Accelerate Your Guitar Playing
By Mike Hayes
Begin by forming good study habits. Part of your study will be physical performance and part will be mentally engaged in the study of theory, listening to recordings, tapes and the radio, watching television, Internet and watching live performances. You will be talking to other guitarists, students and professionals, studying in classes and with private teachers and of course via online guitar courses, guitar training software etc. You will also be improvising. All of these activities will give you valuable information and experience, increase your skill, broaden your scope and develop your insights. Keep an open mind and learn something from everyone you meet …even if it is not what to do!
The following suggestions should help you in your study and practice:
Never practice or study when you are tired or worried. Relax a bit before you begin. If possible study in a quiet place where you can be undisturbed. Have a music stand adjusted to your eye level when you practice, and make sure that you always have good light. Form the habit of studying in a regular place and at a regular time.
Several short study practice periods on successive days are usually better than one lengthy period of study. A little study every day is better than spasmodic, inconsistent study. Use various ways of making yourself think about what you are studying. If you are looking at a printed page of notes, try to imagine them on a guitar finger board and vice versa.
Form the habit of mentally reviewing every page of music you study before going on to the next one. See how much of it you can recall and try to remember it. When you have learned something make use of it as soon as you can. The sooner and more often, the better. If you have learned fingerings for a few new chords so that you can play them even slowly, make up an exercise or song that involves these chords and has you shifting from one chord to another often. It is not enough to learn about something. Unless you utilize this information it does not become a part of you.
When you have completed a reasonable amount of material, take time to summarize what you have covered. You may want to write your summary. Keep a good music dictionary handy, and use it frequently. When you have discovered the meaning of a new word or term, use it yourself.
Self Study
To correct poor study conditions, consider thoughtfully each of the questions below and write specific answers to each one. Then decide what you can do to correct each of the things wrong with your study conditions. Make notes of these and correct them.
1. What can you see on your desk, music stand, or through your window that distracts you?
2. What music, talking or other noises are disturbing your practice and study?
3. What is wrong with your position or posture when you practice or study?
4. Are you sure your lighting is adequate? What is wrong with it?
5. Is your work space large enough and arranged well?
6. What materials do you lack for effect study?
7. What time of day is most difficult to practice or study? Why?
8. What worries or special interests divert you from studying?
Effective methods of practicing or studying, of themselves, will not suffice. Careful planning also is essential. Lay out your work systematically before you begin. Each individual’s time, facilities and desires are personal matters. Just be sure to adopt some plan and stick to it as conscientiously as possible.
Mike Hayes is a guitar teacher, author, performing musician and session guitarist with over 30 years of professional experience. Find out more about how to learn guitar fast with his popular free ecourse, available at:
=> http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
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Spanish Guitar Songs, Chords and Scales
spanish guitar songs often takes hold of you. If you can play Spanish guitar songs or Spanish sounding instrumentals it is a mark of your progress as a guitar player. This is a wish that many guitarists have but not too many know how to go about finding suitable Spanish flavored music to play.
In order to be some help to these guitarists who wish to have a serious guitar piece to play, I will throw in some suggestions. I know that many of the songs we identify as Spanish guitar pieces are fairly advanced technically but I am not going to leave any out of my list on the basis of technical difficulty. Any guitar piece you hear is probably available on tab and it is up to you to decide once you attempt to play the tab whether you are trying to play something that is too hard for you.
So when we think Spanish music what artists do we think of? There is The Gypsy Kings, Rodrigo Y Gabriela, Paco De Lucia. How about Jose Feliciano. He played Spanish guitar style arrangements of a couple of Beatles songs.
Or there is Spanish Caravan by The Doors. This was actually a mixture of a Flamenco guitar style called Granadinas and a classical guitar piece called Asturias by Isaac Albeniz. The guitar playing sounded impressive on the record but it is not a great technical challenge. You can get the general flavor of the intro to Spanish Caravan by playing the B, C and D bar chords at the second, third and fifth frets. They are all the same chord shape which is based on the A major chord shape in the first position. Here is the B bar chord in tab:
e–2——————–|
B–4——————–|
G–4——————–|
D–4——————–|
A–2——————–|
E———————–|
Now to get the Flamenco flavor into these chords, take the bar off and put your first finger back on the fifth string and let the first string ring open in all three positions.
So now your B chord is:
e–0——————–|
B–4——————–|
G–4——————–|
D–4——————–|
A–2——————–|
E———————–|
You can also try the same technique by removing the bar from the F major shape, and moving it up the fretboard to see how it sounds.
Some popular Spanish songs you could Google are: Compostelana, La Tarara, Volver, Bomboleiro, Bomoleira, Adelita and La Morena de mi Copla. These are all well-known songs that chords, lyrics and tabs should not be too hard to find on the web.
Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.
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7 Things to Do to Get the Most Out of Your Guitar Chords
By Mike P Hayes
Secondly, melody – the melody is the tune of the particular piece of music, it’s the part we hum or whistle.
Thirdly, is the harmony – this is where chords come into the picture and the vast majority of people have difficulty with this aspect of music.
Often, when 
learning the guitar we often experience a musical brick wall while trying to learning to play chords. I have set out 7 tips to help you avoid the common traps.
1. Make sure your guitar is set-up properly: If your guitar is too hard to play your hands will become tense and tire quickly. Please keep in mind that when you buy a guitar the action of the guitar (the distance of the strings away from the guitar fretboard) will need to be adjusted, regardless of the brand or price range. This true for both new and pre-played instruments.
