From teaching hundreds of guitar players over the last twenty-five years, I have found that most musicians do not have a shortage of “things to practice” on guitar.  The problem that I see many guitar players run into is not knowing how to organize all of their guitar exercises into an effective guitar practice schedule that moves them towards becoming better musicians.  If this sounds like you, then I want to show you how to determine what you need to practice on guitar to improve your musical skills in the fastest way possible.

The first significant mistake that guitar players make with regards to guitar exercises is practicing “too many” of them.  As a result, too much energy is spent trying to decide (at random) what exercise to play next, instead of concentrating on getting the most benefit out of each exercise being practiced.  In reality, you can very often achieve a lot more by intelligently focusing on a smaller, targeted list of guitar practice materials than you can from a longer list of guitar exercises that are put together at random (more on this in a moment).

Another reason why guitar players struggle to make progress with all of their guitar practice materials is because they make the mistake of starting to look for “things to practice” before becoming clear on why they need to practice guitar exercises in the first place.  Keep in mind that guitar practice materials can only make your guitar playing better when they are practiced with a specific objective in mind.  Mindlessly playing through guitar finger exercises will not make your guitar playing any better until your mind is clear on several things:

1. The “precise” guitar playing skill (or problem) that you are attempting to improve by practicing a given guitar exercise.
2. Your long term guitar playing goals and how the exercise you are working on will help you to get closer to becoming the musician you want to be.

It is critical to keep in mind that guitar exercises are only important for you to practice if they help you to develop a specific guitar playing skill or to solve a specific problem. The more specific you can become about what you are trying to achieve, the easier it will be to determine the most effective guitar practice materials for reaching that goal.  For example, instead of saying: “I want to fix my sloppy guitar playing”, you need to pinpoint a problem precisely such as: “I need to learn how to mute unwanted string noise that comes from the strings I’m not playing when I play three-string arpeggios”.  Most guitar players never develop the level of clarity needed to benefit from their guitar practice materials and instead assume that the solution to their problem is to find “new and better” guitar exercises to practice.  This leads to a never ending cycle of frustration and slow progress.

If you are feeling frustrated from not knowing which guitar exercises to focus your practice time on, ask yourself the following question: “what skill is this exercise helping me develop or what specific guitar playing problem am I trying to solve by practicing this exercise?”  If you can’t answer this question, then here are five critical things you must do to get more from your guitar practicing:

1. Clearly define your long term guitar playing goals.
2. Find out what musical skills you must develop in order to achieve the long term result that you want.  To help you do this critically important step, study this free resource about how to learn to play guitar.
3. With the clarity you have achieved from doing Steps 1 and 2 above, it will now be much easier to narrow
   down your guitar practice exercises to those that are very specific to your guitar playing challenges.  Do this to prepare yourself for Step 4.
4. Design a highly effective guitar practice schedule containing the guitar exercises you have selected in the previous step.  Organizing your guitar practice time in the most efficient way possible will require some experience to be done correctly. If you need help with doing this, read this page on how to build a guitar practice schedule.
5. Keep your mind actively engaged the entire time you are practicing.  You must always stay focused on the specific objective you are trying to achieve and never let your fingers go on autopilot while practicing.  As your guitar playing improves and you get more experience, you will find that very often you can use a single guitar exercise to develop multiple guitar playing skills at the same time (check out this video on how to practice guitar for an explanation of this concept).

When you begin to implement the above steps into your guitar practicing, you will find that the process of reaching your musical goals will become a much easier and more enjoyable experience.

If you take guitar lessons with an experienced guitar teacher, you should already be familiar with how to structure your guitar practice sessions with these ideas in mind.

However, if you are struggling with knowing what to practice on guitar, implement the ideas from this article into your guitar playing and you will begin to see your guitar playing improve faster than you ever thought possible!

About The Author:
Tom Hess is a touring musician, composer and the guitar player for the metal band Rhapsody Of Fire.
He teaches electric guitar online lessons to guitarists around the world.  On his website tomhess.net,
you can find guitar playing tips, free guitar resources and more guitar articles.

How To Discover The Best Guitar Learning Materials was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

The majority of guitar players who try to make their guitar solos more creative by using the above approach usually end up frustrated with their slow rate of improvement and begin to lose hope in their potential to become really great lead guitarists. Very often they also start to believe in the common misconception that their ability to create great guitar solos is restricted by their amount of natural talent.

Fortunately, it is possible for anyone to greatly improve their lead guitar soloing skills with the right approach. If you haven’t reached this goal yet, I want to show you the most common reasons why guitar players struggle with creating truly great guitar solos and then give you the steps you can take right now to massively improve your lead guitar playing.

The truth is that most guitar players focus on entirely the wrong things when trying to improve their lead guitar soloing and improvising skills. Many guitarists assume that the solution to their guitar soloing challenges is in learning more “new” skills, such as innovative soloing concepts, new guitar licks/scales/arpeggios, and so on.

In reality, simply acquiring new musical skills will not, in and of itself, make your lead guitar playing better, just as having a lot of ingredients in the kitchen will not make you a “better” cook. While having a lot of musical skills will give you more options to choose from, these skills will not “increase your ability” to create great guitar solos until and unless you learn how to “integrate” them to make the best musical choices possible in any musical situation. For the vast majority of musicians, it is this lack of ability to fluently apply and integrate their existing skills that prevents them from mastering the art of guitar soloing.

If you are not clear on what the concepts of musical application and integration mean and how they play a critical role in helping you improve your lead guitar soloing skills, watch this free video about practicing guitar effectively before reading the rest of this article.

Now that you understand more about why the traditional ways of improving your guitar solos are ineffective, here are some specific steps you need to take to begin to integrate your existing lead guitar playing skills on a deeper level and greatly improve your guitar solos in the process.

