and metronome for every practice session. It is not good to keep practicing when your guitar is out of tune, just because it’s a bother to take the time to tune it. It is also a drag using the metronome, but if you are not using it, you are not playing the music! Set the metronome on a low speed, and work up to higher speeds as you improve.

Another helpful guitar practice tip is to record yourself often. It will show you where you need to improve. Somehow, we can overlook mistakes and weak areas while we are playing, but listening to a recording shows you where you are going wrong.

Every guitar player should be aware of the basic principles of muscle memory. Guitar practice is repetition, and if we are repeating mistakes, we are trying to play too fast!

While you should never rush your guitar playing, you should always be looking for ways to increase your speed naturally. Repeated practice using the metronome is the key, but you can choose exercises that include small obstacles that will help you improve if you work on them a lot. You can skip strings, slow your picking down to below your comfort level and concentrate on each note, vary your playing between alternate picking, up strokes or down strokes. And remember to relax at all times.

You can also learn new chord shapes or scale patterns. Adding new elements to your practice will keep it fresh. There are many chord shapes,and the taking the trouble to learn as many as you can will expand your knowledge of music. The same goes for scale patterns. The study of the patterns of notes in different positions on the guitar will give you a complete understanding of your instrument.

Slide guitar is a facet of guitar playing that looks very sexy and sounds good with very little effort. In the early 1900′s dangerous looking dudes apparently loved to produce a wailing effect from their guitars by running a knife blade along the strings with their left hands instead of fretting the strings with their fingers. Some really outrageously dangerous dudes would break the neck off a bottle and slip it on their third or fourth fingers. If they were not careful how they placed the jagged end of the bottleneck, the guitar strings were not the only things doing the wailing.

One of the old-time bottleneck guitar players was Sylvester Weaver who in 1923 recorded a tune called “Guitar Rag”. Some years later Bob Willis And The Texas Playboys recorded the piece under the name “Steel Guitar Rag” which became a staple in the country music repertoire. Weaver’s version of the song was played on a guitjo – a guitar with a banjo sound, or a banjo with a guitar neck – and was the first recording of slide guitar playing. In the late nineteen sixties Duane Allman began playing slide guitar using a medicine bottle on his ring finger.

Anyhow, that’s how slide guitar started. So basically, instead of playing chords, you accompanied your blues song with a solo played by sliding your slide up and down the strings. If you wear your slide on your pinky you can lift it away from the strings so you can use your other fingers to fret chords between slide solos.

Slides for guitar playing are available at your local music store in metal which has strident sound or glass which is smoother. If you want people to think of use as really bluesy and old-timey, use a lipstick holder as a slide.

It is found by many slide guitarists to be a good idea to use open tunings for slide guitar. In case you do not know, an open tuning is where your guitar is tuned to sound a chord. Here are some of the more common open tunings used by slide guitar players:

Open D: d a d f# a d
Open G: d g d g b d
Open E: e b e g# b e
Open A: e a c# e a e OR e a e a c# e

When you are playing slide guitar you will need to damp strings as you go so you do not play unwanted notes. You can use the fingers of your left or right hand to do this but developing the technique will be your biggest challenge. Once you have developed some flair with the slide you might want to so some experimenting with some elctronic effects.

To play slide guitar, you place the slide above the fret. One technique you will need to work on for maximum expressiveness is vibrato. You play vibrato by moving the slide up and down the guitar neck in repeated small movements. Practice on long notes with your hand relaxed.

You will probably be wanting to head over to YouTube to check out some slide guitar videos, but I have included one here which gives you a lesson in basic slide guitar in standard tuning.