Archive for December, 2009

How To Setup And Maintain Your Guitar

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Setting up your electric or acoustic guitar is crucial to having it play well. You also want to know how to maintain it throughout the year and the changing of seasons.

Guitars, being made of wood, react in many different ways to things such as changes in climate, temperature, humidity and moisture.  The two biggest factors to keep in mind are that the air is cold and dry in the winter and warm and humid in the summer.

During the winter month’s when it is dry, wood tends to contract and shrink.  Something that you should keep an eye out for here is the frets on the fret board. When the wood shrinks, sometimes the frets will protrude and you can get some sharp edges sticking out.

In the Summer time, the wood expands again and usually corrects the problem if it does exist.  This is just one example of the things that you want to keep an eye out for.  Another typical thing that happens is that the fret board may start to bow a little bit which creates higher action (string height) and possible intonation problems.  This can be fixed quite easily with the proper truss rod adjustment.

In the spring and summer months, the air gets much warmer and more humid.  This is usually a time when guitars freak out and get a little out of whack. Acoustic guitars tend to get more bent out of shape than electrics because they are more fragile and made of thinner pieces of wood.

I noticed this on my acoustic a couple weeks ago when I was sitting in on a friends gig. I was playing for a little over an hour and I noticed that my left hand was cramping up and getting really tense. I could tell that the neck was getting really bowed and that the action (how high the strings are from the fret board) was getting pretty high.

So what to do…

Electric guitars are typically much easier to adjust than acoustics because all of the adjustments that you typically would make are not permanent.

Acoustics are a little more difficult because you sometimes need to raise or lower the nut or shave down the bridge piece, both pretty permanent procedures.  It of course depends on what your guitar needs.

Sometimes just a few turns of the truss rod will get you back into shape and your good to go.  What I would recommend doing is first of all take a minute to examine how your guitar plays. Does it feel comfortable and easy to play or does it put a lot of strain on your hand when you are practicing.

If it’s the latter, I would suggest taking it to a local music store/repair shop and see what a professional guitar tech thinks.  If you want to do the work yourself, I would recommend checking out the Guitar Setup & Maintenance videos on the RGP website. You can get to them here: http://www.rockguitarpower.com/guitarlessons/guitar-maintenance/

If you don’t have access to these video, you can also find them on my YouTube channel. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/rockguitarpower

If the possibility of making things worse than they already are is scaring you, then by all means take it to a local repair shop and have a professional work on it. You will be amazed at how much of a difference it can make to play a guitar that is fine-tuned and setup properly.

When I got my acoustic back from my repair guy, I couldn’t put it down because it played so good. It certainly gave me some new inspiration to play and write some tunes on it.

If some of the terms and descriptions in this post are confusing to you, don’t worry! Next time I will be talking about all the components that are critical to guitar setup in detail.

Learning To Play Songs Using Guitar Tabs

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The main goal for writing this article is to give you some tips for making it easier when learning other peoples songs using guitar tabs. But first, a little background on what it is to be an emotional player….

As a teacher, I always have students asking me to teach them how to play songs by such artists as Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Slash and many other really famous guitarists. Many of these great guitar players are what I like to call “Emotional Players”. When they write and play music, they do so without much thinking or understanding of what is actually going on with the song.

They are playing from the heart and keep trying new things until they end up with a song, lick, chord progression or whatever there looking for. Sometimes this comes very naturally to a player and sometimes it does not. Regardless of the writing process, something to keep in mind is that when a person writes a song, it is most likely easier for them to perform it and play it again for others than it is for someone else to learn and perform it.

Although this may seem obvious when you think about it, a lot of people don’t take that into consideration when learning a song.

Now the tricky part comes in when you, the fan, student or whatever, wants to learn this song. Most people will either learn a song by ear or by finding some form of sheet music or guitar tab.

If you are going at it by ear, then you just keep trying things until it sounds like the tune. If you are going to learn a song by finding a guitar tab for it, then there is a whole different approach that you will need to take.

