Beginner's Guide to Guitar Jamming

I've had a few questions from readers asking how to get started in guitar jamming. Jamming to your favourite tunes on your guitar is a lot of fun, but what exactly is jamming, and how do you get started? In this post I'm sharing a few tips to answer these questions.

What is guitar jamming?

What is guitar jamming? Wikipedia offers us a helpful explanation. "Jam sessions are often used by musicians to develop new material, find suitable arrangements, or simply as a social gathering and communal practice session. Jam sessions may be based upon existing songs or forms, may be loosely based on an agreed chord progression or chart suggested by one participant, or may be wholly improvisational."

 

You can see that a jam can take a lot of forms from a structured practice session to free improvisation. There is a place for everyone in that range - jamming is not reserved only for elite improvisers. Now that you know that jamming can be easier than you might think, let's have a look at some tips to help you get started.

 

1. Don't expect too much

If you don't have experience then jamming won't be easy. Depending on your skills you will most likely discover lots of weaknesses in your playing and musical knowledge. It can be quite discouraging.

 

But don't worry and tell yourself you're no good. Instead, think of it as an opportunity to learn more and discover your weaknesses so you can work to improve on them.

 

2. Find a sympathetic partner

It's much easier to play all the inevitable mistakes if you practice with a sympathetic partner. Don't start out at the local jam session where you'll have to play in front of many people.

 

Ideally, find a regular partner who's interested in working on their jamming skills and enjoys similar music styles. And remember to be a sympathetic partner for your partner too!

 

3. Agree what you'll play beforehand

If you are a beginner guitarist or new to jamming then don't try to improvise everything. Agree with your partner what you'll play beforehand. Ideally, decide what you'll play before your jam session so you can practice the progressions in advance.

 

You could choose a chord progression or a song chart of a song you both know. Try to start jamming with pieces that are fairly easy for you to play - you'll probably be tense so you'll play worse than usual. If you try something you struggle to play you'll most likely get even more stressed, make more mistakes and not enjoy yourself.

 

4. One of you is responsible for the rhythm at all times

One of you should be responsible for keeping the rhythm going at all times. Again, choose pieces within your abilities so you can easily keep a steady rhythm going for your jam partner. You can use a backing track or a rhythm machine to help and give a fuller backing.

 

5. Share roles fairly

It's easy to get carried away in the fun and excitement of jamming and improvising. But don't forget that everyone would like a go. So don't monopolize the solo role and do your fair share of rhythm playing for others.

 

6. What to play?

There isn’t room in this post for a whole course on guitar improvisation. But to get you started here are a few ideas of what you could play when it's your turn to jam...

 

1. Play the song’s melody - figure it out by ear or learn it from sheet music.

2. Play around with the major scale of the song or progression's key

3. Play an arpeggio of each chord

4. Prepare a few licks in advance and try to place them over the chords. You can use a licks dictionary to help you.

5. Use some 3-note chord shapes to play licks or arpeggios over the chords

 

All of these techniques take some practice to get the hang of, so be prepared to make plenty of mistakes at first.

 

Have Fun Guitar Jamming

Jamming with other musicians is a lot of fun. Your first experiences are likely to be scary and disappointing - there's a lot going on and your mind and fingers will have trouble keeping up, and there’s a lot to learn to become a competent improviser. But if you stick with it and participate regularly you'll improve.

Guitar Song Lesson - Can't Stop by The Red Hot Chili Peppers

My band recently decided to play The Red Hot Chili Peppers hit Can't Stop. I found these nice lesson videos that show a couple of different fingerings to play the guitar parts.

There are a few tricky passages that you'll probably find hard if you're a beginner. But there are interesting challenges for intermediate to advanced guitarists: the strumming patterns, string skipping, string muting, and a two-step bend in the solo. It's a great way to hone your rhythm guitar skills.

Hope you enjoy the videos, and have a happy Thanksgiving weekend if you're reading this in the USA :-)



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Guitar Strum Techniques - How to Palm Mute

Here’s an introduction to the guitar strum technique of palm muting. It’s part of my series on picking and rhythm techniques you can use to spice up your rhythm guitar playing. This time we’re going to look at a picking or strumming hand technique you can use to silence or muffle the guitar strings.

 

About Palm Muting

Palm muting is a technique used to muffle some or all of the guitar strings with the hand that strums or picks. The technique is sometimes used to mute strings after striking them to make the note short and percussive. Sometimes the notes are muted or partly muffled while struck to control the guitar’s sound.