2. Learn the names of the notes on the guitar: Guitar players generally think in terms of lead guitar or rhythm guitar playing, when in reality chords are simply combinations (vertical stacking) of notes. Each chord has a specific spelling, once you know how to spell a chord you can create many different ways of playing that chord on the guitar … if you know the names of the notes and their location on the guitar fretboard.
3. Create four string grids: By dividing the six strings of your guitar into four string grids each grid consisting of three strings. Grid one – first, second and third strings. Grid two – second, third and fourth strings. Grid three – third, fourth and fifth strings. Grid four – fourth, fifth and sixth strings.
4. Learn the triadic and scaletone seventh versions of chords: By learning both the triadic and scaletone seventh chord structures many chord substitution possibilities will become obvious. Following is an example of the triadic (three note) chord structures in the key of C major – C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, B dim. The scaletone seventh (four note version) of the same scale would be: CMaj7, Dm7, Em7, FMaj7, G7, Am7 and B minor 7th flat 5.
5. Pay attention to the strumming hand: The most common mistake guitarist’s make is to focus all their attention on the chord fingering while neglecting the picking hand. Many times the chord formation is correct however unwanted notes are being played by the strumming hand. For example often guitar players incorrectly strum five strings for a D major chord, while this chord sounds fine the sound you are producing with this five string chord is a D/A chord (D major chord with and A bass note.)
6. Learn to play slash chords: A great way to increase you chord vocabulary is to play simple triadic chords with different bass notes. For example a simple chord progression such as A///|E///|D///| could be made more interesting by playing an “A” note in the bass for each chord: A …|E/A …|D/A …
7. Learn to recognize chord progressions: The fastest way to learn to play guitar “by ear” is to train yourself to recall the sound of chord progressions. Many songs are based on standard chord progression templates such as the one, six, four, five chord progression. In the key of “G” this progression would look like this: G///|Em///|C///|D///||
A great many people give up playing because of a poorly set-up instrument or because they can’t seem to get the same sound they hear on the recordings of their favorite artists, by applying these simple tips you will hear (and feel) immediate results.
Mike Hayes develops systems and products to help you succeed in your guitar playing. Find out more about how to learn guitar fast with his popular free ecourse, available at: => http://www.guitarcoaching.com
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Learn Guitar Online – Practice Traps & How to Escape Them
By Mike P Hayes
Actually, that popular phrase is only half true. To achieve our performance goals we need to make an important distinction. Instead of that phrase.
Here is what we need to know …
“Perfect practice makes perfect.”
You see, that’s an important distinction, simply practicing for the sake of practicing won’t cut it! You need to make practice time a time where you eliminate errors and fine tune your skills.
Remember, your fingers are not the thinking part of your body, they are the doing part … and they will keep on “doing it” the way they always have done (even it’s incorrect) until you make a conscious effort to correct the error.
Have you ever practiced relentlessly fifteen hours a day, day after day, driving yourself and your neighbors silly, only to totally botch things up on the day of the performance?
Well, you are not on your own, 85% of guitarists find themselves in the same situation! And, we all know how that feels, our confidence shot to pieces, all you want to do at the end of the night is crawl inside your guitar case and hope nobody notices you.
And so you begin a never ending cycle, poor performance means back to the practice room for more relentless practice, more “over practicing” to compensate for last performance disastrous results, burnout, and the inevitable … another poor performance and further loss of motivation and enthusiasm.
Here’s your escape plan:
Correctly diagnose the problem.
(a) Firstly determine in general terms if it is a motor skill issue or data memory problem?
(b) Then, dig deeper into the problem to find out specifically how we can overcome this glitch.
Let’s say, when you really get down to it, you find that it’s not a case of having fat, dumb, slow or old fingers (physical motor skills), it’s simply that you can’t seem to remember the chords for the songs (data memory issue).
Now, we are starting to get somewhere and you can probably begin to see why it’s essential to continually review the quality of your practice and the results you are achieving.
To give you an analogy, let’s image for a moment you were driving down the highway without a map and suppose you had to turn right to reach your intended destination, simply turning left and going as fast won’t get you there.
You need to focus on your prime objective and constantly design practice sessions that will achieve your goals.
Now, back to our problem of forgetting the chords for our songs, simply practicing writing the chords down on a data memory card.
Write the chords four bars to a line as follows:
C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
There’s two reasons for this (a) firstly, it gives you clarity and it allows you to remember small amounts of information, (b) with only four bars per line many repetitious phrases become obvious where you can immediately recognize and associate current material with information you have already learnt.
For example let’s say the following 16 bars where from a new composition by your bass player, your problem is you have to learn the chord sequence for a performance tomorrow.
C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// ||
At first glance this looks tricky, when you split the project down into four bar units it becomes clear the there are sections that are repeated.
line 1:
C /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
Line 2:
F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
Line 3: (same as line 2)
F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
Line 4: (same as line 1)
F /// | C /// | G /// | C /// |
I know this looks simple, and it is, but you would be surprised to know just how many practice hours can be saved by breaking things down to very do-able pieces of information.
Never get caught again …
In a nutshell, it’s the quality of your practice sessions not the sheer quantity of practice time. Remember before you sit down for your next practice session, decide whether the problem is motor
skill problem or data memory problem.
Mike Hayes is a teacher, author, speaker and consultant. Get his tips and tested strategies proven to boost your guitar playing his membership site at http://www.guitarcoaching.com today.
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