• Learn The Guitar Fretboard Inside And Out – True mastery of the guitar neck goes much deeper than simply being able to identify a specific note/fret on the guitar. In order to really know your way around the guitar, you need to be able to play all the scales and chords used in your style of music everywhere on the neck, and be able to combine these shapes fluently. Guitar players – from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai – all have/had this exceptional awareness of scales and chord shapes on the fretboard. This skill enabled them to improvise great guitar solos effortlessly in any key without “getting lost.” In contrast, guitarists who struggle with making their lead guitar solos sound like music, often do not have this skill well developed and become stuck with soloing in the same one or two positions every time they play lead guitar. Regardless of how many scales you actually know, if you cannot fluently play them all over the guitar neck, you will have a very hard time with using them creatively in your lead guitar soloing.
• Master Aural Skills (Train Your Ear To The Fullest) – Most guitar players (even the rare few who actually practice ear training exercises on a regular basis) do not have a clear understanding of what it really means to “have a good ear for music.” It is commonly believed that ear training is all about “being able to identify any interval, chord, or scale” after hearing it. Although this skill is “a part of” having a good ear, in reality, ear training plays a much deeper role for your lead guitar playing. At the highest level, aural skills are “the link” between all of your musical skills (guitar technique, music theory knowledge, phrasing, mastery of scales and chords and more) that enable them to work together to create the most expressive guitar solos possible. Master musicians use their ears to imagine the music they want to hear and direct their hands to produce that sound on the instrument as quickly and naturally as you speak your thoughts when holding a conversation. Without good aural skills, your musical skills can only work in isolation and your ability to create great guitar solos will forever remain limited (more on this below).
• Create Music With Your Mind Instead Of Your Hands – Most guitarists approach the process of lead guitar soloing in a mechanical way by “playing scales over chords”. After learning the key of the chord progression, most musicians simply begin to solo by running through familiar scale shapes and licks. Essentially their mind goes on autopilot and all of the “creating” is done with the hands.

Here is a visual demonstration of the most common process that most guitar players use to create guitar solos:

In contrast, great lead guitar players rely on their ears and their mind to imagine what they want to hear before playing a single note, and use their hands (guitar technique) as well as their music theory knowledge, mastery of the fretboard, and other musical skills to express what the mind wants to hear. Although they also end up “playing scales over chords”, the overall level of creativity and expression achieved is much greater because all of their musical tools/skills are integrated together as one “creative whole.”

Here is a breakdown of the process used to create great guitar solos:

Although the steps above happen very fast (and almost always occur on a subconscious level), this kind of thought process is key to creating truly great guitar solos.

The most important thing I want you to notice is that most of what actually “creates” a great guitar solo needs to be done with your mind and your ears. This is totally different from the thinking process of inexperienced guitarists, whose guitar solos are merely an attempt to “fill up space/silence with notes.”

• Continuously Work On Your Guitar Phrasing – Many lead guitar players continuously search for “notes to play” but neglect looking for better ways of how to play (phrase) those notes. Good guitar phrasing involves much more than applying an occasional bend or vibrato to a note. When I train my students how to master guitar phrasing, I show them how this skill consists of “macro” and “micro” level components. “Macro” level phrasing refers to how each phrase fits into the big picture of the lead guitar solo and the song itself (much like phrases flow in a conversation). “Micro” level phrasing deals with ornamentation applied to individual pitches of the phrase. It is important to understand the difference between the two components and to have effective strategies for training both of these areas of phrasing. If you want to find out more about what goes into great guitar phrasing and get some ideas on how to practice this skill on a “micro” level, download this free lesson about guitar phrasing .
• Get Regular Feedback On Your Lead Guitar Soloing From More Experienced Guitarists Or From A Guitar Teacher – Unlike improving your guitar speed, where you can measure your own progress in a tangible way, improving your lead guitar playing is a very “intangible” skill. This means two things:
  1. It is very hard to become aware of specific flaws in your lead guitar soloing when you don’t know what things you should be listening for.2. It is also challenging to determine whether or not your guitar solos are actually improving and what areas of your lead guitar playing still need work. You will make the fastest progress when you have your guitar solos analyzed by a guitar teacher who can not only point out specific flaws in your guitar playing but also can create an effective lesson strategy to help you overcome the specific challenges that are holding you back from creating truly great guitar solos.

Now that you understand more about what it takes to improve your lead guitar playing, you should become excited as you realize that all of your musical goals are entirely within your control to achieve. When you begin to implement the steps I have outlined above, your lead guitar soloing skills begin to improve rapidly.

If you haven’t already done so, watch this free guitar practicing lesson and download this free lesson about phrasing on guitar to get more specific advice on how to improve your guitar soloing.

About The Author:
Tom Hess is a very successful online guitar teacher, recording artist and a member of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He teaches guitar players around the world in his electric guitar lessons online. Visit tomhess.net to get free guitar playing resources and to read more guitar playing articles.

How To Create Great Guitar Solos was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

On this issue, guitar players tend to fall into one of the following groups:

1. Some guitarists almost never use a metronome in their guitar practice routines.
2. Others always (or almost always) practice guitar with a metronome.

When the guitarists in the first group are  asked about why they practice guitar without a metronome, often say that they want to avoid having to stick to a rigid tempo while playing guitar. They claim that not practicing guitar with a metronome helps their guitar playing to be more expressive and musical. Others in this group simply just don’t think much about the metronome.

The guitarists in the second group (those who practice guitar with a metronome almost all the time) will usually tell you that the metronome is key to getting big results from practicing guitar. Therefore, these guitarists believe it is essential to practice everything to a metronome to develop tight rhythm guitar playing skills, increase guitar speed and track musical progress.

Which Group Of Guitar Players Are You In?

Fact is both of the above belief systems are incomplete and misleading ways to approach guitar practicing. Here is why:

You need to alternate between practicing guitar both with and without the metronome, but to be effective you need to do so in a strategic way, not a random one. You must have a diverse set of targeted guitar practice techniques and you must know when and how to applythe use (or non-use) of the metronome to each one to successfully overcome every guitar playing challenge you face. When it comes to practicing guitar with a metronome, there are times when using it is necessary and there are other times when the metronome will distract you from improving in the areas you need to master.

There are multiple ways of using a metronome in your guitar practice routines. Consciously choosing “not” to use a metronome “sometimes” is one type of such strategy.  It is not enough to simply decide to practice guitar with a metronome a certain percentage of your practice time, such as 50% with and 50% without.  To get the most benefit from using a metronome, you need to know when, how and why to use it (or not use it) depending on what goals you are trying to achieve in a given practice session.

Although the complete list of strategies for using a metronome in your guitar practice sessions is beyond the scope of this article, I want to share with you several of the most important roles that the metronome should play in your guitar practicing, and also explain when and why to avoid using it.  These ideas will help you to get much faster results in your guitar playing.

How To Use A Metronome To “Test” Your Guitar Playing

Contrary to popular belief, practicing guitar with a metronome does not help you to “improve” your guitar technique or “increase” your guitar speed.  As I discuss in this free mini course on how to increase guitar speed, there are specific elements that go into guitar speed that must be trained and refined, often at super slow speeds without the metronome.  The metronome is then used mainly as a test to establish how well you have mastered these elements. The speed at which you can play will indicate whether or not you need to do additional practicing (without using the metronome) to overcome the technical flaws preventing you from playing guitar as fast as you want.