 

Another use for palm muting is to prevent some strings from ringing while playing notes on other strings. For example, strings can be palm muted during the release of a bend so the release is not heard.

 

How to Palm Mute

So now you know what palm muting can be used for, but how do you do it?

 

The basic idea is that you touch or press the strings close to the bridge with the fleshy side of your hand. The picture below shows an example hand position. We’ll look at some of the details of the technique through the following questions.

 

What part of the hand do I use?

In fact palm muting doesn’t always use the palm. In pop, rock and blues styles it is done with the area near the side of the hand – you can think of it as karate chop muting.

How do I place my hand relative to the bridge?

This depends on the sound you want to obtain. To mute the strings completely press them at least a couple of centimetres or so from the bridge. For a muffled sound you need to place your hand closer to the bridge, even right on it. Experiment to find what works best for you and to discover the different sounds you can create.

 

How do I mute only some of the strings?

You can play with the angle your karate chop compared to the guitar’s top so that only some of the strings are pressed. It takes some practice to do it so don’t despair if you don’t get it at first. It’s easiest to mute the bass strings while the treble strings remain open so start by working on this technique.

 

When you have figured out how to modify the angle of your palm to mute only a few strings at a time you can adjust the position of your hand to select which strings are muted – higher to mute bass strings, middle to mute middle strings and lower to mute the top strings.

 

Conclusion

Palm muting is an essential guitar technique that allows you to create different sounds and more interesting rhythms. It takes a little time and patience to learn how to do it but it’s really not so hard – it doesn’t require astonishing speed or finger stretching.

 

If you have any questions about palm muting, or other rhythm techniques, please click the comment link below and leave your question.

Marty Schwartz’s Guitar Coaching Club 50% Off Special

Here’s a short post for today to bring you news of a very special offer to get Marty Schwartz’s “The Guitar Coaching Club” at a special sale price of 50% off from now until 27th November 2011. Update: The sale offer has been extended to the 4th December 2011 - you still have a couple more days to get in if you click here.

The Guitar Coaching Club includes a ton of guitar tuition:

• Lifetime membership of Marty’s GuitarJamz site,
• 60 guitar lesson DVD's,
• Lifetime delivery of all of Marty’s future guitar DVD's,
• Bonus jam track CD's,
• 6 bonus guitar ebooks,
• Plus member's only access to Marty’s exclusive guitar forum.

If you enjoy Marty’s YouTube videos or DVDs already then you’ll know his guitar lessons are fun and packed with useful instruction. This offer is the chance to get a whole lot of Marty’s teaching – enough to keep you busy for years – for an unbeatable price.

Click here to get full details of the content of The Guitar Coaching Club and this special offer from Marty’s web site.

Please note that I may receive a commission if you choose to purchase from Marty’s site after following this link.

Fender G-Dec 3 Thirty Amp Review

Last week I excitedly took delivery of my new Fender G-Dec 3 Thirty guitar amp. In this post I'm going to write up a review of my experiences with it in its first week.

 

I chose this amp for home practice and for playing with other musicians in rehearsals and small concerts. The main features that made my decision are the sound quality and versatility coupled with reasonable power and the built-in backing tracks that I think will make practice with a backing band simple.

 

Introduction to the G-Dec 3

Just in case you don't already know the Fender G-Dec 3 Thirty amplifier is here's a quick rundown of the main features:

• 30W modelling amplifier with effects – 100 editable presets
• Plays mp3 or wav backing tracks – 100 high-quality built-in tracks – pitch and tempo shifter controls
• Phrase sampler and looper with overdub
• You can download more presets and backing tracks from Fender’s G-Dec web site

 

The best place to get more information is the Fender product web site you can find here. There are also some good video demos on YouTube, one of my favourites is here.

 

OK, now you know what I'm talking about here's my review so far.

 

General

Setting up, plugging in and switching on out of the box was really easy. There are lots of features but you don't need to read a manual or fiddle with endless dials to start playing.

 

The sound quality of the amp is really very good. Purists would say it's not a proper tube amp, but it costs less, is much lighter and smaller, and has many more features that are really useful for practice at home and elsewhere.

 

The amp is over-powered for home-only use, no need to push the volume much higher than 2, but I knew this and wanted the extra head-room for use in band situations. There’s a 15W model that would be plenty if you’ll use it at home only.

 

I’ve used the amp at one band practice this week with drums and found that it’s plenty loud enough. I didn’t need to turn up the volume higher than 5.

