Best of Not Playing Guitar 2010

The end of the year is approaching and I’m about to enjoy a well-earned Christmas break with my family.

 

Before packing the Christmas gifts to offer I’ve been reviewing some of the past year’s guitar information and thinking about what to discuss next year. It’s been fun and I’ve re-discovered plenty of interesting ideas.

 

I’ve picked one favourite idea from each month on the blog to share with you here. In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy Christmas.

 

• January - Make Transcribing Guitar Music Possible helped me to improve my transcribing skills this year. Maybe it’ll help you too?

 

• February - Get Guitar Practice Motivation in Your Pocket tells how the humble guitar pick can help you.

 

• March – We all dread making mistakes, but learn How to Recover From Mistakes and you can conquer your fear.

 

• April – Don’t be a fool, get your chords into shape with these 24 Guitar Chord Change Tips.

 

• May - 5 Easy Acoustic Guitar Songs From The 60s offers great songs from Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, and one of my own first ever guitar songs from Donovan.

 

• June - Could Tiger Woods Make You A Better Guitar Player?

 

• July – Looking for a fun, portable, practice tool? Check out the Guitar Player's Guide To The Ukulele

 

• August – Feeling a little tired at the end of the year? Try these 5 Ways To Rekindle Guitar Practice Enthusiasm

 

• September – Hmm, couldn’t decide between Four Golden Rules To Be A Better Guitarist or Do You Practice Guitar Like Rafael Nadal? I’ll let you make your own choice…

 

• October – Here’s a post that turned into the longest, and most helpful, set of comments on the site (thanks guys). What do you think, Guitar Soloing - Is It Worth Learning Modes?

 

• November – The end of the year has been way way way way busy for me, but these 6 Ways To Maintain Your Guitar Skills When You've Got No Time helped me keep sane.

 

• December – I learned a bunch of useful stuff this month in The Guitar Practice Habits of Aaron Matthies

 

If you’ve read all that, well thank you for your patience and attention. I’m honoured.

 

But you’ve wasted enough time Not Playing Guitar now though, so switch of that browser and get to practice. But before you go, if you’d like more good reasons to put off guitar practice and read instead, simply click here to sign up for free email notification when more guitar lessons are published.

3 Ways To Accelerate Your Musical Growth

As you learn to play guitar you need to develop not just your guitar skills but also your musical knowledge. Why? There are several good reasons.

 

First for me is that increased musical knowledge will help you to get more out of your instrument. The more you understand how music works the better the music you'll be able to create will be.

 

Another reason is that knowledge of different styles and the ideas of other musicians in the past and present will feed your own musical ideas and help prevent you from getting stale.

 

Both these reasons add up to one great result - playing music stays fun. And what's fun gets done.

 

OK, so if you agree that growing musically is a useful thing, how do you go about doing it? Read on to learn about 3 methods I'm sure you'll find effective…

 

Listen Widely

The first step to broadening your musical knowledge is to open your ears. Make efforts to seek out new music, music you wouldn't usually listen to.

 

Be careful to avoid the mistake of dismissing something after just one listen. Many times, I've found music I didn't like much on the first listen turns out to be highly enjoyable. And sometimes the reverse is true too.

 

Listening to new music is a good step, but for maximum benefit try to learn and play some unfamiliar pieces too. Learning to play the songs will give you more insight into how they're made than simply listening to them will.

 

Analyse Your Likes And Dislikes

So now you listen and learn to play songs and music that you didn't pay attention to before. You're off to a good start. But to get maximum benefit you need to ask yourself questions as you do this.

 

Analyse the songs or passages that you like or dislike to answer the question, "Why?".

 

Why do you like this piece, or dislike that one? What is it that makes a piece of music likeable to you? What is it you dislike? Get clear and specific about the answers - in musical terms.

 

Armed with this knowledge you might start to see some common patterns that will help you to forge your own musical identity.

 

Reach Out To Other Musicians

Here's a final tip that will bring huge benefits if you put it into practice. The best way to open your ears to listen more and to learn about new types of music is through meeting other musicians.

 

Your relationships with other musicians will give you more knowledge and ideas to develop into a better musician yourself. It might be just a lick that you learn from someone else, a new way of looking at something familiar, or the discovery of a whole new musical style.

 

Let me recap these three ways to grow your musicality.

 

1. Listen widely, open your ears to new ideas.

2. Question, and learn why you like or dislike something.

3. Share and develop relations with other musicians to develop yourself musically.

 

How about you? What is your favourite way to explore and learn more about music? Do some sharing here by leaving a comment.

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 5 – Crazy Wide String Skipping

In the final part of this series of picking exercises we’re going to look at some exercises that will have you jumping all over your guitar strings.

