Learn Electric Guitar

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So you are learning electric guitar, and unsatisfied with the pace you have set?

Learning to play any sort of instrument does largely come down to consistent practice. But there are a few things you can do that will help you learn electric guitar fast.

1) Use a metronome

There are many types of metronomes - older style mechanical ones, digital ones with a click, even some that fit in an earplug. They are all good, the main thing is to get one and use it. You don’t need to use it all the time, but using it regularly will help you learn electric guitar fast.

The best way to use a metronome is to set it at a speed slow enough to play an exercise or a section of music with complete accuracy - this might be a lot slower than you would like to be playing. It is better to set it too slow than too fast. Play through the piece you are learning a few times, and then increase the metronome by a very small amount. Keep doing this, playing through the piece 3 to 4 times, and then raising the metronome by 1 or 2 beats per minute. If you do this consistently then you will improve very fast.

2) Develop your ear

Your ear is as important or maybe even more important than your technical ability. When you hear some music, try to work out how it is played without using your guitar. Before you play something, try to sing the melody out loud. There are all sorts of ways to develop your ear, and time spent doing it will help you learn electric guitar fast.

3) Invest in some tuition materials

In my post on Guitar Instruction, I talk about a number of different alternatives and their benefits and drawbacks. If you are wanting to learn electric guitar fast then you should look to take as many of these approaches as possible. As far as instructional materials go, I recommend Jamorama on this blog as a student of mine has used it and it has been great. There are many good choices though. It is important of course to USE the materials, if you buy them and then just let them sit there, that won’t do any good.

4) Plan your practice times

A lot of people “practice”, but their practice just means picking up the guitar now and then and noodling for a bit, with no forethought about what to actually play. This means that you will often just cycle through what you are most comfortable with - basically you are practicing what you already know how to play. If you plan your practice, you will get much faster results. To plan your practice, first pick a time in the day that you have set aside for it - treat this time you have scheduled with the same respect as an important meeting with somebody’s time you are paying good money for. Next, break down exactly what you are going to play through during your practice time, and for exactly how many minutes you are going to practice something.

5) Eliminate distractions

It’s pretty awesome to just noodle in front of the TV or while browsing the internet. I do it all the time - it’s one of the greatest pleasures of being a guitarist. When you have set aside time for practice though, you don’t want to be distracted. Turn your mobile phone off - it’s okay, the world won’t end and you can get back to people after your practice. If you live with anybody else then let them know that you will be practicing at a certain time and you don’t want to be disturbed in that time.

6) Be careful

One thing that can stop you improving and even send you backwards is injury. Carpal tunnel syndrome, repetetive strain injury and related problems can stop you playing for months or maybe forever. Warm up and stretch before trying anything really difficult. And if playing something is causing you pain, the absolute worst thing you can do is just ignore it and power through.

Good luck and happy playing!

Technorati Tags: Learn electric guitar, learn electric guitar fast, Learn Guitar

Southpaws have a few different options when they first start learning guitar.  Some people who are naturally left handed will just get a right handed guitar and learn to play it like any right hander would.  This gives you the most options with guitars to buy, and considering that the left hand does a lot of the work on a guitar, it might not be such a bad idea.  Other players, most famously Jimi Hendrix, take a right handed guitar and set it up for left handed playing by changing the nut to string it upside down.  This works well with some guitars, like a Fender Stratocaster, but would be very cumbersome for something like a Les Paul.  Others will just buy a left-handed version of the guitar they want.  They’re not as available as right-handed guitars though, particularly for rare or second hand models.. and sometimes they can be significantly more expensive.

Ben from the Left Handed Guitar Player blog, however, just takes a right handed guitar and turns it upside down.  And makes it sound pretty good!  Sounds way too simple, but he’s posted video to show it works.  If you’re a lefty wanting to play right handed guitars, give it a look.

Technorati Tags: guitar, guitar lessons, Learn electric guitar, Learn Guitar, left handed

Click here for larger image

Another lesson in the alternate picking series, this one practices alternate picking on non-adjacent strings.  Unlike some of the other exercises in the series, this one has no tonal centre, isn’t based on any particular scale and is designed only to improve technique rather than achieve a particularly melodic sound.  However some of the fragments from it can be fit in to a lot of different situations.  Keep in mind that one of the reasons for playing through a wide variety of different patterns is so that you won’t end up being stuck in any one of them when you use what you’ve been practicing in a song situation.

There’s no fingering for the left hand written here.. try it with your first and third fingers to start with.  Once that gets easy, try it with your second and fourth.  As always start slow, get it perfect and speed up gradually.

Technorati Tags: Alternate Picking, guitar exercises, Learn electric guitar, string skipping

Isn’t it strange how performing in front of a crowd can sometimes make something as fun and enjoyable as playing into a real nightmare?  Here are a few tips to sort out those nerves..