So, before you start using a metronome to “measure your improvement” in speed, you need to spend a substantial amount of time refining the fundamental technical components that make guitar speed possible (without using the metronome).  This goes totally against the conventional wisdom of practicing everything to a metronome in order to improve your guitar technique, but is a much more effective way of developing this skill (check out the aforementioned free mini course to fully understand why this is true and how you should practice to build guitar speed).In fact, it is this belief that more work with the metronome is the key to overcoming one’s guitar speed or technique plateau that keeps many guitarists frustrated with their lack of guitar playing progress.

How To Use A Metronome To Improve Your Rhythm Guitar Playing

The guitar players who never (or very rarely) practice guitar using a metronome say that they want to have the freedom of not having to stick to a rigid tempo in order to be more expressive with the music they are playing. Although this style of guitar playing has its place in music (and we’ll discuss this more a little later), most people who only practice guitar without the metronome typically struggle whenever they do have to play in strict time. It is important to be able to play by varying the tempo, dynamics and other musical elements for expressive reasons, but it is equally as important to be able to lock perfectly in time with a particular tempo. If you have always stayed away from practicing playing guitar to a metronome for the reasons mentioned above, chances are that your timing needs improvement.

Unlike the concept of guitar speed, practicing guitar with a metronome is a very critical part of what actually “develops” your ability to play guitar tight in time.  As you play, you can tell easily if your guitar playing is in time if you can make the sound of the metronome click “disappear” on most (or all) of the strong beats of the music.  If you are playing in perfect time, the notes you are playing will line up precisely on top of the metronome click, creating an illusion that the click has become silent or has disappeared.  If you can achieve this goal, you are making excellent progress.

How (And Why) To Practice Guitar Without A Metronome To Improve Your Guitar Phrasing

One problem that guitarists who use a metronome often run into, is a tendency to come up with melodies and lead guitar phrases mostly in “straight” divisions of the beat, such as long streams of sixteenth notes, triplets and quarter notes.  Even though the playing may sound good and be in time, the phrasing can begin to sound somewhat robotic and predictable, even if you use different scales.  One solution to this problem is to practice a guitar phrasing technique known as “rubato”.  This soloing technique refers to intentionally playing lead guitar melodies without a clear rhythm by expanding and suddenly contracting the duration of pitches.

Please note that there is a big and easily noticeable difference between playing in the style of rubato and the playing “not being in time.” One is a cool guitar phrasing technique and the other is a result of poor rhythmic control.  When you play using rubato, it is obvious that the notes of the phrase “intentionally” do not stick to any predetermined rhythm and the phrasing sounds very cool and expressive as a result.  In contrast, if you attempt to play notes that are or should be played in a strict rhythmic pattern but are not able to play in time, the music then has no sense of rubato and simply sounds “out of time”.

To learn more about rubato technique and hear exactly how you should practice it, watch this free guitar phrasing and soloing lesson.

As you can see, always practicing guitar ‘with’ a metronome or always practicing ‘without’ a metronome will limit your ability to reach your full potential as a guitar player. You now know that there are specific times when you should be using it and other specific times when you shouldn’t.

Ultimately, the metronome is only one of many guitar practice tools that should be used “when necessary” to overcome specific guitar playing problems.  The way each tool is to be used depends on the musical goals you are trying to reach and the specific problems you are trying to overcome.  If you lack experience in knowing which guitar practice strategies and tools to use, work with a proven guitar teacher who can guide you towards making your guitar practicing more effective.

To learn more about how to practice guitar effectively, download this free 110 page eBook on how to practice guitar correctly.

About the author:
Tom Hess is a highly successful online guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He teaches guitar players around the world in his electric guitar lessons online.  Visit www.tomhess.net to get free guitar practice tips, assessments, surveys, mini courses, and to read more guitar articles.

How To Fix Common Guitar Practice Problems With And Without A Metronome was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Good news and bad news:

The good news is that virtually anyone can learn to play guitar fast.  In addition, you can directly control the practicing process to make it more effective and achieve your guitar speed goals in a lot less time than it takes an average guitar player.

The bad news is that most guitar players (those who can’t yet play guitar fast) are totally on the wrong track in their approach to increasing guitar speed.  I see this all the time when working with new guitar students who come to me wanting to improve their guitar playing.  The typical path to increasing one’s guitar speed is usually limited to “starting to practice slowly with a metronome and gradually increasing speed in small increments.”  Such a tactic can be effective early on in the process of learning new guitar exercises, but if you rely on it exclusively to develop your maximum guitar speed it will lead to plateaus and frustration.  Here are a few reasons why:

1. This approach shifts most of your focus on trying to “move your hands/fingers faster.”  However, the concept of moving your fingers faster is a tiny, insignificant part of the big picture of what it takes to improve in order to build guitar speed.  The most important elements of guitar speed remain neglected and under-practiced with this guitar practice method.  As a result, the practice sessions often turn into a series of impatient attempts to break through a current guitar speed plateau.
2. There is a large number of different elements that require attention and training in order to learn to play guitar fast, including: two- hand synchronization, picking articulation, tension control, mental processing speed, hand endurance at fast tempos, guitar speed with a single technique vs. guitar speed with integrating a variety of guitar techniques and many more.  Each of these ‘guitar speed components’ need unique practice strategies in order to be mastered effectively.  Relying exclusively on ‘any single’ guitar speed practicing strategy (such as the most common one described above) is not going to help you improve all of the guitar technique elements that are needed to build guitar speed.

Great guitar players who can play guitar fast were able to successfully master all of the above mentioned elements of guitar speed whether they consciously realized it or not.  You need to do the same in order to increase your guitar speed to your maximum speed potential.  If you do not know how to begin the process of practicing these skills in the most effective ways, check out this free mini course about learning to play guitar fast.

To help you expand and improve upon the conventional approach for building guitar speed, here are several guidelines to follow

Get specific about what problems you are having with trying to increase your guitar speed.

Simply saying “I can’t play guitar fast” is not specific enough.  Being unable to play guitar fast is only a symptom of a more complex problem that usually has several causes.  As you have seen above, the root of your guitar speed limitations can exist in any or all of the specific technical elements that make up the multidimensional skill of “playing guitar fast.”  Knowing exactly what is causing your problem is the first step to solving it.  When you learn exactly what is holding you back, you can focus your guitar practice sessions on the specific problems that needs to be overcome.  Having your guitar playing analyzed by an expert guitar teacher is the fastest way to get this required level of clarity.

Use a variety of practice strategies for increasing your guitar speed.

As your guitar playing skill level evolves, so will your specific guitar technique challenges.  Therefore, the practice techniques you use at each stage of your guitar playing must evolve as well in order to be effective.  There is no such thing as ‘one’ ultimate guitar practice routine for increasing your guitar speed.  Of course there are approaches to practicing guitar that are far more effective than others, but the way you organize your guitar speed training routines should be unique to your specific guitar technique and guitar speed challenges at any given time.  You can see many examples of effective guitar speed building strategies that I use with my students by studying this free mini course on how to build guitar speed.

