Guitar Articles

2012-05-04T10:26:00.002-07:00

Why Learn Guitar?

by Jay Vallejo

Before you even decide to do anything, it is normal and common sense to know the reasons behind such an endeavour as it is the very foundation of what you are about to get into. Without this awareness everything would easily give way and your commitment to achieve something would easily waiver and you would have just wasted your time, effort and possibly money in taking several early and discontinued steps.

The following are some non-exhaustive but good reasons to learn and keep on improving to play the guitar:

It makes you smart

This is no exaggeration. Learning to play the guitar involves not only physical but also a lot of mental activities. In order for you to constantly improve each time you practise you need to be observant and be able to analyse and isolate your problem areas. And afterwards you then need to think of a number of possible solutions in solving your particular problem. Of course this only happens in your own practice time and not when in front of your teacher.

Another thing is that when you practise, you also teach yourself how to focus, get organised, and how to do things efficiently. And these also happened to apply to your daily life not only as a musician but as a person in general.

It makes you stand out

Do you know many people who play guitar and are really masters in their style of music? Compare it to the number of people who play other instruments like piano, violin, wind instruments, etc. You can find many in one orchestra set-up alone.

The fact is, the guitar is a very new instrument. So new that itself and how it is played is still evolving and that a very few number of people have truly been able to master it—in their own style of music. These people on the other hand stood out among great players of other instruments. How many people don’t know Jimi Hendrix, Slash, Van Halen, Eric Clapton or Brian May? Not many at all.

It is a very unique and versatile instrument

You can use the guitar to play melodies, chords, arpeggios and even as a percussive instrument! Can you name other instruments that can be used in this variety of ways? Furthermore, a single note, say C for example, can be played in different articulations on the guitar: pre-bend, bend, hammer-on and pull-off, tapping, harmonics, slide-up, slide-down, whammy bar, electric drill, tremolo, vibrato, light-picked, heavy picked, finger-picked (ask your teacher to demonstrate these).

In addition to these, hundreds of real-time guitar effects are on the market and these can enable you to play a single note in many, many ways. Steve Vai can even make his guitar talk and laugh with the use of bending and whammy bar techniques combined with a wah pedal.

It can be a source of living

Once you got some serious skills down you can form a band and play gigs, do your own recording, and get a record deal or become a guitar teacher. In fact you can even do all if you so wish! You simply need to know the steps you have to take and not pure luck. And there are people who can help and teach you these things. But develop some useful musical skills which are in line with what you really want. You don’t necessarily have to be a master to start but make sure you constantly improve yourself in the process.

It is all fun and nothing risky

This is the very reason why most great guitar-teachers and players picked up the guitar and learned in the first place. Learning guitar is not as easy as learning most other instruments. Let alone learning on your own. But once you’ve got some little skills everything else will follow through and you will begin to ask yourself why you haven’t done this a long time ago. Give it a try, learn from a good teacher and NOT on your own, and see for yourself a whole new and beautiful world, the wonderful world of guitar and music.

It is absolutely risk-free unless you go berserk and try to do some stunts and poses while holding your guitar on or off stage. This used to be how it was in the old days. But things have changed through time and now guitar-players aim for virtuosity and not all image and attitude. Of course this doesn’t mean that you should play like a statue on stage.

Just like any other form of art, guitar-playing too requires dedication, commitment, focus, and utmost discipline.

2012-05-02T07:55:00.001-07:00

Find an Electric Guitar and Start Learning the Easy Way!

by Jay Vallejo

It is literally impossible to learn to play any musical instrument without owning one especially in the case of an electric guitar. I able for you to speedily learn to play an electric guitar, you need to invest some time in finding perfect guitar to suit your playing style and your body's configuration (yes, your body's configuration as this will be the factor in determining your playing comfort against any guitar).

Once you find your preferred electric guitar through careful selection, you can now learn to play it. As compared to an acoustic guitar, electric guitars are much easier to play. It would also be best if you can purchase a pick and an amp.

One of the unique featrures of the electric guitar as you may have noticed, it has several buttons or switches and you need to get familiarised with their functions. But before anything else, you should know the essentials in learning to play such a musical instrument. Find a teacher if you can.

Every guitar has its own characteristics and qualities. You have to familiarize yourself with the electric guitar’s qualities and features. Know all the guitar’s knobs or switches. You must know how to control them so that once you start playing the guitar you will know the right mixes of the knobs or switches.

If you can do this, you can expect the guitar’s sound to be at its best. Electric guitars are not simple instruments. Before you can effectively play this type of guitar, you would have to spend a huge portion of your time in learning to play it. Most especially, you need to learn to mix the tones and sounds together.