Know your parts

Learn every part of every song you’re going to play, and learn them backwards.  Get to the stage where you’re so familiar with what you’re going to do that playing it is trivial.  Your heart might still race and your stomach might still be in knots, but if you get everything down then even the worst panic won’t mess up your playing.

Have your gear organised

If you’re playing a show, check all your equipment a few days before you’re due onstage.  Make sure you’re guitar is well set up and your amp has been recently serviced.  Bring a spare set of strings, or even better, bring a backup guitar.  Bring some spare cables, and if you use any effects pedals then be sure to bring some spare batteries.  If something breaks during a show, it’s good to be able to get back to playing with as little fuss as possible.  And even if nothing breaks, it’s reassuring to know that you’re prepared.

Prepare a set list

Write up a set list before the show.. if you’re in a band then it’s best to do it at rehearsal, rather than 5 minutes before you’re due to go on.  It doesn’t matter if you have a copy for every member of the band, or if just one person announces each next song to the rest of the band, but work out what you’re gonna do before you get on stage.  If you’re worried about stage fright, then the last place you want to be is stuck in front of an audience looking at each other, thinking “what are we gonna play next?”

Be well rested

Get a good night’s sleep before hand.  And if you can avoid it, then try not to exhaust yourself mentally or physically before you’re due to go on stage.

Eat well

Eat a good healthy meal at least an hour before you’re due to play.  Don’t cheat with quick snacks or junk food, and don’t overeat either.  If you’re prone to stress about a show, then it’s very easy to forget about food and just end up grabbing something in a rush while you’re getting everything else ready.  But you’ll play much better if you take the time to eat well, you’ll deal with anxiety better and you’ll put more energy into your performance too.

Don’t get drunk

I’m not gonna tell you not to drink at all.. I like to have a beer when I’m playing a show.  It’s okay to have a drink before you get on stage, and have one when you’re up there.  If you feel like it helps smooth you out, then all the better.  But getting drunk before you’re due to play increases your chances of making an idiot of yourself in front of an audience.  If you wanna drink up then save it for after the show.. or if you have to drive home after the gig then save it for another day.

Turn stage fright into excitement and adrenaline

When stage nerves hit you, it’s pretty tough to switch off the racing heart and rapid thoughts.  But if you stop thinking of it as fear, and think of it as excitement and anticipation, then it’s relatively easy to seperate yourself from the anxiety and worry that could otherwise stop you enjoying yourself.

Mistakes happen

How you handle them is what matters.  If you seize up and lose the beat, a simple mistake can end up ruining a song.  If you don’t let it phase you, there’s a good chance that nobody will even notice.

Stay in the moment and have fun

Worrying about things won’t make you play any better.  Hopefully you’re playing music you enjoy.. if you let go and allow yourself to enjoy it, then there’s a good chance you’ll shake off any stage nerves almost as soon as you get started.  Don’t get wrapped up in too many extraneous thoughts, or let your head fill up with the noise and clutter of self-praise or self-criticism.  Just play, and remember, music is meant to be fun

Technorati Tags: Learn electric guitar, Learn Guitar, playing live, stage fright

Heya.. happy new year everyone

To kick things off for the year, I have created an account on Flickr for the Learn Electric Guitar blog.  Flickr is a popular image hosting and sharing service.  What’s cool about having the exercises on Flickr is that, if people want to review some of the exercises I’ve written up without wading through all the text for a second time, then they can go to flickr and view the image files as a “set”, with each image in the set grouped together in the same place.  It saves having to scroll through all the category pages.  So far I’ve only got one set, which contains the images from the series of posts I’ve been writing on alternate picking.  But as I write exercises for other topics, I’ll start to add new sets.

The learnelectricguitar flickr profile can be found here - if you have your own flickr profile, please feel free to add us as a contact.  To see the images click on the link marked “photostream”.  Some more lessons coming very soon, hope you’re all having a killer 2009.

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Another alternate picking exercise:

Click here for full-size image

This is a bit different to the exercises I posted before - instead of being based on a blues scale, it involves a suspended second arpeggio shape repeated across the strings and descending chromatically. Be careful to practice it very slowly to begin with, and speed up gradually. Because this is an alternate picking exercise, all of the arpeggios beginning on the A string start with an upstroke, so be careful not to start them with a downstroke (which is very easy to do if you don’t pay attention). This exercise involves a lot of stretching towards the end, it might be a bit much for some people, so don’t worry if you can’t bring it all the way down to the first fret on your first try - keep playing through it and you will improve.

While this exercise in itself is not especially melodic, and has no tonal centre, the individual arpeggios are quite a nice little flavour to throw into a guitar solo. Hope you enjoy it, and merry christmas everyone

Technorati Tags: Alternate Picking, arpeggios, guitar exercises, Learn Guitar

I haven’t added any exercises here in a while.. though I do plan to get one more post on alternate picking exercises before christmas.  In the meantime, check out these licks from Jon over at Guitar Noize.

