Acoustic Guitar Finger Picking Lesson

Today's post is a video lesson showing you how to perform a basic finger picking pattern.

Finger picking is an enjoyable way to strum your guitar and create soft relaxing music. I like to play a little finger picking in the evening to end a busy day, it always helps me to wind down. Finger picking is also a good way to get more out of beginner open guitar chords.

Before you take a look at the video, here are a couple of key points you could pay attention to so that you'll be successful as you try finger picking yourself.

1. Start with only one chord. This will make it simpler to keep your attention on your picking fingers.

2. Start slowly. If you start too fast you'll get your fingers in a knot.

3. One pattern at a time. Master each pattern thoroughly before moving on.

Got that? Now let's take a look at the video - don't forget your guitar to play along.



Sounds pretty good, doesn't it.

Remember to take things slowly and keep it simple by working on one pattern and one fixed chord. Invest a little time to practice - it's a great alternative to TV to relax in the evening - and you'll soon learn to play faster and introduce more sophisticated patterns.

Gary

Video lesson from Next Level Guitar.

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.

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Learn Guitar: 5 Ways to Deal With Stuck Progress

Are you struggling to get your guitar progress into gear? If you're frustrated by the feeling you are stuck in neutral then here are five tips to help you shift up to a new level of playing. Fasten your seatbelt, and let's go for a ride...

From time to time as you learn guitar you will be frustrated as your playing gets stuck on a plateau. Worse, this plateau will sometimes feel lower than previous playing levels. But don't despair, here are five tips to help you get to grips with your learning plateau and grow to reach new levels of guitar playing.

Get Mad

Give vent to your feelings. If your lack of progress makes you feel mad, then yell. Sad? Then cry. Whatever the bad feelings you have about your progress give them an expression.

If you keep the bad feelings and frustration inside they'll grow and undermine your confidence. Of course, don't do anything to anybody you'd regret later. No road rage, yell and cry with yourself only.

Find a comfortable space and give your feelings full course for ten or fifteen minutes. That should be enough to empty all or most of the bad feeling. Then sit down and calmly work out what you will do to work through your progress plateau.

Relax

After getting mad and letting go of your frustration it's a good idea to wind down and relax. Do some breathing exercises, stretch, take a walk and get some fresh air. Or maybe just enjoy a film or some other relaxing activity.

Immerse yourself completely in pleasurable activities and forget about guitar practice. When you feel the urge to play again your relaxed mood will let your playing flow more easily.

Let Yourself Play

When you do pick up and play again don't start with high expectations. Swap Formula 1 racing for a quiet Sunday afternoon drive. Let yourself simply PLAY with the guitar and enjoy what you know already. Go back and have fun as you play through songs you've learned well already.

When you've had enough of playing them all, go back to your practice schedule and pick up again.

A Change Is Gonna Come

Often a plateau is a sign that some kind of change is going on, only you can't see it yet. Keep on with your practice and you will discover a new level of playing on the other side of the plateau. When you look back you'll probably wonder what you made all the fuss about.

Don't Give Up

However you deal with your plateau don't let it cheat you into giving up. Challenges to your confidence and persistence are a part of the learning process. The only way you can fail to get better at playing guitar is when you give up.

Now, signal, check your mirror, engage first gear, and cruise on to a better guitar future...

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.

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Photo by ChrisDownUK.

Easy Ways to Play F Chord With No Bar

Here are two different ways to play the F chord without having to make a bar (or barre). Most guitar learners have trouble with the F chord when they come across it. The bar across the first fret is very difficult to make without first developing good technique and finger strength.

But the F chord doesn't have to be so hard when you know that there are different ways to play the F chord. In the rest of this lesson you will learn two fingerings to play the F chord without making a bar.

Firstly you are going to learn a simple three finger position to play notes from the F bar chord at fret one. Then we'll have a look at another F chord fingering based on the simple open D chord you can use a little higher up the neck.

F Chord 3 Finger Version

The first way to play an F chord without making the bar is to play only the three notes shown in the diagram below.

 x|---|---|---|
  |-1-|---|---|
  |---|-2-|---|
  |---|---|-3-|
 x|---|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|

It can take a little practice to place your fingers across three frets like this, but until your fingers are stronger it's less of a struggle than making a bar.

Here's a little trick you can use to get a good sound. Lean your index finger down towards the bottom string so that you touch the first string with the side of the finger tip. This muffles the first string so it doesn't ring out when you strum. If you sound the first string E note then you'll end up playing an Fmaj7 chord instead.

F Chord from D Shape

You can also play the F chord a little further up the neck using the familiar D chord shape shown below.