 

Finally, the built-in chromatic tuner is really useful and easy to use.

 

Play Mode

In play mode a dial on the front of the amp lets you select any of the 100 built-in presets and backing track pairs and jam away to your heart's content. Couldn’t be simpler.

 

The included presets and tracks offer a lot of choice in different styles – I found it quite bewildering at first. I keep a little sheet of paper and a pencil handy to note down favourite presets and backing tracks I discover.

 

Among the 100 presets there are a number of styles and sounds that I wouldn't normally attempt to play. I know I can replace these with tracks and sounds to suit my tastes so it doesn't bother me; it's even quite fun to experiment with them.

 

Quick Access Mode

Once I had found my way around some of the presets in play mode I found that I can use the quick access mode to play the backing tracks with a different guitar preset than the one proposed in play mode. This is useful as you can select your favourite guitar sound and then use it to play along with any backing track.

 

Acoustic Presets

One thing that pleasantly surprised me is the quality of the acoustic models. They sound good with an electric guitar and also make for a great acoustic amp when plugging in an acoustic. There are some very nice acoustic backing tracks to play with too.

 

Conclusions

This amp is a huge amount of fun, once I start to play I just don't notice time pass. It has lots of great features that are all very easy to use on the amp. I'm looking forward to many happy hours of playing and to trying out more sounds and backing tracks that I will download using the included Fender software.

 

Strong points of this amp:

• Great sound and range of power
• Features - everything you need is at your fingertips in one box
• Easy to use
• Fun

 

Weak points or disappointments:

• None so far

3 Steps to creating better guitar licks

Do you struggle to come up with guitar licks that sound good? I used to, until I developed this system for creating them effectively.

Doodling on the guitar would sometimes lead to some good licks. But it also wasted a lot of time as I ran up and down scales without a clear purpose or structure. Too often I'd finish a practice session with no good licks to show for the time spent.

 

The easy three step process I'm describing here has helped me to create better sounding licks more regularly. With a little practice, and of course knowledge of your guitar scales, you can use it to come up with great sounding licks that serve their purpose every time.

 

The three steps of the process are:

 

1. Plan what you want your lick to do.

2. Make up a first version of your lick.

3. Revise and refine your lick.

 

Now let me share the things I do as part of each step.

 

1. Plan your lick

In this step you decide what the purpose of your lick is and lay out the initial frame for your lick. An easy way to do this is to answer the questions below.

 

• What is the main scale you plan to use?
• How many beats or bars does it last?
• What chords is it played over?
• What is the mood of this lick: angry, aggressive, soft, joyful, melancholy...?
• Is it fast, slow, or a bit of both?
• What two notes on the fretboard do you want to start and end the lick on?

 

2. Make up a first version of your lick

Now it's time to turn your plan into a series of notes on your guitar.

 

I find the best results come by working out a rhythm pattern first. Make up a pattern for your lick by singing or clapping it out loud. Don't worry about getting the pitch of the notes right, the aim is to figure out a pattern of long and short notes and spaces.

 

When you're happy with your rhythm you can start to add notes to it.

 

Look at your lick's first and last notes. With the count of notes in your rhythm pattern and the main scale you intend to use in mind, choose a series of notes to get from the start note to the end note. Play these notes as you go to see how they sound.

 

Remember, the route from start to end doesn't have to be a straight line. Be creative and experiment at this stage, you can change things later if anything proves unplayable or just plain weird (unless that's just what you wanted, of course).

 

3. Revise and refine your lick

By this stage you have a lick worked out with just the series of notes you want. If you're happy with the lick already then you can stop here. But you might want to continue to enhance your lick a little.

 

You can refine your lick by experimenting with some little alterations to the notes or timing. The little alterations you come up with are also a great way to create more licks that work with the first.

 

Finally, you can add expressive effects to complete your lick. Bends, slides, vibrato, hammer-ons, pull-offs, chromatic step-ins, and picking effects can all give your lick more life and punch. You don't have to go overboard with the effects, they will sound best when used with subtlety and restraint.

 

If you follow this three step process you will find that it becomes easier to create great sounding licks that fit the songs you wish to play.

 

One final piece of advice is to write down the licks you come up with. It's so easy to forget them and it would be a shame to lose all that hard work, right?

 

I like to use tab notation software to save the licks I create. Click here to read about 3 easy to use and inexpensive tools for PC or Mac users.