Practice integrating your guitar techniques together to avoid sounding like a “guitar speed robot.”

Over the years of teaching hundreds of guitar players to improve their guitar technique (as well as other musical skills), I have found that most guitarists spend very little time applying and integrating their musical skills and guitar techniques in particular.  This results in lack of musical freedom to express yourself completely and fully in any musical context.

When it comes to increasing your guitar speed, most guitarists typically focus on becoming faster with only one technique at a time.  For example, you may practice your sweep picking for 15 minutes, then move on to 15 minutes of legato, followed by 15 minutes of 2 hand tapping. Although this approach will help you to improve at these techniques in isolation, you also need to specifically practice using all of these techniques together in the same way that you will find these techniques used in real guitar solos.  Neglecting to do this will make your guitar playing sound unnatural and rather robotic as you will struggle to play consistently well with using a variety of guitar techniques at once.

Although guitar speed is clearly only one out of many musical areas that must be mastered in order to become a truly expressive and creative musician, it is a highly desired skill that most guitar players do not have.  Applying the suggestions above during your guitar practice sessions and following the guidelines from this free guitar speed training mini course will help you greatly to build as much guitar speed as you desire for your specific guitar playing goals.

About the author:
Tom Hess is a professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He teaches guitar players around the world via online guitar lessons.  Visit http://www.tomhess.net to get free guitar playing tips, assessments, surveys, mini courses, and to read more guitar playing articles.

How to Play Guitar Fast – Avoiding Critical Mistakes In Learning To Increase Your Guitar Speed was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Like most people, when I started teaching guitar I also didn’t know much about how to teach well. I thought, because I was a good guitar player, that I would be able to teach well. That was false. In my first ten years of teaching I had taught thousands of guitar lessons and thought I was really good. Fact is, like most guitar teachers, I was only mediocre. Over the next ten years of my teaching, I finally began to learn the most effective ways to consistently help guitar students progress to very high skill levels in shorter periods of time.

Here are five things you should know and do when getting started teaching guitar:

1. The first (and most important) step in learning to teach guitar is to care more about guitar students than any other guitar teacher in your area will. This alone makes a huge difference in the results that your students will get from you compared to what they could get from anyone else.

2. Great guitar teachers do not teach guitar; they teach people. What is the difference? If you teach “guitar,” your approach is to think about the technical, musical and philosophical ways of showing someone how to play a guitar. Fact is, your students don’t want to learn to play guitar. They want to learn “how to feel” a certain way when they pick up a guitar and play (or try to play). They not only want to learn how to get these feelings in the future when they can play well, they want to also feel it right now. They want to love the way it feels to enjoy the process of learning. When you really focus on that, then you begin to realize you are not teaching guitar, you are teaching people.

Teaching “guitar” is more about explaining or demonstrating various aspects of guitar playing, music theory, etc. Teaching “people” is all about solving problems, developing a specific strategic path to the specific goals they have, supporting them and keeping them motivated in the process of their development.

3. Surround yourself with other expert guitar teachers. There are two common mistakes most guitar teachers make. Either they don’t surround themselves with other guitar teachers at all, or  they surround themselves with other guitar teachers who are not true expert teachers -those who get big results for their students and have very successful guitar teaching businesses. Surround yourself with experienced expert guitar teachers who know how to successfully handle the same situations that you might be struggling with.

4. Learn to balance patience and expectations. Everyone knows that to be a good guitar teacher one must have a lot of patience. What most don’t know is how to balance patience with expectations. Your students’ learning progress is heavily influenced not only by what you teach them, but on what you expect from them. If you fail to consistently communicate higher expectations for your students, most of them will progress slowly. You need to push them a little with realistic, but high expectations while at the same time being supportive and patient.

5.  Don’t settle for being “good enough.” Sadly, many guitar teachers think it is okay to be “good enough.” Do you want your doctor, accountant, or your auto mechanic to be “good enough?” Or do you want these people to be the best they can be in order to serve you better? It’s unethical to not be as good as you know you can be. I’m not suggesting that you need to have an advanced music degree from a university, nor that you need to be a great guitarist before you can begin teaching guitar. All guitar instructors have to start from somewhere, but once you get started teaching, you owe it to your current and future guitar students to constantly be learning how to become a better guitar teacher. Your students expect and deserve this from you and you deserve it for yourself.

Get guitar teacher training.

To get started, check out my fifteen tips for guitar teachers

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He teaches, trains and mentors guitar teachers from around the world. Get more highly effective guitar teaching resources.

© Tom Hess Music Corporation

How To Get Started Teaching Guitar – Five Things You Need to Know and Do was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Unfortunately, most guitar players struggle with this for years because they don’t understand (or aren’t willing to do) the things that would really enable them to create consistently great music with the skills and knowledge they already have. Instead, most simply try to acquire new skills and do not seek to go deeper by learning more about the skills they already have but have not yet refined.

In the video below, we will focus on how to ‘use’ what you know and how to get a lot of cool sounds and emotion out of playing very few notes on the guitar. The more you learn how to get a lot from little, the easier it is for you to get a lot from a lot.

When creating or improvising guitar solos, most guitar players rely on ‘playing new notes’ (or more notes) in order to express themselves. This rarely works well.

The key to creating, improvising and playing great guitar solos is not ‘what’ you play, it’s ‘how you play it’.  Having great guitar phrasing is infinitely more valuable than having other great guitar skills. There are many ways to learn guitar phrasing, but the most important is to be able to play one note extremely well. Another great thing to practice is to make many small variations on a small single phrase. You want to focus not on what to play, or what the note options are, but instead on what you can do with a small phrase. How much emotion and interest you can squeeze out of something small.

Fact is, it is harder to be expressive with two or three notes than it is with lots of notes. However, after you master expression with a few pitches, your lead guitar playing will improve a lot when playing lots of notes.

Train your lead guitar skills by working with ‘less’ notes, so that you can master the ability to become fully expressive using all the notes, techniques and skills that you can already play, instead of working on ‘new skills’.

You can sometimes grow faster as a guitar player by learning more about your ‘existing’ skills instead of learning new ones. Training with a very small group of notes is one of the key methods you can use to do this.

Watch the lead guitar lesson video below to see exactly what I’m talking about and learn how to improve your lead guitar playing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkW8VeaAhbs

Download your FREE guitar eBooK about ‘Guitar Practicing Secrets’

©Tom Hess Music Corporation.
All Rights reserved.