 

In earlier parts of the series you’ve worked through different alternate picking exercises. Picking notes on the same strings, picking notes on adjacent strings, skipping across strings, and exercise patterns that pick their way right across the fretboard.

 

This set of exercises takes things a step further giving your pick more of a challenge. As you’ll see in the tab below the series of exercises involves skipping across several strings in one go… and skipping back again.

 

 

I find it’s a real challenge to work on patterns like these. You can make up many more quite easily. But ensure that you work to a pre-defined pattern that you must play accurately, in rhythm and with correct timing.

 

If you just make up the pattern as you go along you could be tempted to cheat yourself and pass off your mistakes as improvisation.

 

Not that improvisation is a bad thing, but if your goal is to improve your picking accuracy and speed then you must have a clear target to aim for so you can evaluate how you did and measure your progress.

 

Work through these example patterns until you can pick them smoothly and in time with no mistakes. Start out at a moderate or slow tempo and increase speed gradually, take the time to master each tempo before speeding up some more.

 

A few minutes pick of exercise in your daily guitar practice routine is a good way to develop and maintain accurate and fast picking skills. Use and build on the ideas in this series to create your very own routine and become the picker you’d love to be.

 

If you enjoyed this post you might also like:

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 4 – Alternate Across The Fretboard

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 3 – String Skipping

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 2 – Adjacent Strings

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 1 - Alternate Picking

5 Easy Beginner Guitar Songs With Only 2 Chords

Here are five easy beginner guitar songs that you can play with only 2 chords.

If you’re just starting to learn guitar or you know someone who is, then these easy songs are just the ticket to help you get started playing some real songs quickly.

I know that when you first start out it can feel like an impossible task to master the three or four chords that most songs need. That’s where these easy songs make for a handy stepping stone to give you a smaller target to aim for and keep your motivation up.

These songs are a mix of traditional tunes and rock hits, I hope you’ll find something you enjoy.

Click on the links below to watch a video of the song and learn its chords. You can play all of these with any simple strumming pattern you choose.

1. Oasis – Songbird

A fun and simple song from Manchester rockers Oasis. The video also features my favourite guitar – a Gibson Hummingbird.

2. Donovan – Goldwatch Blues

Psychedelic folk rock from 60s Britain.

3. Joe Cocker – Feelin’ Alright

Unrequited love in only two chords.

4. Traditional - Hush Little Baby

An easy lullaby with a lovely melody that everybody knows.

5. Jonathon Richman – Roadrunner

The “most magical song in existence”? Some people think so.

If you’re just beginning to learn to play guitar look out for more easy two-chord songs to build your repertoire. My list of 85 two-chord guitar songs is a good place to find some more.

Guitar Christmas Gift Ideas #1 - 2011 Calendars

It's that time of year when us guitar players are all dreaming of a Christmas tree surrounded by great guitar presents. And (we hope) our non-guitar playing friends are looking for the perfect guitarist’s gift to offer us.

 

To help them out over the coming days Not Playing Guitar is sharing a few ideas on perfect Christmas gifts for guitar players to suit all budgets.

Today's gift idea for the guitarist in your life is a 2011 guitar wall calendar. A calendar is a gift that can help and please the guitarist in your life in at least three ways.

1. Boosts Motivation

 

It keeps a prominent reminder of their favourite instrument within sight to give their practice urge a daily boost.

2. Keeps Music In Mind

 

Keep them thinking about the music they’re learning and playing throughout the day. The constant reminder will be a source of new musical ideas or the inspiration for answers to playing problems they’re working on.

3. Dream And Enjoy

 

You might not be able to offer them that custom Gibson or Fender guitar they dream of, but they can admire one every day on their wall calendar.

 

That’s three good reasons why your significant guitarist will enjoy a guitar calendar under the Christmas tree.

 

And if you’re looking for another reason, well, it’s not guaranteed but they might just think about you too each time they look at the calendar you bought them…

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 4 – Alternate Across The Fretboard

How are your guitar picking skills coming along? If you’ve been working on the exercises in the first three parts of this series I hope you’re noticing some improvements in accuracy, and maybe even picking up a little speed. I know I am.

 

In this exercise we’re going to practice traversing the fret board, from the low strings to the high strings and back again.

 

Movement like this occurs a lot in scales and arpeggio patterns. It’s also useful when you play licks so you can rapidly climb from a low to a high note, or descend in the other direction.

 

The exercise comes in three parts, let’s take a look at the first one.

Remember to alternate down and up as you pick through the notes. The challenge here is to cleanly move from one string to the next as you alternate. Watch out for those double string jumps every fourth note.