Aside from the electric guitar, you also need to get an amp and that was already mentioned awhile ago. Guitar amps are available in many sizes and you need to get the appropriate guitar amp. Since you’re a beginner, you need to get an amp that you can use during practice sessions. Buy only the best quality amp and make sure that you try it out before paying for it. Some stores allow their customers to test the amps at its highest point. Also, remember to purchase an amp that already has a distortion box because this is very important when it comes to playing an electric guitar.

There are many songs and guitar tracks using electric guitars. You need to be familiar with these said tracks so that learning to play such instrument will be a lot easier. If you’re a good listener to these guitar tracks and songs, you will learn fast. Try to reproduce the sounds you hear and if you can do it, then you can tell if you’re learning.

You can find further techniques, information, and tips online if you’re determined to learn to play an electric guitar. Remember these three essentials in learning to play such guitar: have your own electric guitar, get other guitar accessories like a pick and amps, and listen to guitar tracks or songs. If you know these three essentials, you’re on your way to learning to play an electric guitar.

So you see, you can easily learn to play an electric guitar by knowing the essentials. Now it’s time to pick out the method to use – whether you will hire a professional guitar instructor, buy a guitar instruction book, or learn through DVD programs and other internet guitar programs.

Be sure to choose the appropriate method to learn quickly. Your learning will depend greatly on your personality and attitude. If you’re patient, determined, and motivated, you can and will not encounter many problems in learning to play the electric guitar.

2012-05-02T05:49:00.002-07:00

How to practise Guitar

On everything that people want to excel at, everybody knows that one needs to practise really hard. But nobody or very few people actually bother to think about how to. There’s always the right way in doing everything. Let alone learning to play and master guitar.

We always hear the phrase “Practise makes perfect”. This has somehow helped many people in developing the right mental attitude in trying to achieve something. But also, it has misled some people trying to learn things that require great amount of precision and technique such as guitar playing.

The right phrase to remember then is “Practise makes permanent”. This is more accurate since practising can also mean practising the wrong things and therefore you become good or great in doing the wrong things on the guitar (which isn’t perfect at all).

So now I am going to give you some highly beneficial guidelines that you can follow every time you practise guitar:

Focus

You need to constantly remember that you are teaching your brain and your muscles to do the right thing (in minute details). You should keep your attention right to what it is your doing. If you get distracted somewhere along the way just snap out of it and get back on track. This takes a lot of mental discipline but it is something you can get used to. It’s just a matter of forming good habits.

When you practise guitar you need some dedicated and undisturbed time for doing so. Don’t practise guitar anywhere near sources of distractions (TV, noisy people, etc.). If you live with non-musicians you need to communicate this to them and make them understand so that they may respect that undisturbed quality time that you ask of them.

Frequency

Never let a day go by without practising. Practising guitar for a few minutes every day is a lot better than practising for 8 hours but doing it only once, twice or three times a week. Of course this doesn’t mean that practising just for 5 minutes a day is fine. Practise for at least an hour a day.

But there are days when we are just too busy with other commitments and find it hard to fit the time in for practising. These are the days when you can practise for a few minutes and dedicate it to your weak areas only. Likewise you can do guitar exercises that have transferability features (more on this below).

Transferability

This means doing one particular guitar exercise that benefits more than one area of guitar playing. For example, playing guitar scales to the metronome up and down the neck—it helps you build speed and at the same time helps you to get familiarised with different scale positions along the neck so that the next time you play a solo you know where your fingers need to go with great speed and accuracy.

Relax and Slow down

When practising new guitar techniques you need to be able to perfectly execute or articulate each note with great ease. This is the key to playing at lightning speed. You can see great guitar players play in great ease despite the level of difficulty that comes with what they are playing. It is because they are relaxed.

In order to develop proper guitar technique you need to teach your muscles every small things properly because it will remember every single thing you teach it. So you need to play things boringly and painfully slow at first to avoid making even the slightest mistake. Don’t be tempted to play things fast right away. It will only harm your technique. You will only develop bad habits and they are very hard to break, even harder than learning new difficult things.

Only increase speed when you can already play it with great ease for a repeated number of times.

Divide and Conquer

When practising long passages try to learn them in small 3-bar chunks and then try to connect them seamlessly. It's ok if you can play them just slowly at first. You can move on to speed building after you’ve been able to play the whole thing slowly.

Isolate

Pay attention to parts of exercises or passages you are having difficulties with. These are the things that you need to pay particular attention to (recording yourself playing and listening back will help you with this). You will then need to analyse what is keeping you from executing those parts correctly. After you’ve spotted the problem you can then slowly correct it in isolation. Just play it in the proper manner many times over (see Relax and Slow down above).

As you do this you will soon notice that that same mistake has disappeared and you can then start to build your speed gradually and the cycle goes on and on until you’ve reached your desired speed.

