Guitarist - Do Your Research

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This is the fun part of improving. In order to grow as a good all round player, even though you may have a favourite genre or style you frequently want to play, it’s great to try and great a lot of different musical influences around you.

 So try and get to small gigs or jam sessions so you see many different players. And get fresh a outlook on your playing.

This will give you new ideas and you will see how people approach their playing in different ways. You may be familiar with 12 bar blues but everyone has their own different slant towards the way it is played.

Jamming with people will force you to improve you ear for keys and pitch etc and you will be playing ideas which very often will be original and inventive. Jamming helps to try and be interesting and push’s your ability to greater improvement.

Try and get into the discipline of a regular daily time slot say minimum one hour for guitar practice. Break down that time into segments of practicing different areas. So for example the first ten minutes is warm up exercises which can be chromatic scale patterns covering the guitar neck up and down. At a speed that allows the notes to be played cleanly. Try to increase slowly with accuracy in time.

Then perhaps have a ten minute slot on scales. Try scales in different keys. Ten minutes on scale patterns. This is a interesting aspect of practice. The great thing about patterns is they can be applied to most scales and immediately you have achieved a new type of run which often can sound really interesting. So if you had a pattern for example that you go up four notes in the scale then back three. Start again but at the second note in the scale and go up four notes in the scale then back three. Repeat throughout the scale. Just working out new patterns is time well worth spent in practice.

Get used to the pattern and sequence of the run template and it is surprisingly easy to apply this to a another scale. Though the positioning on the guitar neck is different the pattern is the same. The runs can sound very interesting. An easy way to increase your playing dynamics.

Experiment with holding the pick and the pic or plectrum position in your fingers. Different types of picks will have a change in feel. For example a middle gauge pick with a pointed end is excellent for fast accurate clear sounding runs. Softer gauge works well for acoustic strumming. Also try and experiment where over the pickups you pick or strum. Closer to the bridge will give a more of a treble sound compared to picking over the neck pickup that will give a warmer more mellow sound.

Another useful idea is to try playing with a muted sound. This is achieved by placing the palm of your strumming hand over the guitar bridge. This has the effect of muting the strings and stopping them ringing on or sustaining after the note is played. This can give a very powerful and dynamic effect. Try different areas of the palm with different areas of the bridge. When playing runs or scales it will give a more precise sound where each note is more defined.

Experiment with different gauge strings. Players for example often place the full heavy gauge strings on acoustic guitars, why? Try placing electric gauge strings on an acoustic guitar say size 10’s on the top E string. It is surprising how good the sound can be and it increases the dynamics of the guitar for example proper string bending becomes possible.

String bending is a great part of guitar playing to master. It adds dynamics to your sound and opens up many possibilities of interesting playing techniques , though be prepared it is not at all easy to master and will require a lot of hours of patience practice to master and then some.

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