If it is a good quality guitar tab that you are working with, then you will most likely find that learning the song is a lot harder than you thought because there are so many little changes and differences between the parts. This is because most good tabs will transcribe the song exactly how it is played on the recording.

What you need to remember is that emotional players rarely play the same thing twice, there are always little changes that happen between takes. This can leave the person learning the tune very confused because it’s hard to understand what it’s like to write emotionally and let the music come out of you without thinking about it. When you’re learning another person’s song, you will be approaching it with a whole different mindset than the person who wrote it.

Let’s take the song “All Along The Watchtower” By Jimi Hendrix for example. Click Here To See Examples 1 and 2: how to read guitar tab. If you look at what he plays during the 1st verse Vs. the 2nd verse, you will see that they are totally different. The chord progressions are the same, however the lead parts that Jimi plays are different.

Both parts sound great over the chord progression so they are just two different ways to play over the chord changes. The frustrating part for most beginners comes in when they try and learn every little detail of every part.

Now if you are a perfectionist or in a cover band, then it’s important to play the song as close to the original as possible. However, if you are just wanting to learn the song for fun, then what I suggest doing is to first learn and play just the basic chord progression. Once you are comfortable with this, then try and tackle the more difficult and advanced parts.

Another situation to look out for is when you have a bar of music with a lot of single notes that are very close to one another. The trick here is to understand that all these single notes are usually part of one single and basic chord.

Instead of strumming the chord, it’s played by breaking up the notes. Click On This Link: guitar tab lesson to take a look at an example of this in Metallica’s “Fade To Black”. This is the main verse riff. At first glance you see single notes all over the place.

I’ve seen many beginners approach playing this with just one finger. Now step back and look at it like a group of chords. You will see that the chord progression goes Am, C, G, Em. If you put each of these chord shapes down before playing the part, you will see that you have almost all the notes right under your fingers, all you need to do is play the right strings and your golden.

These are just a couple examples of what to look out for when working with tabs. There are certainly many more tips and tricks you can use to make the process of learning songs quicker and easier but these are the two biggest situations that I see people having the most difficulty with. Keep practicing and learning new songs and the process of using guitar tabs will get easier and easier.

The Fine Art Of Practicing Guitar

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Let’s talk about THE MOST IMPORTANT thing that you can do to improve your guitar playing.  PRACTICING!  How you practice and your mindset on doing it altogether is, in my opinion, the most crucial thing to focus on when you want to excel at guitar playing or anything else for that matter.

Now I’ve worked with many students over the years and I have come to find that certain people have different needs when it comes to what and how they should practice. The biggest thing that you need to keep in mind here is that PRACTICING IS PLAYING!!!!!!!!  I can’t emphasize this enough.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who are thinking about playing guitar or have started to learn and a lot of the time I hear something to the effect of “I really want to play guitar but I don’t like to practice”. If that’s your response, or anything similar, then in my opinion you are not practicing effectively nor are you looking at it in the right way.

To practice and play effectively you do not need to sit there and keep on playing some boring exercise over and over again to see great results. That has it’s place in guitar playing but for the most part you can make awesome practice/playing routines out of songs or techniques that you want to learn.  This is always more fun than just practicing/playing some old exercise because it gets you learning something specific that you want to know how to play.

For example, if you are working on getting better at the Minor Pentatonic scale, then look for a song that you like that uses the scale and work towards playing a certain passage from it.

Now it is usually a good idea to make an exercise out of a small part of the passage and repeat that a lot.  This gets you use to the general movement and feel of the lick.  After you master the basic technique, you will find it much easier to learn the actual lick.

One of the biggest problems that I see students do when they want to learn a solo is that they will start out by learning the solo note for note without paying any attention to the techniques that are happening to make the solo sound good.  Many times there are repeated patterns in solos that happen time and time again in other songs.  If you can spot some of these cliché licks, then it will make playing that particular solo so much easier and more fun.

