Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘How To Play Guitar’ Category

Our furniture is designed for lounging in, not playing the guitar. The first step to playing the guitar is not twisting your body up when you pick up your instrument. There is an art and science to holding the guitar and it is just as important to learn these skills as it is to learn picking and strumming.

Giving in to gravity when the body’s center of gravity is too far back will cause a flattening of the lumbar spine (Norris 39). While this is acceptable for many activities -due to the fact that it will require less energy than sitting “up straight” in a poorly designed chair- it is not necessarily advantageous for playing the guitar. Playing the guitar for several hours a day in this position can put a dangerous strain on the back and can also limit one’s capacity to breathe. In the words of Richard Norris, M.D., director of the National Arts Medicine Center, “flattening of the lumbar curve results in flattening of the diaphragm, limiting its excursion and thereby decreasing the air flow” (39). A forward sloping chair will redirect the body’s line of gravity over the sit bones and will not only discourage flattening of the lumbar spine, but it will also allow for fuller breathing as well as decreasing the amount of work that the body must do in order to sit upright, thereby reducing the risk of pain and fatigue.
The Humane Guitarist on holding the acoustic guitar

Here is a video on playing the steel string acoustic when sitting down.

We often forget that when we sit down to play the guitar we should be playing by the body’s rules. What we want and when we want it is of no importance to our body. It has its own way of doing and learning and how much we learn to play by the bod’s rules governs how fast we learn how to play the guitar.

If you have seen people who learn to play the guitar with little or no effort, it becomes obvious from watching them that they are comfortable in their body and they know instinctively how to work with it. The first thing we need to do if we are going to smooth the progress of learning the guitar is learn to watch for unnecessary tension.

It is a little bit of an effort to free up some attention from the usual way we practice but if you start with muscular tension, you will notice that we often torture ourselves when we practice our guitar playing. We make little grunting noises when we make mistakes, we hold our breath, and the muscles in our faces work overtime as our fingers, arms and hands try to learn in the face of crippling tension.

The first tool we have that will help us notice and lessen unnecessary muscular tension is the speed we try to play at. It is a good idea to deliberately play a little slower than our mind and feelings tell us they want to. Our haste to become guitar heroes is driven by the ego, and the ego does not want to cooperate with the body.

“Playing guitar can be painful, particularly if you stay at it for hours at a time. To begin with, we must use our bodies in an asymmetrical way to hold the guitar, resulting in muscle imbalances. In addition, we cave in the front of our bodies as we wrap around the instrument and we usually distort our necks and compress our vertebra as well. We risk injury from repetitive motion and we tend to build tension in our necks, arms and hands with extended practice. Even the most body-conscious players can fall victim to pain and injury at times. With some information and a few exercises these problems can be avoided or solved.”
Charlotte Adams – Pain-Free Guitar Playing

“Excess muscular tension will destroy anything you attempt on the guitar.

It will nullify days, months even years of practice.

It affects every note that you produce on the instrument.

If it remains unchecked, you will practice tension so deep into your playing that it will take a long time to undo. There is also a good chance that tension in your hands, arms etc will damage the body.
http://www.trueguitar.com/articletension.htm”

Many guitar players find that their right shoulder gets numb after a lengthy period of practice. Guitarists put their bodies under a great deal of stress so you need to be aware of what you are responsible for in terms of wear and tear on your system.

Basically you should be sitting erect when you are playing the guitar. The effort to sit up straight will help you to identify areas of tension and discomfort that could be sources of serious damage to your body. As you play your guitar, try to only use the minimum amount of muscular tension. These two simple guidelines will help you keep healthy over years of daily guitar practice, but you need to remember to keep track of your muscular tension and posture EVERY DAY.

One thing you need to do is to stop playing when there are signs your circulation is not in good shape. Like that tingling feeling you feel when your legs have been crossed for too long. But numbness and tingling can appear in the shoulders or hands too, telling you that maybe a nerve is getting pinched, in which case you should stop playing and get moving to get your circulation going again.