 5th
 fret
  |-2-|---|---|
  |---|-3-|---|
  |-1-|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|

You may have learned this fingering at the second fret to form a D major chord. But you can also move it up three frets to the fifth fret and it becomes an F chord. Check the notes on the third, second and first strings: C, F, A - the fifth, root, and third of the F major chord.

Note that the open fourth string remains a D when you move this fingering up the neck so you should avoid picking this string when you play the F chord.

You can optionally play the F root note in the bass at the 3rd fret. To do this use the fingering shown below - it takes quite a stretch so you might need some time to make it. Start by learning to make the basic three finger shape using the second, third and fourth fingers of your fretting hand. When you can do this easily then you can try to add the root note with the first finger.

  |---|---|-3-|---|
  |---|---|---|-4-|
  |---|---|-2-|---|
  |-1-|---|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|---|
 x|---|---|---|---|

Conclusion

Now you know two different ways to play F chords without making a bar. This should make it easier for you to play those favourite songs that have F chords in them.

Gary



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Photo by Al Jordan.

Guitar Lick Dictionaries

A guitar lick dictionary is a book or DVD that shows example guitar licks in a given style. A lick dictionary is a great tool to help you move from playing scales to playing solos as you learn to improvise.

Playing lead guitar parts and solos is not simply a matter of playing scales. You must learn to choose notes from scales and assemble them into short sequences, called licks. And as usual one of the best ways to learn to do this is to copy from those who already know how. That's where licks dictionaries come in useful.

You can find many licks dictionaries for all styles of music. You can learn the licks by heart to use them in your own playing and you can also study them to learn how to make up your own. Being able to copy licks like this is a great shortcut to creating lead guitar parts in your chosen style.

Here is a small selection of guitar lick dictionaries you will find helpful in rock and blues styles.

Blues Licks

Blues Licks Encyclopedia: Guitar, Wayne Riker, Alfred

150 Cool Blues Licks in Tab, Toby Wine, Cherry Lane Music

101 Must-Know Blues Licks, Wolf Marshall, Hal Leonard

Blues by the Bar: Cool Riffs That Sound Great over Each Portion of the Blues Progression, Chris Hunt, Cherry Lane Music

Complete Book of Blues Guitar Licks and Phrases, Austin Sicard, Mel Bay

Lead Guitar Blues Licks Arsenal

Rock Licks

101 Must-Know Rock Licks, Wolf Marshall, Hal Leonard

Lead Licks: Over 200 Licks in All Styles, Wolf Marshall, Hal Leonard

Rock Licks Encyclopedia, Cataldo & Tomas, Alfred

Rock Licks for Guitar, Joe McIntyre, Hal Leonard

500 Lead Guitar Licks and Riffs500 Lead Guitar Licks and Riffs


Copy licks from the dictionaries to learn how to create your own and for inspiration. Borrow licks and transform them with your personal touches for your own playing.

Have fun learning and using these licks to make up your own guitar solos.

Gary

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Guitar Practice Routines

The Not Playing Guitar archive is gathering quite a lot of articles on guitar practice routines. This page provides a handy index to make them easier to find.

I'll be updating the list from time to time as more posts appear so remember to bookmark this page for future reference.

• 7 Ways to Make Guitar Practice Fun

• Chord Change Practice Drills

• Two Chord Guitar Practice Routine

• Instant Guitar Practice Routine

• Guitar Practice: Never Be Stuck for Ideas Again

• Guitar Practice Routine: Throw Some Meat In

• Guitar Practice Routine: The Album Approach

• Guitar Practice Routine: Songs First

• Guitar Practice Routine: Three Stages

• Guitar Practice Routine: Hamburger's Tips

• Guitar Practice Routine: Interval Training

• Guitar Practice Routine: Get Started

• Aristotle's Guitar Practice Routine

Be informed about future posts on this topic for free. Register for updates from Not Playing Guitar delivered by email or to your RSS reader.

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.

Photo by lucas.

Guitar Practice: Use Chord Progressions

Chord progressions are an excellent tool to organize your guitar practice. Knowledge of different progressions and skill to play them will help you learn and remember songs more easily.

A chord progression is simply a series of chords played one after another that create a characteristic sound. The verses, chorus, bridge and other parts of songs are simply chord progressions played one or more times.

Understand the Musical Landscape

Chord progressions shape the musical landscapes of songs, giving each its characteristic sound. Working with the language of chord progressions as you practice is an excellent way to ensure your practice is musical and not simply a series mechanical finger exercises.

As you become familiar with the language of chord progressions you will unlock many songs that you can play easily with the same progressions you play in your guitar practice. Your ears will also learn to recognize the sound of the chord progressions you practice when they occur in music you hear.