So now the number one question asked after the first guitar lesson… “How often and how long should I practice/play for”?

The answer to the first part, how often, is simple. EVERY DAY if you can make time for it.  The answer to the second part, how long should I practice/play for, takes a little more thought to answer.

Here is the big factor: How focused are your practice/playing sessions? Are you sitting there in a quite room with a metronome and your cell phone turned off or are you noodling around while watching TV, eating French fries and texting your best friend about what your going to do this weekend.

I can make 15 minutes of practice enough time to excel at whatever I am working on at the moment if I sit down and plan out what I need to work on in that time.  If you’re the organized and discipline type, then I highly suggest setting up a weekly routine where you plan out what your going to practice/play and set goals as to what you want to accomplish in that time.

If you’re not so organized and don’t feel like taking the time to plan things out, then at least make sure that when you practice/play you put all your attention on your instrument.  No phone calls, no TV, no snacking, bickering or distractions.  You will be amazed at what you can get done.

If you want to see an example of what you can accomplish if you focus, check out this You Tube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvo_srRBSkI

This is Jonathan Dretto, a ten-year-old student that I have been working with for only a couple years.  I can tell you one thing for certain about Jonathan, he not only practices/plays a lot, but also he is very focused when he does it.  He knows how to work with a metronome and always has it on during his practice/playing sessions.

Another really important element to practicing is to play along to the recordings of the songs that you are working on as soon as you can.  This is, in my opinion, the next best thing to performing for other people because it’s fun and gives you the sense of what it feels like to play in a band.

The big pay off for me, when I spend time learning a new song, has always been to crank up the volume, hit play and act as if I’m playing with the band in front of thousands of people.  Playing to recordings also gives you a steady beat to play to and it’s usually a lot more fun than using a metronome.

Something that I always tell my students when there working on a new song or technique is to not worry if it doesn’t sound good at first or if they can’t keep up with the tempo of a certain passage.  The same is true if you are playing to a recording.  One of the best things about practicing to recordings is that it lets you know how well you have the song down and where you need to improve.

One last thing that I wanted to mention about this topic for now is to make sure that you pick songs or parts of songs that you really want to learn.  Don’t discard a song if you think it’s going to be too hard to learn and play.  Although it’s best if you learn a song from start to finish, you can still get a lot of good from just learning a few riffs or licks from a song that you think is really cool.

Understanding What Kind Of Guitar Player You Are

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Over the years working with people as a guitar and music teacher, I have found  4 main types of personalities that people have when it comes to how they react to learning and playing music.  It’s important for you to figure out what type of personality you have so that you can maximize the time you spend when playing and practicing guitar.  It’s also important to note that these are just the most common traits that I see and work with. There are certainly more and you don’t necessarily need to be just one.
In no specific order:

#1-The Emotional player: These are the types of people who can let loose of their thinking and just play the instrument with lots of emotion and expression.  I often find that these types of people physically use a lot of their body to feel the rhythm of what there playing and don’t mind letting their emotions take control of them.

Things to focus on:  I usually find that these types of players are not that interested in reading music and would rather learn songs by having other people show them how to play or by figuring them out by ear.  The best thing to do if you’re a new player is to get proficient at playing open chords, movable bar chords and power chords.  You have a lot of feeling and energy that your are dying to let out so the quicker you can play the essential chords that are used in guitar, the quicker you will be having fun playing what you want to play.

#2- The Songwriter: This is the type of person that loves to write their own music and create songs from scratch.  You usually have a lot to say and like to share your thoughts with other people through songs.  I have worked with some people who don’t care much to learn other people’s songs and I have worked with other people who don’t even understand that they are capable of writing their own music. In either case, I firmly believe that writing music is an extremely important skill for an aspiring musician to learn.  It gives you a lot of insight as to what type of player you are and what skills you need to work on.

