How To Improve Your Guitar Playing

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”

Guitar How-To

How To Improve Your Guitar Playing