Guitar How-To

The way to make your learning curve less steep and your learning time shorter is to make effective use of your practice time. If you allot half an hour a day for guitar practice then why not make that half hour additional to the time it takes to make a cup of coffee, get your guitar out from under the bed and get it in tune. In fact you should have your guitar on a stand, ready to go. Or if you have a picture rail or a hook on the wall, loop a length of guitar string through, or around the headstock and hang your guitar on the wall.

One of the biggest obstacles to shortening the time it takes to learn to play guitar is the frustration we feel when we realize we have to start again from scratch today when yesterday we felt as though we had made some progress.

If we practice some chord changes for half an hour today, our muscles take an active role in what we are doing, just as they do when we are on a long drive and after a while, changing lanes and maneuvering the car seems to become easier. But this progress is not permanent – tomorrow our thinking brain or our feelings will be in charge and it will take another session of careful practice to bring our muscle memory to the fore again.

And so it goes on. We begin fresh every day until, some more permanent change does arrive. We sit down with the guitar one day and it’s different. If you practice a lot, this could take a few weeks. If your practice time is limited it could take a little longer.

While we find ourselves looking at chord changes, here’s some info from Dan Denley on changing chords.

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