Things to focus on:  You don’t have to be a musical genius to start writing your own songs.  Some people are scared to even try it, others NEED to do it to get out all of their ideas.  A lot of the most famous songs in modern music are extremely simple and easy to play, with only a few chords that make up the whole song.  Along with knowing how to play the basic open chords and having a good understanding of melody, I always encourage songwriters to study a bit of music theory so that they understand Harmonic Structure and how songs work to sound pleasing to the human ear.  Even if writers can crank out songs like lightning, they usually, at some point, get frustrated because they only have a limited knowledge of how music works and get stuck writing the same old song time and time again. Understanding theory will give you more options and ways to be expressive in songwriting.

#3- The Technical Player: These are the types of players that love music theory, playing physically difficult songs and usually enjoy reading music.   The ability to read music is not a must, however it does enable a player to understand much more about the song both emotionally and how to perform it with more expression.  If you like a good challenge and don’t mind spending a lot of time to perfect a certain song or technique, then you will probably find yourself in this category a lot of the time.  Also, the theory side of music, that is very math oriented, is usually very interesting to you.

Things to focus on:  Technique, technique, and more technique! If you like playing technical music you are going to want to focus a lot on perfecting your technique. This includes every aspect of how you pick (whether it be with a pick or with your fingers), strum, slide, sit, stand, etc.! Having a big vocabulary of scales, arpeggios, and patterns to link them together is also a must.  Playing fast is also something that you are going to want to spend some time developing. The ability to rip through passages at very high tempos is incredibly FUN and EXCITING! If you focus on the right learning methods, it’s not as hard as you might think although it does takes a lot of continued practice to get your muscles up to snuff to keep with the fast pace.

#4- High interest, Low attention span.  I couldn’t think of a specific name for this description so sorry but that’s the best I could do.  A lot of people with ADD can fall into this category but that’s certainly NOT a required trait.  Now you might already be thinking that falling somewhere near this category puts you at a disadvantage but I will tell you from experience, nothing can be further from the truth.  I have worked with a number of people who obviously have a really hard time keeping their thoughts in one place and focusing on a certain topic.  While that might be the case, these people also had incredible pitch perception (sometimes even what’s known as perfect pitch) and the very valuable ability to learn music by ear.  I couldn’t be more envious of these types of people because I can assure you that I am not one of them.  Learning music by ear and developing pitch perception has never come easy for me and I have had to work my tail off to be able to do it well.  I have seen some students who are able to master this ability with ridiculous ease.

Things to focus on:  Understanding theory and reading music is usually difficult for these types of people. When I work with people that are like this, I always focus on getting their technique as good as possible because they already have the tools inside of them to be an amazing player, it’s just a matter of giving them the ability for their fingers to move the way they need to so that they can play what’s inside of them.  It’s good to do a lot of ear training exercises and learning songs by listening to them.  After they get to a certain point, they usually form an interest in theory and want to understand more about how music works. This is because they become somewhat discouraged at what they don’t know and understand about music.  I’m a firm believer in teaching what people want to learn and not pushing to hard for them to learn what they don’t.  There are certain things that are crucial for every guitarist/musician to understand so I have always found a way to be able to teach those things in a manner that best fits their personalities.

Again, these are just the main personality characteristics of people that I work with.  There are plenty more and of course you can be some of one and some of another.  The reason I think it’s important to understand where you might fit in to all of this is because it will enable you to have a lot more fun learning guitar and not get so frustrated when things become difficult.  Always focus on learning the things that you want to be able to do and the rest will come with time if you are looking to become a well-rounded guitar player.  If someone says that knowing how to read music is essential for a beginning guitar student and you do not take to reading easily, then I’m pretty sure your not going to be having much fun when you start out.  One very important thing that you need to ask yourself is what style of music are you looking to play.  If you say Classical or Jazz, then I say that hands down, without a doubt you need to learn to read music.  However most other styles of music can be played, written, and performed well without knowing how to read notes on the staff.