Any teacher will tell you that teaching is a hard job. And many students will tell you that learning is also a hard job. In fact, the mantra “It’s hard…” is rapidly becoming the number one catch phrase with students. It’s almost as though simply saying “It’s hard” or “It’s confusing” is a free pass to moving on to something that’s not hard or confusing. Trouble is that in going this route, we’ve effectively taken our brain out of the learning process. And, pardon the pun, if you think about it, taking the brain out of learning doesn’t seem to be a very bright idea.

We spend out whole lives learning. Some lessons come very easily and become ingrained in our thought process. Four times six is twenty-four. Placing your hand on an open flame will burn it and will hurt a lot. The brain has this information down pat.

Other lessons are ongoing and might not have definitive outcomes. If I smile and say hello to someone, chances are good that I’ll get a smile and a hello in return. But it’s not one hundred percent certain. As far as this lesson goes, my brain is still working out an answer.

Learning how to play the guitar offers our brains no end of opportunity to learn. But, because it’s so easy, it’s tempting to want to just be shown something without going through any effort to dig out the information ourselves, even though the information is readily available. And it’s truly funny (in a sad kind of way) because we learn things a lot more complicated than music all through our lives. People can recite the lyrics of their favorite song but can’t tell you a G chord has the notes G, B and D in it.

A big part of learning is attitude. We dislike the word “work” and we want things to happen magically, totally forgetting that almost nothing comes that way. Again pardon the pun, but even eating and walking (not to mention reading and sitting at a computer) are things we had to take a single step at a time. Given the choice between commiting something to memory, no matter how simple it might be, or just asking the same question over and over again, many people choose the latter.

As a guitar teacher, I have a goal that seems self-destructive: I want my students to learn how to think so that, should they ever be in a situation where they have no teacher, they can still rely on their brains to get them to the point they want to reach. Oh yes, we need to work on the hands and the muscle memory and all that. But getting a student to realize that he or she has the capability to figure out a problem, almost any problem, has to also be a big part of the learning process.

So if all your learning is being spent on your hands, engage your brain for a minute and rethink things. If you’re not adverse to reading, you might want to take a look at an old column on Guitar Noise called If I Only Had… It’s a bit simple, but I think it gets the point across.

Peace

Let’s explore a tip that has a lot to do with music — no matter what instrument you play. We’re talking about singing. What do we guitarists need to know about singing? Maybe we should scrap the whole topic and let vocalists pick this up. But maybe we should investigate a bit.

What’s the point of singing? What do we sing to help us play guitar better? First, a fact: Singing helps you memorize and understand music better (than if you didn’t sing.). We’re not going to slog through all of the academic, scholarly research done to prove this. Instead we’ll get practical, so you can prove the usefulness of singing to yourself.

Pick any two tunes from your favorite artist. Pick two tunes that you don’t know how to play yet and that sound fairly similar to each other. Some possible artists to start with: Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel. We’re going for catchy, simple melodies. We’re not going to work with chords in this tip.

Learn the melodies of both tunes completely by ear. For the first one, don’t sing it all. Just dive right in, and pick out the major scale pattern you are most comfortable with, and try to pick out the tune’s notes within that pattern.

For the second tune, don’t touch the guitar yet. Sing the tune, and keep singing it, repeatedly, until you are confident you know the melody without any backup harmony. Only then, work it out on your guitar. Use the same major scale pattern you used on the first melody, if you can.

Now for the moment of truth: which tune was easier to learn? I bet it was the one you sang.

Keep this in mind: Your first instrument, and with many people their most musically accurate instrument, is your voice.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - February 15, 2006 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.

What does “guilt” have to do with playing guitar? It has to do with practicing. Guilt over how often you think you ought to practice, versus how much time you’re actually spending on the frets. But more to the point, guilt related to the guitarist you are compared to the guitarist you think you want or have to be.

There’s some real simple advice on handling this uncomfortable emotion: let it go. However much you practice has got to be enough. It is enough. Unless you’re a pro musician, your practicing isn’t putting any bread on your table, as good as it may feel. So let practicing take a back seat to working, paying bills, watching your kids grow up.

There’s always more to learn on the guitar. And no matter what skill level you have, no matter how much skill you’ve lost, the point of playing is really to feel engaged in something timeless and wondrous, isn’t it? And you can get that feeling even if you can’t tell the difference between a tuning peg and a truss rod, or an eighth note and a perfect fourth.

There will always be players who are “better” than you — in other words, more skilled. And there are always going to be players more dedicated than you. So what? No other player can give you what you can give yourself when you play: again, that sense of timelessness, of wonder and timelessness. So let the guilt go; let the good flow.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - February 1, 2006 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.

Timing is a critical part of making music. Without notes playing in their proper time, you have one enormously bad glob of harmony.

But timing is also important in practicing music, in the discipline of making music. For one thing, a metronome will improve your ability to play in time. Always play with a metronome. We think we know a tune until we turn on the metro, and reality hits as we stumble.

Beyond that, use a timer to time each exercise you do: scales, tunes, whatever. Deadlines have a way of motivating. If you know you only have 15 minutes to work on learning a riff, you’ll use that time effectively. This is true because you know if you run over that 15 minutes, you’ll be cutting into time for scales or something else important.

And another type of time to keep: a record, or log, showing how many days you’ve spent a particular song, or playing something else. For example, if your goal is to transpose all twenty songs in your repertoire to one other key, keep track of how many days it takes you to do that, using hashmarks on a piece of paper that faces you when you practice.

Then, when you’ve completed all transpositions, you might want to do another set of transpositions in another key. Again, track how many days it takes. When you complete that second set, you have two numbers to give you a good indicator of how your transposition skills have improved.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - January 1, 2006 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.

