Guitar Lesson: Practicing Or Playing Music?

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By Peter Edvinsson

What is most important as you try to learn to play guitar? Technical guitar exercises or playing music? What areas should you focus on as you try to use your practicing time as effective as possible?

Could it be that both these areas are important and should go hand in hand?

You could practice in various ways and you could practice many various things as you try to learn playing guitar. You are probably already identifying yourself in a niche of guitar players. Even if you are not you will experience sooner or later that different approaches will lead you in different directions.

For example, if you only learn small parts (the coolest parts) of famous songs you will end up with knowing small parts of songs. Obvious, but that is very common among beginning guitar players. If you only practice this way you will of course miss the long term development as a guitarist.

You wanted to become one type of guitarist but ended up becoming another type of guitarist. Why do things like that happen?

Probably because we know that what we saw we will reap but do not realize that this applies to guitarists as well!

If you never practice skill exercises in your guitar playing you will not develop your skill very much. If you don’t want to become a proficient guitar player but only want to sing songs you can relax and develop your time to learning songs.

If you really know what you want it is much easier to determine what exercises you will need.

If you have a somewhat vague idea about what type of guitarist you want to become I would suggest that you balance your guitar practice by choosing both melodies and other musical exercises and also skill building guitar exercises.

If you only practice speed by learning scales, arpeggios, licks and other technique building exercises it is an imminent risk that you will sooner or later get fed up with practicing because of the lack of stimulating musical content.

It can actually be a great investment in your musical development to take some time off every now and then by going to a concert or listening to other music that will inspire you.

Yes, you are right, you will not practice your fingers, but music and playing guitar has to be a joyful experience for you if you are to inspire and lift others when you perform. You will gain so much by filling yourself with inspiring music that it will compensate for missed skill building exercises.

Music is the key in this discussion. It has to be the basis for all other guitar playing activities. Otherwise you will as before mentioned lose interest in the activity.

Sometimes I remember my first steps learning to play guitar and I remember that I did not think in terms of becoming a better guitarist than my friends or being the fastest guitarist in the world or a lot of other disturbing unmusical considerations. I was just enjoying the music I created.

I guess that keeping this feeling of why I wanted to learn to play guitar in the first place in vivid memory will help me not to be too carried away with only technical exercises.

Okay, what then is more important as you try to learn to play guitar? Technical guitar exercises or playing music?

As in so many other aspects of life balance is probably the key to reap optimal benefits from your guitar playing.

Peter Edvinsson invites you to download your free guitar sheet music and guitar tabs at http://www.capotastomusic.com

Getting The Most From Your Guitar Practice Sessions

Playing the guitar is probably one of the great hobbies anyone can have. There is something to be said about picking up the guitar and letting the music lead you. If you intend to make a career out of or grow as a guitarist, practice is essential. You have heard the saying practice makes perfect. Well, it applies in all areas of your life, even your hobbies.

Here we will show you just how beneficial guitar practice can be, just what you can hope to gain, and how you should organize your practice sessions in order to experience a successful practice session that will help you grow as a guitarist.

The Importance of Practice

Practice, in any area of your life, is extremely important. You cannot hope to grow, excel, or better yourself without routine practice. Practice can help you fine tune and advance in your areas of strength, as well as improve on your areas of weakness.

When you pick up the guitar and decide to start learning how to play you have goals. These goals could be anything from just learning to play because of your love of music, a hobby, or even something more advanced in life, such as one day become a member of a band, recording music, or writing music for others.

The only way to excel in your choice is to practice, practice, and practice some more. Even advanced guitar players need routine practice sessions. Just because they are at a higher level of experience, does not mean that they do not have to practice routinely and fine-tune their art of playing.

Approaching Practice with the Right Mindset

When it comes time to practice on your guitar, it is important to have the right mindset. Your mindset can either make or break your practice session.

First, remember why you are practicing. Remember your love of music and the enjoyment you get out of your guitar. If you look at your practice sessions as if they are a chore or a job, you definitely will not gain the most insight out of the session.

Secondly, remember that you are not perfect. You will make mistakes on your journey to perfecting your guitar sessions. Mistakes are what makes us human. Do not dwell on one mistake, simply work to correct it or move on and come back to it after a while. Do not beat yourself up over the mistake.

Try to clear your head of all the day’s worries. What happened at work or in class today should not be on your mind, preventing you from really making the best out of your practice sessions.

Understand your goals for this practice session. Before you start, realize your goals. What do you want to work on? What do you want improve? Is it a new song or an old song? These are all important. Achieving your goals first require understanding your goals.

How to structure your practice time

Scheduling your practice sessions should first be a priority. Even if you work or go to school on a full-time basis, your practice sessions should be scheduled around them, on a daily basis. It is far to easy to because too busy in life and lose track of time. Without scheduled practice sessions, it will be extremely hard to reach your full potential and advance in your skill level. Therefore, be sure that each and every day you set aside specific time to practice.

Make sure the time you schedule is not going to be interfered with visitors or phone calls, or rushed by appointments and commitments.

At the start of your practice session, make time for warm ups. Stretch your fingers and prepare yourself for the session. Warming up can help you work through muscle tensions, so either start up with a few warm up chords or a song you already know.