Organizing Your Practice Session

Here are some steps to building a practice session from a chord progression.

Pick a progression

Pick one chord progression to work with for your practice session. One progression might not sound a lot, but as we'll see one progression can already give you plenty of work.

Play the Progression in all Orders

Play your chosen progression through a few times in the normal order. Then re-organize the chords into other possible orders and work through them again.

For example, if you choose to practice I-IV-V progressions then you can play them in several different orders: I-IV-V, IV-V-I, V-IV-I, I-V-IV, etc.

Playing the progression in different orders has two benefits.

1. You practice chord changes that don't occur in the normal order, e.g. I to V and V to IV.
2. Your ears experience hearing all the different changes between the progression's chords.

Play the Progression in All Keys

As well as playing the progression in different orders you can also play it in different keys. This will provide yet more chord changes for your fingers to work on and develop your ears further. You'll be able to play and recognize the progression in a larger number of songs.

As a minimum aim to practice your progression in the five common guitar keys - A, C, D, E, and G. If you are the over-achiever type then you can practice the progression in all twelve keys of the chromatic scale.

An Ideal Building Block for Guitar Practice

Chord progressions are an excellent building block for your guitar practice. They are one of the main ingredients of the songs you will learn and play.

Guitar practice built around chord progressions is good musical training. It will give your chord changes a good workout, train your ears and develop skills for playing in many musical situations.

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.

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Photo by Dan Zen.

Two-Chord Songs: Feelin' Alright

Dave Mason is one of the unsung heroes of rock music. He has played with some of the biggest names in the history of rock, Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, Fleetwood Mac, Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones..., but his name is unfamiliar to most of us.

He wrote today's two-chord song "Feelin' Alright" with Traffic in the sixties and it has since been covered by more than 48 artists, including a well-known version recorded by Joe Cocker.



In the words of Mason, "I was trying to write the simplest thing I could - it was just two chords. The song is about unrequited love. Hate songs are love songs. I write mostly about that because it never changes."

The two chords are simply a C7 and an F7 played alternately for one bar each over the verses and chorus. But even though the song has only two chords, that doesn't mean there's nothing interesting to learn. A well designed Feelin' Alright lesson over at Guitar Noise shows you how to turn this seemingly simple two-chord song into a thorough rhythm guitar workout. As the lesson shows, sometimes less can be more.

Note that in the lesson the song is transposed to the key of E. You can find the lyrics and chords in the original key at the Ultimate Guitar site, Feelin' Alright.

To learn more about Dave Mason and what he's up to these days read this interesting article on recent concerts published by Laughlin Entertainer.

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.


Learn acoustic guitar with 153 step by step video lessons, acoustic jam tracks, ear training and music reading software. From beginner through to advanced player with Jamorama Acoustic complete learning system.

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Learn Guitar: 7 Steps Beyond Playing Tabs

Several guitar learners recently asked me how to progress beyond learning and playing songs from tab or chord files. Here are a few ideas to build your musical knowledge and develop your own creative ability.

To go beyond simply playing from other people's notation you need to deepen your knowledge of music. When you understand the language of music you can create your own and join the musical conversations you hear.

Learn The Language

Get yourself some books and study music theory. Music theory describes the rules and common patterns of the language of music, a bit like grammar lessons in everyday language.

Music theory allows you to think and express yourself in musical terms, just like you think and express your thoughts in spoken language. You'll create your own lines and arrangements or even compose your own songs.

Ear Training Just as you can't understand Italian only by studying books you can't learn music without learning to hear the words and sentences.

Develop your ear skills to understand the music you hear. This skill will help you to transfer your musical ideas from your head to your instrument.

Improvising

Improvising is a skill that takes a lot of time and practice to master. But it's worth the effort to experience the freedom of creating music as you play.

You can learn to improvise and create solos, fills, and licks to play around and over chord progressions.

Chord Knowledge

You can never have enough knowledge of chords. There are a huge variety of different ways to plays chords on the guitar, so you'll always be able to learn something new.

Learn about new chord forms, inversions, and substitutions, work them into your playing to create your own little parts instead of simply playing the tab.

Rhythm Skills

Learn to play with rhythms to transform and recreate music. Take a song you know and play its chord progression in another style. Play a rock song in slow blues time, or turn a country song into a funky groove.

Arranging

Use your knowledge of music theory to change songs you know. This is called arranging. You can learn to play songs in different keys, or mess with the chords a bit. Use your theory knowledge to replace passages of two or more bars on the same chord with some chord substitutions.

