Tag Archive | "exercises"

Guitar Practicing Effectively and Safely

Posted on 14 December 2009. Tags: , , ,

Everyone who is a musician has, at some time or another, heard the phrase “Practice Makes Perfect”, but this is a complete falsehood.

While guitar practice is vitally important to improving your playing, it should not be practice makes perfect, but rather, practice makes permanent. The fact is that if you have always practiced something incorrectly, then you will always play it incorrectly as the habit becomes ingrained.

My primary objective is to provide you with effective practice tips that will help you improve your guitar playing style while keeping you safe.

You are probably wondering what could possibly be unsafe about practicing your guitar.

That is an excellent question.

I have noticed a common trend among veteran players that I am familiar with. Many of them suffer from hand and wrist fatigue. Many have had to endure wearing braces while playing because after years of playing the wrong way, they have developed carpel tunnel.

Anyone who has ever held a guitar can understand how playing the instrument can create strain on your hand and wrist. Therefore, taking the necessary time to practice the proper way is something you should strive for sot hat you can avoid this painful condition. Your musical abilities will benefits, also, but the main goal is to get your hands into the right shape.

After all, if you were a brand new weight lifter you wouldn’t go straight for the five hundred pound weights. You would begin with much lighter weights.

You wouldn’t take the chance of serious injury by starting any other way. The same is true of playing the guitar, proper training, conditioning and warm up are necessary to stay in top playing shape so that you can enjoy playing for many years to come.

Exercise 1 – Stretching is key

Before you play the first note, or even think about touching the guitar, you should spend five minutes simply stretching your hand. Stretching will prepare your hand for playing as it gets blood flowing to your hands and will help your muscles and tendons to relax. You will be amazed at how much endurance you will have for playing when you take the time to stretch. Blood moves oxygen, and your muscles are hungry for oxygen. Take the time to stretch your entire hand from your fingers, to your wrist and forearms.

Exercise 2 – Timing is everything

A metronome should be your constant companion when you are practicing. Timing is everything in music, and playing to the steady tick of a metronome will help you develop your timing. Great timing is the single most important aspect that all musicians share. Having a great sense of timing is what sets great guitarists apart from amateurs.

It’s foolish to think that you would not benefit from the use of a metronome or do not need one.

Exercise 3 – Chromatic scales serve a purpose

Chromatic scales are done automatically, with little thought behind them, but they will condition your hands. Using chromatic scales is simply the easiest way to improve dexterity, and increase speed because they will make hitting the right note a very natural action.

At one time, I could spend hours doing nothing more than the following chromatic exercise, and it improved my speed a agility greatly.

If you want to be able to rip through your music accurately and quickly, make a point of practicing these scales on a daily basis.

E|—————————————–1-2-3-4———-|
B|———————————1-2-3-4——————|
G|————————-1-2-3-4————————–|
D|—————–1-2-3-4———————————-|
A|———1-2-3-4——————————————|
E|-1-2-3-4————————————————–|

Reverse it after you play it

E|-1-2-3-4——————————————|
B|———1-2-3-4———————————-|
G|—————–1-2-3-4————————–|
D|————————-1-2-3-4——————|
A|———————————1-2-3-4———-|
E|—————————————–1-2-3-4–|

When you are practicing, be sure to use alternate picking.

Once these exercises are completed, move everything up on fret and practice some more. Continue moving up the frets and practicing them for speed, accuracy and agility.

Try to work your way up through all 11 frets, and then move back down again.

When you start feeling a burn, complete the exercise you are on then take the time to stretch your arms, wrists and fingers thoroughly before you continue practicing.

Following these tips will improve your playing, prevent painful carpel tunnel, and give you the confidence you need to play any venue.

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Learn Guitar Improvisation By Faking

Posted on 08 November 2009. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Peter Edvinsson asked:

A fake book can really help you a lot in developing your improvisational skills. If you choose just one of the songs you will find a source to many exercises that will help you become a much better guitarist.

Do you know what a fake book is?

A fake book is made in a very compact format containing a lot of songs. This is possible because you will usually only find the melody of a song and the chords of a song.

The melody is written out with sheet music notation and maybe guitar tablature and if it is a song you can find the lyrics beneath the melody. The chords to play you will find above the notes.
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Because this is a compact way of writing down songs a fake book can contain more than 500 songs.

This very rudimentary way to write down the songs gives you as a guitarist an opportunity to use your own musical taste when you interpret the songs.

The songs will usually only contain very basic chord progressions. When you hear these songs played the songs are often spiced up with more interesting chords. Often there are also more chords used which will make the chord progressions more interesting and exciting musically.

The act of trying to find more chords to use in a song and to spice up existing chords is an excellent exercise in chord theory. As you are working with a song you are interested in and also will use the exercise in you actual guitar playing you will be more motivated to do a good job.

You can now practice the new chords in the song. Concentrate on one chord at a time. There are many ways to practice a chord by for example playing the chord in various positions and with different voicings.

You can now take the chord practice a step further by using your new chord progressions in the song and practice changing chords. Take a few bars of the song and practice to play the progressions on your guitar as you vary the chord voicings.

When you have decided which chords you will use in a song you can use these chords to find suitable scales to use in your guitar improvisation. You can find many scale books on the net with suggestions on which scale to use for various chord progressions.

We will use the first chord of the song you are working on to show how you can find out which scale to use. If your first chord is a C-major chord you can choose between for example a C-major scale or a C-major pentatonic scale. The principle is to find a scale that contains the notes in the chord.

Now it is time to actually practice playing the scales on your guitar. Start with the first chord in the song and continue the same way with the other chords. First, strum the chord on your guitar and practice playing the suitable scale up and down in various positions and patterns.

Actually it is very common that you can use the same scale to many chords in a song. For example, the C-major scale will work together with the chords C-major, G7, Dm, Am and so on.

Now when you have mastered playing the suitable scales to the chords you can start to work on improving your improvisational skills by taking the previous method a little bit further. Strum a chord and use the scale you have chosen to create your own patterns, melodies and licks.

You are now prepared to improvise over the chord progressions you have written down using the scales you have chosen. The exciting part is when you come to a bar with a new scale to use. If you find it hard to change scale during your improvisation it might be a good idea to concentrate working on this skill for a while.

That means, use two scales and try to alternate between them as you continue to improvise maybe a couple of bars over each scale.

You can use a song in many other ways developing your skills in guitar improvisation. This should of course be a positive exercise leading you towards the goal to be able to play the song from start to end with melody and improvisation as you would like to play it in public.

Learn Guitar

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