Then you should start working on your goals, both the long term and the short term. Practice sessions should always be beneficial. While working on things you already know is a great way to fine-tune your skills, you should also, at every practice session, attempt to learn something new. Push yourself to extend that song, learn a new chord, or try something a tad more difficult.

With each session, if you attempt something new, you will find yourself achieving your goals in no time, mastering the concept and moving on to bigger and better things.

In the End

Not everything about playing the guitar is easy. It is important you continue to practice, learn new things, practice some more, and increase your level of difficulty. Practice sessions will help you flourish as a guitarist and find some intense satisfaction as well.

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of MusicianHome.com, a site that provides information and articles for musicians at all stages of their development. http://www.musicianhome.com/

The Art Of Practicing

I have always believed that success, in practically any subject you can think of, is a direct result of “clear thinking”. That is, the ability to understand very clearly what needs to be achieved and the action to set about surmounting very necessary hurdles in order to reach those goals. Less than successful people are either not clear in their goals or for one reason or another give up along the way. It’s leveling that rough terrain, along with a clearly defined end result in mind that will get you there in the end. The success roadmap might go something like this:

Visualize goal => Surmount problems => Score

Sounds simple doesn’t it? However, this clear thinking is all very well but it’s usually the thought required before step 1 (visualization) that causes problems. Very often the goal does not manifest in mind because the process is so overwhelming.

And so it is with practicing the guitar, or any instrument for that matter. In more laymen’s terms it’s more like “What the hell should I be practicing?”.

Practice is a constant struggle for many people. There is so much to learn and often so little time to allocate to it. For the jazz musician, clear thinking can be as simple as “I really like that Charlie Parker 2, 5 - how does he do that?”. Then transcribing the line, practicing it in all keys and working the phrase into your own vocabulary. The ’score’ as I like to call it is the ability to work it in to your own playing. I want to talk a little about that in a minute.

First, I think the most important thing to talk about is how to make best use of your practice time. There was a time when I started playing where I used to sit in my room and allocate 15 minutes to practicing scales and arpeggios, 10 minutes on technique exercises, 20 minutes on sight reading and 1/2 an hour on practicing my classical guitar repertoire. Why? because my teacher told me I had to. Years later once I started to study jazz guitar on my own I didn’t feel the need to be practicing this way. It wasn’t really benefiting me fully. I started to have my own goals in mind that I wanted to reach. I wanted to learn to play like one or two of my heroes, but more importantly because I liked what they played. Even more under the microscope were certain melodic lines and licks that tweaked my ear and fueled me to transcribe or simply copy the way they phrased or ‘felt’ a phrase. Once I clearly had in mind what I wanted to achieve I could go about achieving it - I knew what I had to do.

It’s important to sit down to practice and be really clear about what you are going to do during that practice time. Now, one thing that helped me tremendously was when I made a huge commitment to scheduled practicing. In other words, deciding that every single day, no matter what, I would sit down and dedicate exactly one hour to working at this instrument. The amazing thing I found is that my regularly scheduled practice literally fueled my regularly scheduled practice! Does this make sense? What this means is that, the more I practiced, the more I wanted to practice. What started out as a committed hour turned into committed six hour sessions. Once I got into music college in London I remember waking up in the morning and practicing until I went to bed at night, remembering to eat on occasion. I was so fueled by the commitment to practice that the drive to play took over completely.

Regular practice clearly keeps your guitar technique on tip top form. There’s nothing like picking up the guitar and playing a few short runs and being on top of your game, simply because you are playing regularly.

The other wonderful thing about committing to regular practice is that it actually helps you to think much more clearly, because you start to see results. Once you start to see results the concept of learning is much less overwhelming and you are able to make decisions about what you want to work on much more easily.

So do yourself a huge favor, first, make the decision to want to get much better at your guitar playing. Then once you have decided that, make a clear commitment right now and allocate a certain time of day to your guitar practice. If you only have limited time then give yourself what you know you can afford. Once you get your teeth into this system, if you don’t have more time, trust me you will want to find more time. You might just want to wake up earlier. The drive to learn will take over.

Quality practice is key. I find now I am older that, if I let myself, I can get more and more distracted because there are so many other facets to my life. When I make the decision to focus 100% on my guitar problems and how I can surmount them, I find I can get completely absorbed for hours once I get going. Sometimes it helps to avoid those distractions from the outset. Maybe turn the phone off!

There is a huge difference between playing the guitar and practicing the guitar. I can play for days quite happily but am I learning anything new? Not unless I stop myself and work on my weaknesses. And there are plenty of those trust me! Many years ago I wanted to learn licks from my favorite players. I would hear a line and transcribe it. Many times I found that those musical phrases would not come out in my playing and I asked myself why. It dawned on me that there were three possible reasons:

1) I found the phrase too technically difficult to pull off.
2) It just didn’t feel like it belonged in my vocabulary.
3) I hadn’t fully explored the idea enough - perhaps I didn’t fully understand how to use it in a practical sense.

Let’s talk about these briefly.

