It's Not WHAT You Play, It's HOW You Play It

It's Not WHAT You Play, It's HOW You Play It

If you are like most guitar students, you want to acquire more skills and knowledge about guitar playing. You want more things to learn, practice and play.

Our appetite for MORE is what pushes us to keep learning, but it often also prevents us from ever feeling truly satisfied. Why? ... 

 

Guitar Playing Tip 5 - How To Improve Your Picking

Guitar Playing Tip #5 is about improving your picking

 

In order to pick faster, you need to think about several basic components.    

 

The efficiency of your picking motion:    

 

- You do NOT need to pick with the least amount of motion  per note. 

- You do NOT need to use the least amount of force per note.  

 

How To Play Faster Without Becoming Tired

How To Play Faster Without Becoming Tired

Many guitarists mistakenly believe the key to playing without getting tired is developing more hand strength or endurance, or playing with as little tension as possible.  

Guitar Playing Tip #3 - How to instantly increase your speed

Guitar Playing Tip #3 - How to instantly increase your speed   

The first thing you need to realize is that learning to play fast is NOT about learning to “move your hands faster”.  It is much more about learning to make your motions smooth and efficient.    

Also, playing with thin gauge strings and low action (low height of strings from the frets), is NOT going to make you play faster.    

One of the things that will help you improve your speed is to focus on the synchronization, which is training your picking and fretting hands to work together.    

Even if you never developed the ability to move your hands any faster, you would still improve your maximum guitar playing speed by making your 2-hand synchronization more precise.  

And after you do synchronize your hands very well, any increase in speed for each hand will result in a much higher overall speed increase.    

Guitar Playing Tip 2 - How To Improve Your Guitar Playing When You Have Little Time To Practice

How to improve your guitar playing when you have little time to practice. 

 

Think about all the things that you have to practice in order to reach your musical goals. Some of things require that you  have a guitar in your hand (such as practicing string bending) and other things will not (such as fretboard memorization).   

 

You can learn, study, review or practice some things away from the guitar. When you do this you are able to spend 100% of your actual ‘guitar playing’ time on things that require you to physically play.   

 

For example, let's say you need to improve in these areas:   

 

Fretboard Memorization 

Aural Skills (ear training) 

Songwriting 

Improvisation 

Music Theory

Rhythm (timing) 

Various Guitar Techniques    

 

How to memorize the notes of the guitar fretboard

If you ask 10 guitar players what they do to try to memorize the fretboard, you may hear 10 different answers.

Fact is, most of these methods are probably pretty good, however, even the best of these are going to be limited in their ability to enable you to instantly recall notes, chord shapes, scales,
arpeggios, patterns etc. with zero hesitation…

Here is your Guitar Playing Tip #1 – Playing with Conviction

As you know, to improve our guitar technique we need to pay careful attention to the physical hand motions in order to play cleaner, faster, and more precise. 

And when we do practice   this way, we can greatly improve our guitar playing over time...