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional guitarist and teaches electric guitar lessons online.

Improve Your Lead Guitar Playing: Lesson And Video was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

If your band plays twenty-five gigs this year, how many of your friends/fans will come to see more than four of these? A very small percentage. Why?

It’s (probably) not you, it’s them. Let’s find out why and what you can do about it.

When you ask your friends/fans to come to your next live show and see you play, what are you really asking them to do? Are you asking them to watch and listen to you perform your cool songs? No.

In reality, you are really asking people to travel all the way to some dirty club where they need to pay to get in the door. Then they will find themselves surrounded by intoxicated people who scream in one’s ears because the music is too loud to talk, pay for overpriced drinks (and bad food), stand (or sit if they can find a chair) through an opening band they likely have little or no interest in, then wait again an additional fifteen minutes (and they’re lucky it’s only fifteen minutes!) as the stage changes from one band to the next, then finally they get to stand through ninety minutes of your band’s cool songs in a room that is booming with muddy bass frequencies because the sound man does not know how to properly mix bands in a room that was never acoustically designed to have loud music played in. After the show is over they leave the club and drive home with their ears ringing and a headache.

So if that’s what you ask them to do the first time, they come out to see you play, what are you asking them to do the second time?  And the third time? The same thing of course.

Compare that with going to see a movie. You go to the nearest theater, you buy a ticket, you ‘sit’ through five minutes of previews, then you watch the movie. Afterwards you are home in maybe fifteen minutes.

Or compare going to see your band’s live show with staying at home and watching TV, listening to music, surfing the internet, or a long list of other pleasurable, easy and convenient things people can do.

The point is this: people have easier, and more convenient alternatives to have fun next weekend besides coming to see you (or any other band) play live.

As you can see, musicians fight an uphill battle to fill the venues we are performing at. We have a lot of work to do in order to get people off their butts to see your band’s next live show.

Your friends and fans really need to know if it’s going to be worth all the hassle described above before coming out again to see basically the same show a second, or third, or fourth time.

You first need to create a better and more unique experience for your fans from one show to the next. Some bands change the songs they play from show to show. Changing the set list does help a little bit, but you need to do more than that to really change what your fans will expect to experience.

Some bands try to be uniquely different from other bands. You don’t need to be different from other bands, you need to be a good band that puts on live shows which are often unique from each other! People need new reasons to come back to see you again and again. Download this special guide to learn more about how to get more people to come to your live shows.

Think about what your band can do to make your shows unique from each other.  Then, once you have ideas in place that will make your next show more special for your audience, you need to clearly and strongly communicate this to people.

I’ll give you two great examples by comparing two rock bands I know. I’ll show you how one of these bands totally packed their next several shows and the other band missed their opportunity to do the same by making a critical mistake.

Band 1: The first band put together their own show and instead of teaming up with another band, they hired a small group of (very attractive) women dancers to perform on the stage as the opening act. It was announced (before and during) the show that these women and the band would be hanging out with the audience ‘after’ the show at a nearby hotel lobby. People enjoyed the show and the activities that followed later. The key piece of success for the band was that they heavily promoted the event as ‘special’ and promoted the dancers (including embedded dancer videos on the band’s and club’s website) in as many places as possible. They worked very hard to promote the uniqueness of this show and told people very clearly how ‘this show’ was better and more special than previous shows. It didn’t take long for the promotion to go viral in the area. The final result: The club was packed!

During the opening song and the band’s final song the dancers came out and danced on stage, then moved into the crowd for a while and danced there too. The dancers were smart when they had the idea to integrate their act with the bands act on and off stage. They made real connections with the crowd as they mingled with them at the show and also afterwards. Both the band and the dancers did something really good for themselves. Instead of just putting on a good show and making the audience have a good time, they put a strong desire in the minds of many people there to come see them again and again.

This band did similar shows with these (and other) dancers as well as comedians and other acts (both musical and non musical) to keep their shows different from each other so that people would not only get off their butts to come to see the band for the first time, but also for a second, third, fourth, fifth and more times.

Band 2: I recently saw a second band play in Chicago. Their show also had other ‘acts’ that were not bands, including a pair of very attractive fire eating women who the crowd went absolutely crazy for. The only problem was there were only about a hundred people in the venue to see the show, and this was in a the club can hold up to thirteen hundred people.

The band knew the audience would love the show, but they failed to promote it well and differently than how they promoted their past shows. So at the end of the night they had hundred people who might come back to see them again. Had they promoted the event as the first band did, they would have had several hundred people coming back to see them again.

Had the show been promoted and organized more similarly to the way the first band had done, they would have several hundred people coming back to see them again at their next shows which would then almost be a guaranteed success, at least on the local level.

It’s very important that your shows are unique from each other and not necessarily unique from what other bands do. In addition, the most crucial lesson to be learned is all of your ‘promotion’ needs to highlight each of your shows as unique, different and special events. It’s not enough for your shows to actually be unique, you need to always communicate that uniqueness in all of your heavy promotion.

So what about your band? I’m not necessarily suggesting that you copy the examples above. What I am suggesting for you is to think a lot about what your band can do to make your future live shows more unique, special and better than what you normally do. Sit together with your band mates and brainstorm your possibilities. To learn more ideas, download this free eBook about how to get more people to come to your live shows.

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional musician, recording artist and mentors other musicians to build a music career.

©Tom Hess Music Corporation.

All Rights reserved.

How To Get More People To Come To Your Live Shows was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

After mentoring many musicians who are developing their own music careers, I see the same false assumptions, problems, and mistakes appear again and again. Here is the list of the Top 10 mistakes that can hold you back:

Mistake #10 – Not having a compelling image that is congruent with your music. Most musicians (and bands) severely underestimate the importance of their image. Yes, music is about “music,” but the music business success is about having a total package that includes music, image, a visual stage show, and many other things that need to be fully developed and integrated in a congruent way.

Mistake #9 – Trying to “get your name out there.” Although this seems to be a main goal of most musicians and bands, it is the wrong approach to start with. Before trying to be seen and heard as much as possible, it is often more important to focus on “converting” the people who hear and see you into becoming actual fans. This “conversion” is the first key to your promotional success, not getting seen or heard as much as possible.

Mistake #8 – Believing that social media websites are the keys to online music promotion for musicians and bands. Social media websites are a tool. They are one piece of the online music marketing puzzle.  Music industry companies (record labels, artist managers, booking agents, etc.) are far more interested in the popularity of your website, not how many friends you have at MySpace, YouTube, Facebook or any other website that you do not own and control. Want to impress the industry with your band’s promotion? Build your own personal website traffic.