This has to do with playing in position, versus at different positions along the fretboard. This is really a topic concerned with improvisation, but also with straight melodies.

Here’s the gist: Do take the time and trouble to break out of staying within a single position. We’ll get to the reason in a moment.

You could be playing a melody for a tune, and maybe it stays completely within the key, or maybe is has some chromatics (notes outside the key). And you might be able to play it completely at fret/position V, for example. And it might sound great, too.

But don’t be satisfied with this. Instead, do the following: For each change of the tune’s chord’s, play the melody at a different position.

You’ll start by learning the tune’s chords: for each change in the tune’s chords, play a pattern for that chord in a different position from the last chord pattern.

Example, super simple: Louie, Louie, three chord tune. Say it’s in E: Chords E, A, B. You could play the E at position IV and the A at position V. Don’t. Play the A at position II.

Why? Why pick a new position for each chord change? Because when your hand stays in the same position, your lazy guitarist’s brain (don’t get angry, all our brains are lazy, mine especially) tends to think “Same position, therefore, same sound, same chord, same key, same, same, same…”

But when we move our hands to a new position, Lazy Brain turns into Thinking Brain: “Ah! new position! New sound.” And you will thus become sensitive to the tune’s chord changes instead of thinking in terms of one, monotonic set of sounds that probably sounds like the tonic chord.

I’m not saying use this exclusively. It’s an exercise. Try it.

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

This first appeared in the Guitar Noise News - January 15, 2006 newsletter. Reprinted with permission.

None of us practice as much as we’d like to, let alone as much as we think we should. There’s work, school, family, friends, and no end of the little things that happen in life. And when a moment of free time comes along, well, who wouldn’t like to sit and just enjoy it by doing nothing once in a while?

And then, there are the times that we could practice, but alas we don’t have our guitars with us. Practice without a guitar? Sure! As much as we might think otherwise, we tend to concentrate our guitar practice on just the “finger” aspect. We strum and play scales and riffs and songs and work on getting our muscle memory in shape. But there’s a lot of “head” work that could be going on as well. And when better to practice using your head when you’re not preoccupied with your fingers?

When I lived in Chicago, I realized that I could have easily gotten in anywhere from an hour to two hours practice time a day by playing my guitar on the bus or train during my commutes to and from work. But that’s not an ideal place to practice, with a guitar anyway. So I started working on the other aspects of playing, the “head work” as it were, during the commutes and found that it truly helped me a lot when I got that guitar back in my hands.

You may not be able to practice guitar as much as you’d like, but don’t think you can’t be improving your skills just because you don’t have a guitar with you. Here are four easy things you can practice when you’re away from your guitar:

Rhythm. Strumming and keeping rhythm tends to be one of the biggest challenges for beginning guitarists. Often it takes a while before the act of strumming becomes fluid and natural. But there are a lot of ways to develop your sense of rhythm and timing that don’t require you to have a guitar in hand.

Do you tap your foot along with the beat of a song? Take that a step further and use your strumming hand. Tap out a strumming pattern on a desk or table, or use a pick to strum on your leg. It’s a great way to get a rhythm into your hands before you try it out on your guitar.

Ear Training. Who wouldn’t like to pick out how to play a song just by listening to it? Ear training might seem beyond your abilities and skills, but it is something that most people can develop with time and practice and repetition. And there are tons of opportunities to practice!

Chances are you listen to music pretty often. Take a little time to concentrate on what you’re hearing. You can do this in a general way, such as trying to pick out major or minor chords, or in a more specific way, trying to figure out what the guitarist is doing. Are they chugging out power chords, fingerpicking, or playing a riff to help out the rhythm? As you learn more about intervals and chords, you might even find that listening in this way helps you learn songs by ear.

Print out a few of our lessons on ear training to read in your spare time. You can find them here: http://www.guitarnoise.com/ear.php

Chord Makeup. What’s six times four? Twenty-four, of course. What notes are in a G major chord? If you couldn’t automatically answer “G, B, and D,” then you might make it a point to learn three or four chords a week. Soon, you’ll know your chords as well as your multiplication tables. You’ll find this very handy when you’re trying to come up with different chord voicings (alternate ways to play chords). Combining chord knowledge and ear training makes it easier to let the music you hear in your head come out in your playing.

Start out simple, working on things that you use every day. In other words, concentrate on your major and minor chords in “guitar friendly” keys such as C, G, D, A and E. Once you’re good with those, try adding sevenths and major sevenths. Then you can really test yourself by picking two or three notes and then naming chords that use the notes you chose.

Again, and I really can’t stress this enough, learning the makeup of your chords is not all that different from learning your multiplication tables. If you take the time, it will become second nature to you before you know it.

Sight Reading. Reading music notation is another thing that gets incredibly easier with a little practice. When you know you’ll have time to read, carry a piece or two of sheet music along with—or even instead of—your newspaper, book, or favorite guitar magazine, and try to listen to the music in your head while reading it.

A lot of people couldn’t be bothered to learn to read music, preferring to argue instead about how (insert your guitar icon here) doesn’t know how and it doesn’t stop him or her from being great. I can’t help think that in the amount of time it takes to write and post a response about why you don’t have to read music, you could learn six notes on the staff.

Reading music is simply a tool, a color to add to your crayon box, if you will. And for many people, it can be a huge help, if for no other reason than to learn to read rhythms and to use that skill to enhance their strumming. Even if you decide you can’t read the notes, notation will allow you to read a rhythm, which kind of brings us back to step one again!

So the next time you find yourself without a guitar, get in some practicing! You’ll find that this supplemental work with your head will help you improve the work with your fingers.

–David Hodge