He’s written up some string skipping exercises, they are written out legato though as he suggests, you could have a try at playing through the first one with alternate picking.  The second one is quite a stretch.. if you find it difficult then you can start it by playing the shape 3 or 5 frets up and stop when you run out of fretboard the sliding tap.  Then bring it back a fret at a time as you get used to the stretch, adding the tapping and then finally the open string.

If you try either exercise and reckon it’s cool then leave him a comment telling him what you thought, cos he does run an excellent blog over there

Technorati Tags: guitar exercises, guitar noize, Learn Guitar

I was looking at my website stats just before and I saw that someone had arrived here by searching for the phrase: “what age to learn electric guitar”, and I thought to myself “well, just about any age really.”

Small children can have problems with full size electric guitars, getting a 3/4 size or 1/2 size guitar will make it easier for them.  Electric guitars are often better than acoustic or classical guitars, as the large body of the latter can make playing very awkward.  For very small children under about 6 a ukulele might be a better choice to start with, because they can be bought very cheaply, they are not so challenging for young hands, and it’s very easy to play whole chords with just one or two fingers.  A lot of the skills they learn on that can be transferred straight over to the guitar.  Learning a seemingly unrelated instrument like piano or trumpet can help with reading music, and basic concepts like keys and scales (violin is particularly good for developing an ear for pitch).  If you are getting an electric guitar for a young child, try to start them off an a light gauge of strings, ideally no heavier than .009 - .042.  Electric guitar strings are made of metal and can be tough on the hands and finger tips for any beginner, but particularly for little kids.

If you’re worried you’re too old to start, you’ve got to have a think about what you want out of the instrument.  If you’re learning because you want to be on MTV, and you’re already in your mid-twenties or later, then you’ve probably left it a bit too late for that.  Then again, the chances of pop stardom can be vanishingly slim at any age, and it often has very little to do with ability on the guitar.  If you’re wanting to learn the electric guitar because you actually like the instrument, you want to create music for its own sake, or you just think you might have fun playing in a band, then you don’t need to worry about being too old.  Worrying about being too old to learn is actually kind of pointless really, because you can hardly wait around to become young again.  Right now you’re as young as you’re ever going to be, so if you’re worrying that you might be too old then you’d better start now

Technorati Tags: Learn electric guitar, what age to learn guitar

Do you ever sit down to practice.. tune up.. plug your guitar into your amp.. start playing and then think “i’m sure it sounded better yesterday“?  So then you start switching pickups, play with the gain knob.. okay, that’s sounding harsh now, I’ll wind back the treble.. okay it needs a bit more attack, I better play with the presence.. maybe what i need to do is move to the neck pickup and put the treble back on.. some more mids maybe..  before you know it, 20 minutes has gone by, and you haven’t even started on what you wanted to play.

Or perhaps you have an amp simulator, with 128 presets, all of which you can customise.. and many of them sound great, but not quite perfect.  As a teenager I had a little zoom pedal to which I devoted hours of my life just sitting there, playing with my settings.  And there’s actually nothing wrong with playing with sounds and seeing what you can come up with.  It can be great fun, and it’s usually a good idea to try to sound the best you can with the equipment that you’ve got.. whether it’s cheap and cheerful, or some seriously high-end gear.

But if you’re trying to get in some  practice time, you’ve gotta avoid doing this every time you sit down with the guitar.  Especially if you are a busy person (let’s face it, who isn’t?), and you’ve gone to special efforts to set aside 20 or 30 minutes in the day to play.. you really want to make the most out of the time you’ve got.

One thing you can do is just not plug into anything at all.  This is how I practice when I’m at home.. after I’ve tuned the guitar, I’ll rip the cable out and just play.  An unplugged electric guitar is not very loud, but it’s loud enough to compete with the usual household background noise of televisions, pets, telephone conversations and so on.  What’s great about playing like this is that the only way you can change your tone is by changing how you use your pick and fingers.  There’s nothing else to fuss around with, and that makes you a better player.  Despite all the guitar amps and speaker cabinets I have cluttering up my house (at last count I had 6 amps, 3 cabs, 1 hardware and 1 software amp simulator), I do almost all of my practice unplugged, and this is what I recommend to my students too.

If you do want to plug in when you practice, do try to keep in mind that the sky is not going to fall in just because you don’t sound like the guitarist on your favourite CD.  You’re recording an album and you’re not playing live.  Most of the time, it’s best to practice just with a clean tone with no effects, using a balanced EQ with plenty of midrange.  Even if you are practicing punk or metal, try not to use a lot of distortion on your sound.  It’s not a great idea because it hides your mistakes, which stops you from being precise with what you play.  When you’re practicing two-handed tapping, you can benefit from a little bit of gain or compression.. but try not to overuse it.  It’s better to hear your mistakes than to hide them, at least when you’re practicing.

Technorati Tags: guitar tone, Learn electric guitar, practice tips