Mistake #7 – Not investing enough time into building your music career. Most musicians spend most of their time on music, but put very little effort into the many other critical elements needed to make it in the music business. If you are already a talented musician, you should invest at least 50% of your time into starting or advancing your music career. If you are still developing your musical skills, you should still invest around 25% of your “music” time into building a future music career.

Mistake #6 – Surrounding yourself with people who are negative, lazy and lack ambition. If you are very serious about becoming a professional musician and building a great career in music, then you absolutely must surround yourself with like-minded musicians.

Mistake #5 – Having merely mediocre live performing skills. Many musicians who are not yet in a good band put off developing their live performing and stage presence skills. This is a big reason why talented musicians don’t get into really good bands that they audition for. Your music may be good, but a live show requires more than great music. If people only wanted to hear the music, they would listen to you at home. Both fans and record labels want (and expect) to see a real show. Neglecting live performance skills results in talented musicians and bands becoming quickly forgotten.

Mistake #4 – Focusing on increasing the quantity of fans instead of the intensity of your fans. The number of fans you have should always be your secondary focus (not your primary one) if you want to become successful in the music industry. The fact is, it is not the number of fans that matters most, but rather the number of fanatics which will contribute more directly to your success (or lack of it). This is particularly true in the beginning of a band’s music career. Focus more effort on converting your existing fans into raving fanatics. Learn to do this and the number of your overall fans will increase through powerful word of mouth.

Mistake #3 – Not enough cash flow to support your music career. Like it or not, it takes money to build a music career. Even if other people/companies are paying for your record, tour support, merchandise, etc. you still need to have the freedom to pursue opportunities as they come. Sadly, many musicians miss opportunities because they can’t afford to take advantage of them. In addition to a decent income, you also need the flexibility of being able to take time away from that income source to go into the studio, go on tour, etc. That is why learning how to teach guitar is such a great way to achieve both if you learn how to become a highly successful guitar teacher.

Mistake #2 – Not enough depth in your music relationships. There’s an old expression, “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” In music this is often modified to, “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you.” The truth is it’s not about either. The most important aspect of connections within the music industry is how deep are the current relationships you have now and will develop in the future. You don’t want to simply know people or be known, you want people who know you to have a real deep connection with you so that you are always on the top of their mind when opportunities present themselves. Ask yourself, “What can I do right now to deepen my existing relationships further on an ongoing basis?”

Mistake #1 – Having a fundamental misunderstanding about what record companies look for – and expect – from new bands. This is a huge topic, but in a nutshell it’s very useful to think of record companies like a bank that lends money to people or small businesses. Record companies make most of their decisions about with whom they will work and what the terms will be in much the same way that a bank will determine who they will loan money to and what the terms of the loan will be. Both record companies and banks basically want to know three things:

• How much value do you bring to the deal right now?
• How much risk do you bring with you right now?
• How much potential value and risk might you bring to them in the future after they invest in you?

If you want to buy a house, the bank wants to know a lot about the specific house you want to buy and even more about you. Record companies are the exact same, they want to know about your music, your talent and your band, but they also care as much (or more) about you (and your band mates) as people. What is it about you that will make a record deal a good or bad investment for them?

To learn more about avoiding these big mistakes and building a successful music career, get my free music career tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He mentors musicians online to develop their own professional music careers and provides free music career resources.

© Tom Hess Music Corporation

Top 10 Mistakes People Make When Trying To Become Professional Musicians was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

1. Inspiring and motivating your students – teaching guitar well is often more about inspiring your students than teaching a new scale, chord or song.

2. Teaching them ‘new things’ to play/practice – Most guitar teachers understand this basic concept, but often struggle to know exactly how much ‘new content’ is too little or too much for each student. Most teachers ‘overwhelm’ their students with simply too much material in a short amount of time.

3. Helping them to solve their playing/musical problems – The best way to improve your guitar teaching is to understand exactly how to help any student overcome any problem.

Each of these areas has its own challenges, but for most teachers it is the last category (helping students solve guitar playing/musical problems) that can be the most difficult to consistently do well.

When teaching guitar to solve problems and bad habits, the first thing to do is be clear about  the process itself:

Identify the true cause of the problem. Remember that ‘symptoms’ of problems and ’causes’ of problems are often totally different things. A misdiagnosed problem (just like a misdiagnosed medical problem) can make things worse than doing nothing at all.

Find proven solutions to overcome this problem. Yes, this seems like an obvious point, but often teachers ‘guess’ or use the trial and error approach to teaching guitar. Surround yourself with other experienced guitar teachers. Ask them for their advice on your specific challenge, doing so may save you and your student a lot of time and frustration.

Communicate the causes and your solution to your student’s problem. Again, this may seem like common sense, but fact is, most teachers do not fully explain the cause and solutions to the problems students have, they sort of skip this part and move directly into implementing the solution. The reason why communicating the cause and solution to your student is so important is that, without the student truly knowing what these things are, they often won’t truly practice your solution diligently at home.

Implement the solution (training). To be the most effective, you need to do more than ‘teach what to do’, you need to ‘train’ them to do it. The ‘teaching part’ can usually be done quickly, but it is the ‘training’ that takes the time. Think more like a sports trainer and less like a school teacher as you implement solutions while teaching guitar (more on this below).

Hold their hand – You do not need to treat all your students like children (unless they are children), but when teaching guitar, it is important that you monitor your students’ motivation level and help them to keep it high. A mediocre guitar teacher who keeps his/her students highly motivated will almost always get much bigger results than a great ‘technical’ teacher who does little or nothing to keep students inspired and motivated – yet this is an area most teachers don’t do consistently well in – because they underestimate its importance.

Because students typically have multiple problems in their playing (inconsistent articulation, weak sense of timing, excess body tension, inefficient hand movement, excess string noise, just to name a few common ones), and because there are typically multiple causes to each of those problems, the hardest part about teaching guitar, as it relates to solving students’ playing problems and breaking bad habits, is knowing the best order to deal with the causes of a student’s problems. Timing is critical and so is the order.

Many (well intentioned) teachers make the mistake of trying to use ‘linear logic’ to help students break bad habits and overcome challenges. There are many problems with this, the main one is we don’t teach machines, we are teaching people. Everything we do, and when we do it, has a positive or negative impact in the mind of our students. In theory it might make perfect sense for a teacher to make the student deal with the most basic problems first. That seems logical right? Well, those that follow this all the time will have a hard time keeping students long enough to help them become the guitar players they wish to be.

Contrary to what many guitar teachers believe, fixing the most fundamental problems your students have in the beginning (or trying to break too many bad habits at once) does more harm than good for most students. Yes, problems and bad habits must be dealt with in order for your students to reach their maximum potential, but too much of this at the same time may kill the will for your students to endure the natural frustration that comes with learning to play guitar.