Compose

Compose some songs of your own. Make up a chord progression, a rhythm pattern, a melody. This will help you to learn more about song structure and form.

Pick a simple repetitive chord progression, play it and improvise words over it. Don't worry about making sense, just try out words that fit over the music.

These seven ideas offer lots of different ways to break out of the habit of simply learning and playing tab. It will take time and patience to develop them but you can gain new musical freedom and express yourself.

What about you? What suggestions do you have for a guitar learner who wants to move beyond learning and playing tabs? Share your ideas in a comment.

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.

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Photo by cecilawong812.

Video Guitar: Summertime

I love this acoustic solo guitar version of Summertime I discovered on You Tube. Hope you enjoy it too...



View Summertime video on You Tube from nickrubberneck.

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.

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Play Guitar - Why Do You Make Mistakes?

Many of the playing mistakes you make when you play guitar arise not from a lack of skill, but because you're unsure what comes next. When it's not crystal clear in your mind what you're going to play next you often end up making an error.

Develop detailed knowledge of the songs you play, really memorize them, and you will be able to play with more confidence, make fewer mistakes, and enjoy playing more.

Would you like to build that kind of song knowledge? Learn how in my article Learn Guitar Songs Faster over on the Jemsite blog.

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.

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Guitar Improvisation: A Kick Start Guide

Here's a selection of activities you can perform to get started with guitar improvisation. This is in response to a question recently left by a reader who commented,

"On a side note, could you recommend what is best to open up to guitar more, instead of just reading and playing tabs? I am not very confident with solos, and improvising is something I really want to nail but I find myself just going up and down through scales, not really knowing what to do or which note to hit next."

There are many different ways to get your creative juices going and go beyond playing up and down scales. Try some of the suggestions below to discover which ones suit you.

1 - Experiment with jam tracks

Get some jam tracks and play whatever your can over them. If you can only play the scales up and down then start with that.

Listen to the way the notes sound over the backing track. Gradually experiment different ways of playing the scale notes and use your ears to choose what sounds good to you.

2 - Start with blues soloing

The 12 bar blues progression is standardised. This makes it easier to memorize so you'll know where you are in the progression and learn to anticipate the chord changes.

There are also fewer wrong notes in the blues. If you play a "wrong" note of the scale you won't cause too much damage. You can even get bonus points if you learn to play the wrong notes well enough.

3 - Make up licks in advance

Making up decent licks at the same time as playing is probably too many things to do at once when you begin. You can make things easier for your brain if you create some licks on paper first.

Write out a few one or two bar licks, then learn to play them by heart. Now play them over a jam track and alternate your prepared licks with an improvised response. Create the response by modifying the original lick in some way.

4 - Work three or four notes at a time

Instead of a whole scale pick only three or four notes to focus on. Make up licks and improvise with these notes and learn to get as much as you can out of them.

5 - Use a licks dictionary

Shop for a dictionary of licks in the style you want to play. This will give you more lick ideas to use in the exercises above. You can also analyse the licks to learn how they have been created. What scales are used? Which notes end phrases? How are long and short notes used?

6 - Start with melodies

An alternative to a licks dictionary is to learn melodies to some simple songs. Nursery rhymes or songs you know really well are good material for this (try to discover the melodies by ear if you can).

Play the melody and then play a variation, adding your own personal inspirations around it. You can also pick phrases of one to four bars in length from the melody and work with those in the same way as the licks you make up on paper.

7 - Learn from your heroes

Copy some licks from players you admire or want to emulate. You don't have to learn whole solos note for note, simply pick a few phrases from a tab or songbook. Then make up similar phrases of your own by changing a note here or there, modifying the rhythm or emphasis.

8 - Use chord notes

Make up some licks using notes from the chords of the progression you improvise over. You'll find this gives you some new sounds and makes a change from playing the same scale.

Experiment with one or more of these approaches and you should find yourself going beyond playing up and down scales. Learn to build interesting licks and string them together and you'll soon be building pleasing solos.

Gary

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Video Guitar Lesson: Stand By Me

In today's post I'm sharing a video lesson that shows a cool finger style arrangement of Stand By Me. The arrangement is not too hard but should give a fun challenge to you if you're moving from beginner to intermediate guitar.



As well as a great video Sawlon has also kindly provided a Power Tab version of his arrangement of Stand By Me you can download from Ultimate Guitar.

If you enjoy this arrangement then visit Sawlon's YouTube channel to see more. Meanwhile, enjoy learning and playing this great sounding arrangement.

Gary

Learn acoustic guitar with 153 step by step video lessons, acoustic jam tracks, ear training and music reading software. From beginner through to advanced player with Jamorama Acoustic complete learning system.

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