 

The second part of this exercise is similar to the first, but we’re going to jump two strings per note.

When you’ve got those two patterns down it’s time to move on to the third exercise. This one takes the previous two and combines them into one exercise.

The trick here is to maintain a regular tempo as you move from one pattern to the next.

 

As you practice all these patterns you can easily create some simple variations to give your picking a harder workout.

• Start the first note on an up stroke
• Reverse the pattern by starting on the high strings

 

If you enjoyed this post you might also like:

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 3 – String Skipping

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 2 – Adjacent Strings

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 1 - Alternate Picking

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 3 – String Skipping

In today’s guitar picking exercise you’re going to practice skipping over strings as you alternate pick.

The exercise is shown in the tab below with open strings. You can of course combine the picking pattern with a scale pattern or a chord to create some more challenges for yourself.

Pick each pair of strings four times – down, up, down, up – before you move on to the next pair. When you reach the first string and then start to move back up the strings begin with a down stroke on the second string.

Notice that when you move up from the high to low strings you pick the higher note of each string pair on a down stroke and the lower note on an up stroke. This is the opposite of what you did as you work down the strings. The pick stroke symbols on the tab should help to remind you of this.

In the next part of the series we're going to look at some more complicated exercises to give your picking skills a good workout. Click here to sign up for free and be notified by email when more lessons are published.

Update: Now you can read and try these other parts of the series...

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 4 – Alternate Across The Fretboard
Guitar Picking Exercises Part 2 – Adjacent Strings Guitar Picking Exercises Part 1 - Alternate Picking

The Guitar Practice Habits of Aaron Matthies

Here is another opportunity for us to peek into someone else’s guitar practice habits. Today, Aaron Matthies, creator of Tempo Guitar Cards answers my questions on guitar practice.


Gary: Tell us a little about what are you currently working on…

Aaron: At the moment I’m really focused on developing my own ‘voice’ on guitar so whenever I hear a recording of my playing I’ll straight away know it’s me and be happy with the sound.

While every player’s voice on guitar will develop naturally over time, I’ve really been working at shaping it. Lately I’ve been focused on playing a lead line and adding in grace notes and articulation to really make it ‘speak’.

One great exercise I’ve been using is to listen to a singer sing a single line, then try to mimic it on guitar.

It’s easy to figure out and play the right notes, but it can be quite tricky to copy all the subtle inflections and nuances. A good guitarist will play the right notes while a great guitarist will be able to copy all those little subtleties as well. So at the moment it’s my number one goal to develop that skill.

Gary: How often do you practice guitar and how long is your average practice session?

Aaron: I practice every day when possible. I split my playing time in half; half of the time is spent focused on developing as a player and the other half is to just play and have fun.

Depending on the day I might spend 30 mins to 1 hour on each half (ie: 30 mins serious practice and 30 minutes just playing).

When I was younger I used to practice for several hours a day but eventually I realised that if you really focus on what you practice you can achieve a lot more in less time. So a maximum of 1 hour serious practice is enough for me.

Gary: Do you plan your practice in advance?

Aaron: I have a list of things I like to work on in my ‘serious practice’ sessions but I often change it around to learn new things. My typical 60 minute ‘serious practice’ session will go like this:

1. 5 minutes of warm up exercises
2. 10 minutes working on licks and techniques used in other songs
3. 5 minutes on studying new chords and scales
4. 5 minutes of improvising over a backing track (while trying out new chords and scales from 3.)
5. 5 minutes of ear training (I use a program called EarMaster Pro)
6. 5 minutes working on one specific technique (such as sweep picking, tapping, grace notes, etc.)
7. 10 minutes recording and listening back to my playing
8. 10 minutes studying and learning a technical piece (such as a complicated Steve Vai solo)
9. 5 minutes of studying and applying music theory

From there I would spend the next 60 minutes just jamming, playing songs, songwriting, pretty much anything I enjoy playing. I really feel it’s important to have this balance between focused practice and playing for fun.

Gary: What kind of exercises or skills do you practice most?

Aaron: I try to balance everything out. I don’t want to spend too much time on technical exercises or it may limit my song writing or improvising skill development.

There’s no point to me in having amazing sweep picking and super fast alternate picking skills if you don’t know how to use them.

But if I had to pick one area I work on the most it’s my improvising. To me there’s nothing better than being able to jam with somebody else without stressing about not knowing the key or which scales to play.

Gary: What guitar practice tools do you regularly use?

Aaron: I try to use as many different tools as I can find because they will all help you in different areas. Using a metronome for example is great for technical exercises while not much fun to improvise over. So every tool has its purpose. If I hear about a new tool I’ll get it straight away because I know it will help me out in a new way.

