Guitar How-To

If you want to play guitar for an audience it is a world away from performing by yourself. When people are watching you play or sing, everything changes. You become aware of yourself in a different way and you can no longer play on autopilot the way you do when you are by yourself.

Start with a plan for a basic set lasting about three hours. As a guide, your songs are around 3 to 4 minutes long, and you will have a minute or two between songs. So you need to get yourself a list of about forty songs. You will include your favorite songs, and you will also need to draw upon a list of popular songs. If you look on the internet you will find many people’s definitions of popular songs, just choose some songs from a list that more or less corresponds to your style. It will take quite a long time for you to memorize so many songs, so get yourself a music stand and some sheets of paper with your lyrics written on them. These will be your cheat sheets until you have your repertoire memorized.

You will then need to practice your microphone technique. Check out what kind of setup solo players work with at local bars or open mike nights. There is only so much practice you can do at home for this. The rest is learning on the job.

You need to practice every day if you’re going to play guitar for an audience. Daily practice brings your guitar playing persona to the fore. So force yourself to practice for at least half an hour a day, much more if you are learning a repertoire!

Making mistakes is natural. And quite often a guitar player will try to go back to a point where he can start again to play without the mistake. Don’t do this. You’d be surprised how little attention your audience is really paying, so they probably won’t notice the odd mistake. It’s sad to think that you’re not getting the full attention of your listeners, but that’s the way it is.

Likewise, your audience will not notice the odd guitar playing fumble. If you’re technique is a little rusty on the night, don’t worry too much about it, just slow down a little and leave out any of your usual attempts at virtuosity.

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