Each student is different and you need to get a sense of how much tolerance the student sitting in front of you can handle in the present moment. If you overestimate this, the result is likely going to lead to massive amounts of frustration for your student and he/she may give up lessons and playing guitar completely.

How long does it usually take your beginning guitar students, as an example, to sit or stand with ‘perfectly correct’ posture, use perfect left and right hand positions, use the correct picking motions and articulation etc. etc. when playing and practicing? Sure you can teach this in a minute or two, but how long will it take that student to instinctively do this all the time on his/her own without you reminding them? For most students, it takes a long time.

Is it okay to let your students continue to play and practice guitar when you know many basic things are wrong and that they will form bad habits by allowing them to go on in this way?

Most guitar teachers would say, “no, it’s not okay” and then proceed to immediately try to correct all of them as soon as possible. Other guitar teachers simply don’t notice or don’t care enough to address these things. They figure as long as students keep coming back to lessons, everything is good.

The best approach for teaching guitar is neither. To be clear, your top priority should be to keep your student coming back for as many lessons as possible – not simply because you make more money that way, but because, if a student gives up lessons, you can do nothing to help him/her. Obviously, you must deal with problems and bad habits though (to not do this would be the same as only feeding kids candy and never real food).

When teaching guitar to solve a problem, avoid dealing with the entire problem and all its causes at once. Begin with the one thing you can do for your student that will be easiest for him/her to correct. This will help to build confidence that he/she can begin to overcome the problem and that doing so wasn’t extremely hard to start with. Pay attention to how much of this you think they can handle right now. If it looks good, then give them the next thing to fix.

Although some guitar playing problems and bad habits can be really big issues to deal with, try not to make the entire lesson only about solving problems. Most students need to get a sense of forward progress and even though solving problems is forward progress, they can’t always see that themselves even after you explain it to them, so give them something else that is fulfilling for them to play and practice.  A little sugar with the medicine helps it go down easier .

Test your guitar teaching skills.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He coaches other guitar teachers on how to teach guitar

© Tom Hess Music Corporation All Rights Reserved

Improve Your Guitar Teaching was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

When trying to increase your guitar speed, the most important thing to remember is that you must be able to use your faster speed in songs (otherwise, what is the point of learning how to increase your speed in the first place?). Few things about guitar playing are more frustrating for people than having worked so hard to acquire good technique and speed on the guitar but then not being able to use it in real life playing situations, yet most players struggle with this to some extent.

How To Practice For Maximum Guitar Speed was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

1. Your individual playing

The most important thing you can do (individually) to prepare for your gigs is to focus on playing your songs ‘consistently well’. To improve this, practice your songs in a wider variety of environments and situations. Play your songs standing, walking, in the dark, under a strobe light (if you have one), while talking, without looking at your guitar, while friends are listening, etc. The key point is to practice playing consistently well in all those different scenarios. This will help your individual performances on the stage.

2. Your band’s performance

When your band rehearses you should not be focused on playing the songs correctly. If your band mates cannot play the songs flawlessly before the band rehearses, send him/her home to learn the songs. Once he/she has truly done that, bring that person back to band rehearsals. Band practice is not about holding people’s hand through the process of learning the songs which should have been learned at home. If you have a band mate who needs your help learning the songs, you can do this by meeting alone with that person to help. However, if this is a consistent problem, then you may need to replace that band member for someone who is better (or less lazy if that is the case).

Band rehearsals should be about the band playing the songs tight rhythmically, matching dynamic levels in various parts of the songs and developing great stage presence (more on this later).

Because it can be very difficult to really know how good your band is in any of these areas as you are practicing, I strongly suggest you record your band rehearsals in two ways:

• Video record your rehearsals. When you watch the video, turn the volume off and simply pay attention to how the band looks visually. This will help you to really focus on the stage presence and visual impact your band may (or may not) have on your next audience.
• Audio record your rehearsals. Do this with computer based recording software and make sure each instrument is recorded onto its own track (multi track record). Do not listen to the audio from the video recording! The first thing to do is look at the recording on the computer screen. You want to notice patterns of rhythmic flaws. Is your bass player always playing slightly before the beat? Is your guitar player playing slightly behind (late) the beat? For many people it is much easier to ‘see it on the screen’ than it is to hear it. Once you see it, then you will be able to hear it afterwards much more easily. Doing this exercise will really help your band to play much tighter rhythmically (which is absolutely critical for any band). Also listen to how the dynamic levels of the band are changing? Does everyone get louder and softer at the same time? Or is everyone doing their own thing randomly? It almost always sounds best when the band does this together.

3. Your stage presence

When you play live, your music is only 50% of what most people in your audience care about. The other 50% is what they see. Remember, they came to ‘see and hear’ your gig. Great ‘sounding’ bands often lack bigger success because their live shows suffer from lame stage presence. If you want more people to consistently come out to your gigs, you must develop great stage presence.

As mentioned above band rehearsals aren’t about ‘learning to play the songs’. Schedule at least 50% of your band’s rehearsal time to analyze your stage presence skills (watch the video as described above and take notes on what you notice), then begin to implement improvements to this part of your live playing. You can make a lot of improvement on your own simply by some self analysis. If you want more help, check out my free stage presence tips.

4. Eliminate (or at least reduce) stage fright

If you have cool music, a cool band and have prepared well to give your audience an awesome show, that can all be quickly destroyed if stage fright gets in your way. Many musicians simply don’t perform well on stage due to anxiety. Don’t let this happen to you and your band. You have worked too hard to let fear cripple you. Your audience deserves better, and more importantly, you deserve better! You are on stage to have fun, not to be nervous every moment of the gig. To eliminate (or at least to significantly reduce) performance anxiety, check out this stage fright article.

5. Performance logistics

In addition to stage fright, there are other things that may happen during your gig that can hurt it. The main two issues are not being able to hear and not being able to see. If you’ve already played gigs, then you know that every gig sounds different on the stage. One night you can’t hear the bass, the next night you can’t hear yourself, etc. When you are the opening band, you typically don’t get a sound check before you play, so you have no idea what you will be able to hear (or not hear) on stage until you start playing the first song. While there are many different ways to deal with this problem, I’m going to focus only on one of them here. One of the best ways to prepare for not being able to hear all the instruments is to practice your songs with you and only ONE other instrument. So for example, practice playing only with the bass player. Next, practice the song only with the drummer. This will prepare you for live situations when you can only hear the bass or only hear the drums etc.