One of my favourite things to do is quite simple but it’s contributed a lot to my development.

I take my pack of flash cards which contain 50 basic open chords and I’ll draw out four random chords. I’ll then open my recording program on my PC and over a simple drum loop I’ll play and record a rhythm pattern using the four chords and loop it. Then the fun part – I’ll improvise over the top of the vamp and try to come up with interesting ideas.

This may sound simple but remember that the chords are chosen at random – which means they may or may not fit together. This is the point – to learn how to play over anything. Sometimes I’ll pick out chords that sound horrible together but still learn to play something that works over the top.

I really recommend this method for players because it teaches you so many things at once; how chords work together, finding out the key, working out what scales to play, what to do when the chords don’t easily fit into one key, etc. Until you try it, it isn’t obvious how hard this can be.

Gary: You get the chance to pass on just one single piece of practice advice to a fellow guitar learner. What do you tell them?

Aaron: That’s a tough one but the first thing that comes into my mind it to learn to listen.

Really listen.

Listen to your own playing as well as really listen to other guitarists’ playing. This is something many people think they do but they really don’t.

When you are too focused on techniques or concentrating on playing a certain part you won’t be able to listen to what you sound like.

Listening to your playing will help you find out what’s working and what isn’t. It can be hard to listen to your playing while you’re practicing so to get an idea of what I’m talking about have a go recording yourself and listen back to it. Did you hear things you didn’t realize you did when you played it? Does it sound different to what you think you sound like?

I truly believe learning to listen should be the top of every guitarist’s skills. When you sit down to practice, try to really listen to how you sound instead of just thinking about technique.

Aaron Matthies is an avid guitar player and teacher who enjoys writing and recording his own compositions. After starting his own blog on basic guitar lessons for beginners, he decided to take teaching seriously by creating Tempo Music Cards - a website dedicated to help guitarists develop their skills and knowledge using flash cards. Aaron regularly writes new lesson on the Tempo Music Cards website as well as guest lessons on other sites such as the popular Ultimate-Guitar.com.

If you’d like to read more about other players guitar practice habits then click here here to receive free updates from Not Playing Guitar.

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 2 - Adjacent Strings

I'm developing this series of guitar picking exercises to help me improve my picking skills as I play lead lines and improvise. When I noticed I made a lot of mistakes due to missed strings I decided to do something about it.

The result is this series of picking exercises to give my picking skills a thorough work out. I'm spending a few minutes on them each time I practice guitar to eliminate those troublesome string misses.

In the first part of the series I shared some simple alternating picking exercises I use.

In this second set of exercises things get a little more complex. I continue with alternating picking but add more string movement.

Adjacent String Skipping Exercise

Use alternate picking for this exercise but pick the notes on adjacent strings.

E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E E E  E E  E E
|---------------------------------------0---0--0---0----------------------------------------|
|------------------------------0---0--0---0------0---0--0---0-------------------------------|
|---------------------0---0--0---0------------------------0---0--0---0----------------------|
|------------0---0--0---0------------------------------------------0---0--0---0-------------|
|---0---0--0---0------------------------------------------------------------0---0--0----0---|
|-0---0------------------------------------------------------------------------------0----0-|

Start with a down stroke on the sixth string, up stroke on the fifth string, down stroke on the fifth string, up stroke on the sixth string.

After the fourth up stroke on the fifth string play the next down stroke on the fifth string and follow with an up stroke on the fourth string.

Continue alternating on these two strings, then move down to the fourth and third string, third and second, second and first.

After you finish the last up stroke on the first string, follow it with a down stroke on the first string, then up stroke on the second string.

Continue with down strokes on the lower of the pair of strings and up strokes on the string above as you work your way back up to the sixth string.

Triplet Note Variation

When you've finished the above exercise here's a triplets variation. Pay careful attention to ensure correct up and down alternation of the pick strokes.

|-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-| |-3-|
  E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E
|---------------------------0---0---0------------------------------|
|---------------------0---0---0---0---0---0------------------------|
|---------------0---0---0---------------0---0---0------------------|
|---------0---0---0---------------------------0---0---0------------|
|---0---0---0---------------------------------------0---0---0------|
|-0---0---------------------------------------------------0---0----|

In the next part of the series we're going to develop these exercises to make some more variations and add some more picking styles. Click here to sign up for free and be notified by email when more lessons are published.

Update: Now you can read and try these other parts of the series...

Guitar Picking Exercises Part 4 – Alternate Across The Fretboard
Guitar Picking Exercises Part 3 – String Skipping
Guitar Picking Exercises Part 1 - Alternate Picking