Sometimes a horn line does not necessarily fit under the fingers on the guitar. The line might sound just terrific on a sax but if I can’t play it on my guitar it’s not going to have the same effect. In fact quite the opposite! Everyone is somewhat limited technically (although there are a few players that keep my head scratching I must admit!), every player has a ceiling in their own mind and I think it’s perfectly OK to let some things go because they are just two gymnastic on the guitar. It’s of course relative to each player’s ability and comfort zone.

Occasionally I’ll try and work something into my music vocabulary and it just doesn’t feel like me. Some players sound great playing certain things and when I play them them they either sound too much like that other great player or I just don’t feel it. Music has to be personal, it’s OK to weed out stuff that you don’t want to use, even when those ‘weeds’ are a rose garden to others.

The last idea is something very important I think. That is the idea that when you work on some new vocabulary or a new harmonic idea, that you fully understand how to use it and just as importantly, how to work it into your playing so it comes out naturally. Let’s assume you are transcribing a lick on a CD you like. The first thing to do is to make sure you get the notes right. You might slow it down (there is plenty of software on the market that enables you to do this now). Whatever it takes, make sure the notes you are transcribing are correct. Then it is a matter of practicing that phrase so it feels good when you play it.

Now most folks stop right there and wonder why the phrase never shows up in their playing. The secret is to figure out exactly what chord (or group of chords) is being played underneath that line. After that, figure out what other chords could also be played underneath that phrase. Next, learn how to play that phrase everywhere on the fretboard, in different positions and keys. Finally and the most important, work the phrase into your own playing. To do this, start by improvising in any way that you normally might and focus on ways to connect that new phrase you want to play. The new phrase starts on a certain note and you will need to focus on that starting note in order to make a connection to it. Practice improvising freely and connecting to that new phrase, focusing on its starting note. Do this in all keys. Pretty soon you will know if the phrase is going to come out into your playing or not.

The art of practice is a huge subject and musicians have written complete books on it. But I do believe the real success starts with clear thinking. Make a decision to focus on something specific. Here is a more detailed roadmap to take on board:

1) Visualize. What do you want to work on - what do you want to achieve?
2) Plan. What exactly do you have to do in order to achieve that goal?
3) Action. Explore the subject in enough detail.
4) Surmount. Expect problems along the way - this is normal - don’t give up! Just level the terrain.
5) Score - making sure that the subject is fully absorbed and part of your new musical make up, unless you decide otherwise.

Great players really got to grips with practicing in the early stages. It became fascinating to them and the results they saw fueled more practice. It’s a self perpetuating phenomenon. By simply not practicing, the incentive to pick up your instrument diminishes over time. Then the excuses start to pour out in torrents. Then regrets. Then a very dusty guitar possibly in a dark attic somewhere.

Get practicing. Quality practice. Ask yourself questions. Look for the answers. Insist on results. This is the key to improving.

Chris Standring is a recording artist and the owner of Guitar
Made Simple.com Visit this website for free guitar
lessons and a truly ground breaking home study guitar course.

Commitment is Key to Playing Expert Guitar

While it’s absolutely true that musical talent is generally either there or it’s not, when it comes to guitarists, developing screaming fingers is something they all have to work at. If a guitarist plays with their heart, has some innate talent and a desire to truly practice, screaming fingers are a possibility.

To be able to take a guitar and play hot licks like a pro, however, some conditioning will need to come into play. Screaming fingers are, after all, made and not born. This means anyone who expects to pick up a guitar and play like a pro within a few hours is probably fooling themselves. The process of learning will require some time, patience and practice.

To ensure the best development of screaming fingers for guitar players, a novice player will need to set his or her sights on a few things. Number one in all of it will be a desire to learn to play the guitar and play it well. In order to have fingers scream across the strings like they are on auto pilot, it will be important to have a very good understanding of chords, finger placement and the such.

Getting started on the road to success involves some time and practice. The first thing is first, however, learn the guitar! This means take lessons, either face-to-face or online, learn the chords and learn finger placement while practicing it on a daily basis.

Once a basic understanding of the notes and finger placement is in place, the next step in developing screaming fingers involves a willingness to practice these things over and over again. For something to become second nature, it has to be practice. Just like learning to walk, ride a bicycle or write your name, screaming fingers will take repetitious learning to perfect and master.

The idea behind all the practice is to ensure that the mind drives the fingers exactly where they need to go when they play. The more chords are practiced, the more likely it is the movement to play them will become route. When this is the case, having true screaming fingers status is almost attainable.

The other major factor in creating screaming fingers is a willingness to exercise the fingers, as well. It’s important to keep hands limber and ready to play. Many guitar players who want to ensure they can pick up their axe and play it like it was made for them develop or follow an exercise routine for their hands. Whether it’s simply playing the guitar or working on limbering exercises during down times, keeping the hands moving and fast is an important consideration.

Going from beginner to guitar playing expert takes time and a little innate talent, it’s true. The fact is anyone with a heart for the instrument and an ear for music can learn to play and play well.

Developing screaming fingers, however, will require more dedication than just learning the guitar. To truly attain this status, a player needs to know the instrument about as well as they do themselves. The key here is time and patience.

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