Guitar How-To

How To Improve Your Guitar Playing

Guitar playing has always been one of the most accessible and most enjoyable ways for a person to express their creative talent through music. If you make it your business to improve your guitar playing constantly you will find that the instrument can give you a whole lifetime of satisfaction.

There are lots of places to go in the real world and cyberspace to improve guitar playing of whatever style. You might want to just kick off your playing to a good start, find out what it feels like to play riffs on an electric guitar or widen your musical horizons. Whatever you want, there’s no shortage of places to find new directions in music. If you are stuck for inspiration about where to go for help with your efforts on the guitar, try some of these suggestions.

Let’s start with the most obvious and most popular way – video guitar lessons. Guitar playing lessons on video include where to put your fingers, how to keep time, how to hold a guitar pick and how to start playing songs on your own.

And as if that wasn’t enough, you have various video tutorial sites on the internet that feature individual guitar players showing how to do a wide range of techniques like palm muting, string skipping, tremolo and harmonics in all kinds of styles from funk to flamenco.

We are talking about improving guitar playing here, not LEARNING guitar playing, so let’s talk about the virtues of jamming. You just find somebody of whatever level of skill to play guitar with, compare ideas, and swap guitar tips. You might be surprised to find that you are actually able to help another guitar player out, even though you think of yourself as a raw beginner.

To find a guitar playing partner, post notices at shopping malls, colleges or libraries. Craig’s List or Gumtree are online advertising sites that you could try. Just put in your ad that you want to practice with somebody once a week or so.

If you want your guitar playing technique to improve, you have an endless resource in guitar music theory. You can learn about the circle of fifths, playing octaves, how to use the modes, chord progressions or any one of thousands of subjects covered in a guitar theory book. Try something outside your comfort zone like “Guitar Setup, Maintenance And Repair” by John Levan or “Classic Jazz Guitar Styles” by Tom Dempsey.