The next common logistical problem is not being able to see. Often live stages are dark in some moments and then extremely bright in other moments, making it very hard to see your instrument. My eyes are very sensitive to light, so I always play with dark sunglasses on (since the bright lights often blind me on stage without them). For dark situations you can add white out (or even glow in the dark markers) on the side of your fingerboard, so even in very low light you can clearly see your fingerboard. Of course practice playing the entire song without ever looking at your guitar is also a great way to prepare for unexpected lighting problems on the stage.

To get more help developing your music career check out my fifteen free music career tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional guitarist and mentors musicians to start a career in music.

©Tom Hess Music Corporation.
All Rights reserved.

How to Prepare For Gigs and Make Your Live Shows Better was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

There can be more than one reason why a student may struggle when trying to change chords smoothly. So the first thing to do when dealing with this challenge is to diagnose why the problem exists. You need to determine if your student has one of the following problems:

• A. A physical coordination problem
• B. He/she has not been practicing
• C. A lack of understanding of what needs to be done
• D. A mental processing problem

Most guitar teachers assume the reason is either A. (a physical coordination problem) or B. (little or no practice). Fact is, most of the time this is wrong. The majority of students actually do attempt to practice. And true physical coordination problems are rare.

For most guitar students almost all guitar playing problems are caused by their brains, not by their hands! This is why many efforts to help them may not work well.

As I mentioned before, there can many reasons why a student is struggling with this (or any other issue) so it is not possible to give a one-size-fits-all solution in an article. There are however three powerful guitar teaching tips that can help solve this problem with beginning guitar students.

1. Get your students to keep their strumming hand moving in correct rhythm no matter how far behind the fretting hand may be in forming the next chord. In other words, tell your students (when practicing this way) to not allow the strumming hand to wait on the fretting hand! Practicing in this way will solve a lot of other rhythm and timing problems in the future for this student! The student should practice this way about one third of their practice time until the problem is resolved.
2. Get your student to not use the strumming hand at all and simply change chords with the fretting hand quickly (rapid fire, one after another). The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.
3. Make your student play a chord he/she needs to master. Tell him/her to grip the strings hard when playing the chord, then to relax totally (without taking fingers away from the strings/chord), then tell the student to squeeze again all fingers at the same time! Then relax.

The goal here is to train his/her brain to make all fingers move and relax together and not one finger at a time (which is how beginning guitar students make chords on their own – big mistake)… Repeat this exercise until the student can do it well.

Next, have the student move fingers off the strings but maintain the basic chord shape while hovering over the strings…. Then press down on the strings and make the chord… repeat this many times and then gradually move further and further away from the strings before making the chord again. Eventually from an open hand the student should be able to form the chord easily… but in each case you must be sure all fingers are moving and relaxing at the same time, not one finger at a time! The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.

Notice that these solutions of the problem are all ‘physical’, but they are designed to overcome the student’s “mental processing problem” because the student has not learned to separate and isolate each motion. The beginning guitar student’s brain is overloaded with too much information to apply at the same time, this is why we work on method #1 and #2 above to free the brain from too much processing at once. The last method (#3) is designed in order to break the student’s mental processing habit of sending separate and linear messages to each finger of the hand. What we want is to train the brain to process and send one message to all fingers involved.

To get more help on teaching guitar and building a successful guitar teaching business, check out these fifteen free guitar teaching tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He coaches other guitar teachers on how to teach guitar.

Teaching Chords To Beginning Guitar Students was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

There are lots of ways to make guitar solos. Most guitarists focus on ‘what to play’ versus ‘how to play things’. Fact is, the nuances of phrasing (‘how’ the notes are played) often matter MORE than the notes we actually play. How many times have you heard someone play a solo ‘without’ much emotion? Often there was nothing wrong with their choice of notes. The solo lacked emotion and interest because the ‘phrasing’ was weak.

Guitar Phrasing is the most important aspect to creating great guitar solos, yet very few guitar players learn to develop this key element of their guitar playing.

One of the best things you can do to make better guitar solos is to carefully study your favorite singers. In the late 1990s, I began to study the vocal styles of my favorite singers. I learned to play on guitar every little nuance of their vocal phrasing and vibrato… and most importantly, the ‘musical contexts’ in which they made various phrasing and vibrato choices when singing. Singers cannot do many of things that we can do on the guitar, but they can naturally and effortlessly do things that are not common (but are still possible) to do on the guitar.

Listen to your favorite singers and notice the difference between their vocal phrasing (‘how’ they sing notes and phrases) and your guitar phrasing (‘how’ you play your notes and phrases). Then listen carefully to how these singers construct their phrases and compare that to how you create your guitar solos. When you really pay attention to this, you will probably make some very cool and powerful observations. This can be one of the best guitar solo lessons you can ever have. It can be a real eye (and ear) opening experience that can lead you to discover MANY new ideas that you can use to make you’re your own great guitar solos.

Here are three things you can learn and implement into your playing immediately so that you can consistently make better guitar solos.

Delayed Vibrato: Listen to how many singers sing a note (without vibrato at first) and then begin to apply vibrato to it a few moments later. The vast majority of guitar players don’t do this when soloing; instead they apply the vibrato immediately to the note. Although this can also sound good, it gets old to always immediately apply vibrato when you use it. So play a note on your guitar, let it ring out naturally (without vibrato) for a moment, then apply vibrato to it. In addition to creating a more ‘vocal style of guitar playing’ you may also notice that the note you just played sustains longer. (more on this in the video below).

Movement between notes: As you know, when playing notes on a piano there is no ability to ‘bend’ notes. Singers frequently ‘bend’ notes in both directions (up or down in pitch), although downward ‘bent’ notes are more common in most vocal styles. Guitar players frequently bend notes, but 99% of the time they only bend notes ‘up’ (in pitch). (more on this in the video below).

Intuitive Emotional Expression: Singers often manipulate tension and dissonance intuitively. They might sing the 9th of a chord because it makes a very specific emotional feeling. Most (non jazz) guitar players would naturally play the root while making a guitar solo (especially at the end of a phrase). This happens because guitar players typically are thinking about patterns and scale positions. And thus the ear is conditioned to ‘find the consonant notes’ when beginning and ending phrases while creating (or improvising) guitar solos. Singers don’t have ‘patterns’ and ‘positions’ to think about. They are only focused on their intuition – the emotion of each note they sing. This results in more natural options for the singer (compared to many ‘inexperienced’ guitar players) particularly at the beginnings and endings of phrases.

Watch the video below to see exactly what I’m talking about and hear a live demonstration of each.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtePrgcC0w

To get more help with your guitar playing check out my 10 Free Guitar Solo Tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a professional guitarist and teaches electric guitar lessons online.

© Tom Hess Music Corporation.

All Rights reserved.

How To Make A Great Guitar Solo was written by Tom Hess for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise