Learn Guitar: Audacity Free Practice Software

Audacity is a free digital audio editor written by a team of volunteer developers around the world. It supports mp3, wave and most other popular audio file formats. Audacity is available for Windows 98 and newer, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix like operating systems.

That's the technical bit out of the way. Now let's take a look at the features that will help you as a guitarist.

How Does Audacity Help You Learn Guitar?

Here is a quick run down of Audacity's features for guitar players...

1. Click tracks

In the Generate menu you can generate an audio track that plays clicks at any tempo and beats per bar. Play back the click track and you have a metronome.

The nice thing about the click track is that you can record yourself as you play over it and listen to the two tracks side by side. This makes it easy for you to hear how well you kept time.

2. Record Your Guitar

Audacity gives you an easy and flexible way to record your guitar by simply plugging in to the microphone or line jack of your PC (You'll need a 6.5 mm to 3.5 mm jack cable).

You can easily record tracks and mix them together. You can record your own backing and play solo parts over it for example.

You can also mix your guitar tracks with CDs from your music collection, jam tracks, or a drum or bass track.

Audacity also has a number of useful effects that you can apply to your guitar recordings (note that these are not available for real-time playback through the computer), compressor, echo, equalization, phaser, wah wah, delay, reverb, limiter, tremolo...

3. Play with Songs or Jam Tracks

With Audacity you can also record your guitar track as you play along to a jam track or a song. Listen to the recording to hear how well you did.

You can import music and backing tracks from mp3 and Windows Media Audio files as well as CD.

4. Change Tempo or Pitch

You can change the tempo of any piece without changing its pitch.

Change the tempo to slow down those tricky passages for study or to play along with them at a more comfortable speed.

If you want to play a song in a different key than the original then you can also change the pitch without altering the tempo. This comes in handy for those songs played with a guitar detuned a half step or with a capo.

Of course, if you want to change both pitch and speed then you can.

5. Looping

Another handy tool for studying difficult passages, or simply to jam on a short chord sequence is looped playback. You can loop any track or mix of tracks by simply holding down the shift key as you press the play button. You can loop only part of a track by selecting it with the mouse before you start playback.

Audacity's pitch and tempo changes can also be used on the looped section.

6. Export Tracks

The ability to create and play loops, control their tempo and pitch is already handy to have on your PC, but you can also take the jam tracks and loops you create with you to practice elsewhere.

You can export any track or loop you create as an audio file. Copy the files to a portable player or burn a CD and you can use them wherever you practice.

I like to use this to create practice tracks at different tempos to copy to my mp3 player. This way I can work on a piece and gradually increase speed as I practice.

Where do I get it?

In conclusion, you'll find Audacity an essential tool for many guitar practice needs. It is easy to use and costs nothing, so what have you got to lose?

You can download Audacity at the project web site http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/.

Gary

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original guitar content for your web sites. Discover guitar writing services for web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.

If you enjoyed this post sign-up for more free guitar tips from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

Beginner Guitar: 3 Classic Mistakes

There are many traps and pitfalls that can discourage the guitar beginner and slow your progress. Here are three common errors that many beginners make, and suggestions on how to avoid or solve them.

#1 Not Getting Into A Practice Habit

The best way to ensure you get off to a good start and set the foundation for continued growth as a guitar player is to make guitar practice a daily habit.

Many beginner guitar players fail to practice every day. You might not think that missing a day here or there matters much. But a day easily becomes two, then three, and before you know it you get to the end of the week and you haven't practiced.

You must set aside a regular time for your practice and stick to it. When you practice every day you learn faster. It's plain and simple, yet so many fail to do it.

Practice every day for long enough you'll develop a habit that will be harder to break. You'll start to miss your guitar on days when you can't practice.

#2 Playing Too Much

Although daily practice is important for beginner guitar players you don't have to play for hours.

Just like when you start an exercise program you need to build up gradually. If you try to play for hours every day you will end up hurting yourself. You will also have a good chance of becoming fed up with your new instrument and have less of an urge to play.

Start slowly and in small doses. Stop after 20 or 30 minutes to leave yourself with curiosity and enthusiasm to pick up your instrument again and learn more next time.

#3 Giving Up

Burn out is not the only reason many beginner guitarists give up. Starting to learn guitar is hard, your first efforts will probably be quite frustrating. You have to get through the sore finger tips, muffled and buzzing notes, false notes, uneven rhythms and all the other problems guitar playing presents you with.

It can be a long way from the image of yourself as a guitar hero, effortlessly playing songs, that you might have had in mind when you decided to learn guitar.

In this period it is easy to start thinking that playing the guitar is impossible. Or maybe that you're not good enough and don't have the talent. At this point a lot of beginner guitar players simply give up.

But you must know that playing the guitar is possible and that talent has little to do with it. You really only need one thing, and that is to persist.

All those players who give up will fulfill their own prophecy. Yes, it is impossible to play guitar if you don't do it.

But if you practice and play then you can be sure that you will learn to play better and better. It might take you a long time, it took almost every guitar player a long time, but one day you will become that great guitar player that enthralls listeners that inspired you to start in the first place.

Now you know how to avoid these three classic beginner guitar mistakes.

1. Not practicing regularly enough. Develop a daily practice habit.

2. Playing too much. Take it in small doses and build up gradually.

3. Giving up. Simply keep going and you will make it.

If you avoid these three traps you can enjoy a satisfying experience as you learn guitar. It's great fun to join the ranks of those who can play a few tunes, or more, and entertain yourself, your family and friends, and other people.

Gary

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original content for your guitar web sites. Discover guitar writing services for web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.

If you enjoyed this post sign-up for more free guitar tips from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

Photo by TheGirlsNY.

Learn Guitar Fretboard: 4 Ways to Mastery

What does it take to learn your guitar fretboard? You can find many offers of different learning systems but I think the thing that works best is to mix approaches.

Knowledge of the fretboard is most useful when you can apply it. It isn't enough to simply teach your mind the notes on the different strings and frets. You must also teach them to your fingers and show them how to find their way around the fretboard. You must transform knowledge of note names into things your fingers can play, intervals, and chord and scale patterns.

When you mix different learning approaches you learn more easily because you stimulate different channels in your mind. You also get the benefit of learning to apply note knowledge so you can use it to create music, which is of course the goal of learning the fretboard in the first place.

Here are four main approaches you can use to learn your guitar fretboard.

1. Learn The Notes

There are many ways to learn the names of the notes. You can learn simply through repetition of the names by string and by fret.

Many learning tricks can make it easier to memorize the notes. For example, you can imagine frets of different colors to help you find your place on the fretboard. You can assign animals, friends, or any other memorable object to frets to give your mind hooks to hang its knowledge of notes on.

You can also do lots of exercises easily in your mind so you can learn anytime and any place without using up your valuable guitar practice time.

2. Learn Interval Shapes

Interval shapes help you to create short cuts to memorizing the notes on the fretboard. Intervals help because the same notes occur in fixed relations with respect to one another all over the fretboard.

This fact can be exploited to help you quickly identify any note in relation to a few easy to remember reference points on the fretboard. Good shapes to use for this technique are the octave, thirds and fifth.

3. Learn Chord Patterns

Learn the names and degrees of each note in the chords you know. This knowledge will help you to easily identify notes on the fretboard.

Moveable chord forms such as bar chords or the CAGED system are particularly effective for this. You can use the chord positions to quickly find any note on the fretboard.

Fred Sokolow's Fretboard Roadmaps series is also a good place to discover patterns of chords around the fretboard that will help you to quickly locate any type of chord you need.

4. Learn Scale Patterns

In a similar fashion, moveable scale patterns can be used all over the neck to help you find and play notes too.

Pay attention to the interval and scale degree relationships between notes in the chord patterns you learn. As you practice scales get into the habit of reciting note names, scale degrees or intervals as you play each note.

This will soon build a good knowledge of all these three ways of thinking of notes and scales. You will be able to find notes quickly and easily.

Conclusion

A combination of learning techniques is the most effective way to learn your guitar fretboard. With a little time and patience you can train both your mind and fingers to identify any note on the fretboard or find where to play notes and chords of the music you play.

Remember that you can use off-guitar time to work with many of these techniques while you perform mundane daily tasks. Use visualization or simply recite notes on strings or frets, or chord and scale positions out loud.

Gary

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original guitar content for your web sites. Discover guitar writing services for guitar web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.

If you enjoyed this post sign-up for more free guitar tips from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

Four Hand Guitar

Here's a style that could make a change from trying to get your usual two hands to obey your will. I'm not sure if four hands makes things easier or harder, though. What do you think?

Marche turque joué à 4 mains à la guitare
by yom_

Gary

If you enjoyed this post sign-up for more free guitar tips from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original content for your guitar web sites. Discover guitar writing services for web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.

Two Chord Song: Roadrunner

Do two chord songs have to be insignificant? Today's example at least shows that this is not always the case. Jonathan Richman's Roadrunner was ranked #269 in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

The song was also described by journalist Laura Barton as "one of the most magical songs in existence" (The Guardian, 2007).

Roadrunner is one of the most magical songs in existence. It is a song about what it means to be young, and behind the wheel of an automobile, with the radio on and the night and the highway stretched out before you. It is a paean to the modern world, to the urban landscape, to the Plymouth Roadrunner car, to roadside restaurants, neon lights, suburbia, the highway, the darkness, pine trees and supermarkets. As Greil Marcus put it in his book Lipstick Traces: "Roadrunner was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest."

The song's persistent rhythm pulses over only two chords, D and A. To play along to this song you can view the chords and words at Ultimate Guitar Archive, Roadrunner Chords.

Enjoy the song, and don't forget to sign-up for email or RSS reader updates to discover more two-chord songs and tips to help you learn guitar.

Gary

More Information

Learn more about the song Roadrunner at Wikipedia.
Roadrunner Chords at Ultimate Guitar Archive.

If you enjoyed this post sign-up for more free guitar tips from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original content for your guitar web sites. Discover guitar writing services for web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.

Summer Holidays

It's summertime for those of us here in the northern hemisphere, time for holidays. I'll be taking a well deserved break from Not Playing Guitar to head for the mountains for the next couple of weeks.


Before I go I want to apologize for the non-appearance of the promised tips on learning fretboard. Things have simply been too hectic in the run-up to my holidays and I couldn't get those finished.

To make up a little I want to share an article I read recently that offers some good advice on learning the fretboard through scales.

Here are a few highlights.

1. Learn one scale at a time, all over the fretboard.

2. Find out what scales you need for the music you want to play and focus on those.

3. Learn the names of the notes under your fingers, not just the fingering patterns. Learn the scale degrees of these notes too.

Scales and chords are a great tool to help you learn your fretboard. Not only do they provide "road signs" that will guide you to the notes you want to find, but they are usually what you want to end up playing from the notes anyway.

Read Guitar Scales 22 Fret System and try the exercises it describes for one way to create scale road maps for your guitar fretboard.

You'll find more tips to help you to learn your guitar fretboard towards the end of July after my return from holidays. Not Playing Guitar will also be taking a look at some more of these topics...

• Rhythm and strumming lessons


• Chord progressions


• Guitar soloing


• And blues guitar (with news of a special project for blues guitar fans...)
  
  

Sign-up for email or RSS reader updates so you won't miss anything.

Gary

Guitar article writing: Gary Fletcher writes quality, original content for your guitar web sites. Discover guitar writing services for web sites, blogs and newsletters. Visit http://www.writescribe.com/guitar to learn more.