Blues Guitar Solo Tips – Break Out Of Playing Scales

Do your blues guitar solos all end up sounding like you’re playing scales? If they do then you’re not alone, it’s a common problem. One reason you might have this problem is that you practice scales too much.

 

Do you practice scales too much?

What happens when you try to improvise a solo? Your mind is busy trying to keep track of many things…

 

• Listen to the backing track or the band and keep your place in the 12 bar blues progression
• Remember all those scale positions you practiced, where are they in the current key?
• Focus on how to perform a bend cleanly and to the right pitch – don’t want it to be flat or sharp
• Remember to add a nice vibrato on notes where there’s time to rest
• Part of your mind is thinking, oh my, gosh, this is it, it’s me soloing, what if I screw up? Will I look real stupid?
• What if my solo sounds a little flat? How can I get it to be more interesting?
• Why doesn’t my amp sound like I want it to? I really think I should get that pedal to tweak my sound…

 

And so on and so on. That’s a lot of things for your mind to keep track of.

 

So what happens when you’re in that situation? Your mind is so busy with all that other stuff that it doesn’t have time to spend on shaping an interesting series of notes for your solo. Your fingers are left to their own and often simply fall back into whatever their habits are, and the chances are a lot of their habit has been formed during scale practice. Walking up and down scales one note at a time, in eighths, triplets, maybe sixteenth notes.

 

Break out of the scales rut

You can make your solos sound more interesting by getting out of that “up and down the scale” rut.

 

A really easy way to break out of the rut is to play a few wide intervals here and there. You don’t have to play them on every note – that would be just as boring as walking the scale a note at a time – but you can sprinkle a few into your solo to give the listeners a bit of a surprise.

 

To make a habit of this take some of the time you spend walking the scales as fast as you can and practice some licks with wide intervals instead. There’s an example coming up in a minute so you’ll be able to see the kind of things you can try.

 

Another way to get into the habit of playing wide intervals is to use them to practice your scales. There’s no example of this, you simply play the scale notes you know already in different orders – jump across a string, even two, play the scale every second note, every third note, there are plenty of things to keep you busy and shake up your finger habits a little…

 

Example scale-wise lick transformed with wide intervals

OK, time for an example. Let’s start with a boring scale shaped lick in Bb major, exhibit A below.

There’s nothing really wrong with that lick, it just walks up the minor pentatonic scale and it even sounds quite nice. But if you keep walking up and down the scale like that all evening, your audience will be snoring with boredom in less than two songs.

 

So now let’s dress up that lick and try to keep the audience awake with a couple of tastefully placed wide intervals. Not too many, just one or two will transform this lick.

 

Here are some examples that show some options to add a wide interval or two to the basic lick above. As you’ll see, you have various options, there is not just one “right way” to do it.

 

Did you try those out? See how the wide interval thrown in creates a little surprise and livens up the lick? You can use that trick to create more variety in your blues guitar licks and break out of the scale trap.

 

Wide Interval Practice

To build your skill with this technique add some wide intervals to the blues scale positions you know. Pick a note within the position and practice skipping up two or three notes in the scale each time you play it. Now make up some licks of your own using that wide interval. Pick another note and do the same. Repeat this process until you are comfortable playing wide intervals from any note in the scale.

 

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Top 10 Easy Rock Guitar Songs

Here’s an opportunity for you to participate in creating Not Playing Guitar’s top 10 easy rock guitar songs to learn and play.

 

I’m looking for your suggestions to create a list of the top 10 easy rock guitar songs. There are thousands of candidates out there, and lots of different reasons for choosing songs for the list. But here’s an opportunity to share your favourite rock songs that are easy to play on guitar and let us know why they should be part of the top 10.

 

Here’s how it works…

 

Step 1. You Suggest Songs

Here’s your part. Simply respond to this post with a comment (click the “comments” or “Post a Comment” link at the bottom of the post). In your comment tell us about your favourite easy rock guitar songs - 10 songs maximum - and, most importantly, tell us why you think the song should be in the top 10.

 

Songs will get one point for each mention. They’ll get one extra bonus point each time they’re accompanied with a great reason why they should be in the top 10.

 

Step 2. I Summarize Results

This is my part. A week or two after this post publishes I’ll put up a summary of the results for the top 10 easy rock guitar songs.

 

I look forward to hearing from you (click that comment link below)…

 

Make sure you you click here to sign up for free updates so you don’t miss the results.

 

Photo by gilles chiroleu.