Measure

Have a system for measuring your progress. Some aspects of guitar playing can be measured. For example, technique—you can draw a graph and put your maximum speed (you need a metronome) that you can play a technique cleanly at, on a weekly basis.

Some other aspects unfortunately cannot be measured (like your general playing skills, improvising, etc.). This is where recording yourself comes in handy. You can watch or listen to your recording a few months or weeks after and critique yourself and also appreciate how much you have progressed.

All these will be your ultimate driving force to keep on learning and practising guitar.

Goals

You need to set daily specific goals and strive to achieve it through your practise time for the day. You must then put it into your graph as part of your weekly cycle (if it is measurable). The results may vary. There are days when they are huge, there are days small. On some days you may even get no results at all and this would only mean that you are over-expecting. You then need to revise that goal into a more achievable one perhaps a part or small parts of that original goal (divide and conquer).

Organise

There are thousands of practice materials available depending on what your musical goals are. You have to have a system of filing these materials so that they are easily accessible when you need them and that no time which is absolutely nobody’s luxury, is wasted.

Also plan your practice regime ahead depending on what you want to achieve for the day. You can cover a lot of exercises in an hour. Just for an example, 15 min for warming up, 15 min for alternate picking, 15 min for sweep picking and 15 min for improvising. It should also vary from every week or two. You don’t have to practise same things over and over. This is not the key to mastering guitar. You should have a little bit of this and of that. Learning guitar is very similar to planting. You don’t need to water the plants all the time. Sometimes you just let the sun do its job and add some fertilisers for the plants to grow healthy.

Following the guidelines above will greatly help to improve your guitar playing. Now if you find it hard to understand and follow these, find a good guitar teacher who can help you and show you how to implement these things in great details.

Great guitar players didn’t become great simply because they were born that way. It is because they worked really hard with great teachers. And it didn’t happen overnight, it took them a while too! :)

2012-05-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

The Importance of Listening to Recordings

For Beginning Guitar Players

I always ask my students right on the very first day relevant questions like: “What is/are your favourite musical genre, songs, and who are your favourite artists?” And most of them particularly total beginners say “I don’t know”. Now honestly speaking I am quite surprised every time I hear this and I begin to ask myself: “...then why are you even here... what makes you want to learn to play guitar if you’re not that much into music at all?” But then I always realise that they are total beginners therefore they don’t know what they don’t know to even know what they want or should want.

Anyway, the purpose of this article is to emphasize the need for listening to as many records (at least of your favourite musical genre) as you can.

Back in 1992, when I first started to learn to play guitar I wanted to play in a band within the shortest span of time. I was young and wanted results to happen almost immediately. Unintentionally I have found myself back then listening to many records ranging from alternative to death metal due to the huge number of ‘rock’ fanatics I was exposed to.

We were basically lending and borrowing cassette tapes from one another. Then one day I’ve come across Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ and I thought “Hey this is very cool and at the same time not so difficult to play!” Then on another day, Green Day’s ‘Basket Case’ and I thought likewise. And later on I just found myself playing along the records and this time with Sepultura songs too! And I thought: “Great! If I can play along the recordings then I can play them with a real band!” I was so excited and very much driven to form a band and play gigs and become popular in my local area.

Fortunately, there were like-minded guys who were learning to play bass and drums, as many as aspiring guitarists there were and eventually we were able to form a rock band. There were many other amateur bands which suddenly formed and developed as well and our city immediately became a city inhabited by amateur rock bands.

We kept on learning more and more challenging songs and played more paid and unpaid gigs. Basically we just had fun and passively develop ourselves as musicians. Most of my band mates back then are international professional musicians now and they have really grown into more mature musicians. And thinking back I never recall anyone of them taking formal music lessons. That sheer passion for music which manifested itself through constant and intelligent listening surely had paid off.

Now going back to my students, they have learned many physical techniques and chords but when time comes for real playing they don’t have any sense of rhythm and they don’t know whether or not they are playing the correct chords (although they know the chords) just simply because they can’t recognise any consonance or dissonance that the intervals of notes in the context of harmony and melody make. It is somewhat frustrating as they have been with me for more than a year now whereas I was playing in a band within one year and without anyone teaching me! I would have been a much better guitar player if I had a teacher back then though.

Now there are times when they come for their guitar lessons I don’t give them any new materials but I make them review and master the old ones plus I give them assignments that involve listening to records like: “What are the chords to this intro?” or as simple as “What is your favourite song in this particular album and why?”

So if you happened to be a beginning guitar player do yourself a favour by listening to many, many recordings and get valuable things from these if you’re not doing so already. Just marinate yourself!

Remember, nobody is interested in you playing guitar exercises and practise materials. Listen to or even learn some songs from time to time when you are not practising guitar exercises. Try to imitate what chords, melodies, and even weird sounds that your favourite artists are making. If you think you suck, do it anyway! Everybody else sucked when they first started.