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5 Essentials For Learning Guitar – Part 2

By | Agile Guitars, learning guitar

5 Essentials For Learning Guitar – Part 2 (With Bonus!)

If you missed it check out Part 1

Learning Guitar is a great way to alleviate stress, expand your creative mind and quench your thirst for rock!  Here is part 2 of our suggestions of some essentials to help anybody that wants to learn guitar make some serious progress.

learning guitar

Listen, Listen, Listen

One of the main skills to becoming good at playing music is developing an ear for it.  This is just as true for playing the guitar.  There are really two areas to think about when talking about learning to listen.  The first would be to listen to other people playing the guitar and preferably guitar players better than you!  Go listen to all the songs by your favourite guitar players over and over again and try to dissect with your ears what they are doing.  You can listen with a fine tuned ear and try to pick out things like where on the neck they are playing, how many notes are they playing, a specific lick or a chord progression to name a few.  The other thing you can pay attention to is their timing; How are they strumming the guitar, how long or how short a time between each chord they play in the song.  These are all things that you can be listening for to help you improve in your playing.  This is kind of the ‘hidden learning’ of guitar playing but can really help take your playing to the next level once you have mastered the basics as you will have all these chord progressions and different timings in your head to help with your creativity.

The other listening we are talking about, which we have already kind of mentioned, is developing your ear to be able to figure out what is being played and how it is being played in large part just from listening.  This is a great skill to have.  Some people come by it more naturally then others but it is something you can become better at over time as you listen to more guitar playing with a fine tuned ear and as your playing ability improves.

 

Learn Music Theory

Really what you need to do to really become proficient at playing Guitar, especially if you want to make a living at it, is learn the language of music.  And it most definitely is a language and like any language you need to learn to speak, read and understand it.  Some of the things you should learn is how to read notes, the positions along the neck of the guitar and the names of the chords.  In addition, you should learn musical timing and how to decipher what key a song is being played in.  This will be extremely helpful in your playing and improvisation.

If you watch any documentaries or interviews about some of your favourite guitarists many of them will talk about how they can’t read music and so forth.  That may be true but most of them still have quite an understanding of timing, positions, notes and the construction of a song or solo and such.  They usually are able to, when it comes down to it, talk in very technical terms about what they are doing on the guitar.  We are almost convinced it is almost like when you were in highschool you didn’t want to really admit your were smart because it wasn’t cool.  Maybe it is much cooler as goes along with the rock’n’roll lifestyle to say, “I can’t read notes, or music but I just go up there and shred!”  We are not buying it!  Those guys have put in countless hours in learning their instrument and if you want to get good you should too!

 

BONUS – Buy a Guitar

Of course this sounds too obvious but there are a lot of people out there that really want to learn guitar.  It’s been on their list of things to do but somehow they just haven’t got around to it.  Others might be thinking, “why would I buy a guitar if I don’t know how to play yet?”  They think they will learn first somehow, maybe by borrowing a guitar, before they buy one.  Here is some advice…GO BUY A GUITAR!

Now you don’t have to go breaking the bank to buy your first guitar.  There are lots of affordable guitars that are still very good quality out there.  We would suggest one of the models from the Agile AL Guitars.  These are excellent quality guitars that will not break your wallet.  Get one of these and you won’t be disappointed.

Buy the guitar because then you will have it at your beckon call whenever you want to practice or just play around and you won’t have to worry about your buddy asking for his or her guitar back.

GO PLAY!

5 Essentials For Learning Guitar – Part 1

By | Agile Guitars, learning guitar

Essentials For Learning Guitar

Essentials For Learning Guitar

Essentials For Learning Guitar

Learning guitar is a great way to alleviate stress, expand your creative mind and quench your thirst for rock!  Here are some essentials for learning guitar to help anybody that wants to learn guitar make some serious progress.

 

Practice

I learned to play guitar when I was 12.  I took lessons for a year and then stopped.  After that I was largely self-taught and didn’t often practice my guitar as much as I should have.  As a result my progress suffered and my guitar playing abilities kind of stalled out.  There is a difference between just playing the guitar and actually practicing.  Practicing requires learning new things and mastering them.  You can play the same old licks over and over again and as a result never really progress in your playing abilities.  You should try to push yourself to incorporate learning something new into your practice/playing sessions to further progress as a guitar player.  Depending on what type of person you are it may be helpful to have a guitar teacher or maybe subscribe to some kind of online guitar lessons to give you a roadmap of where to go and what to learn next in your guitar skills. There is no way to replace hard work and chances are that you aren’t the Allen Iverson of guitar.

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Stay Motivated

It is easy to give up when something gets hard.  There may be a particular lick or progression you are trying to learn that just seems to darn hard for you to actually master.  I am of the mindset that, though you should not shy away from trying to master these things, sometimes it is okay to take a break.  A good way to keep yourself motivated is to break up your practicing into segments.  It probably is not a great idea to spend all your practice time on something that is really frustrated you to the point of making you want to give up.  Playing guitar is supposed to be enjoyable.  Yes it takes hard work to get good at playing the guitar but it should be fun.  Break up your practice time to devote part of the time to a skill you find really hard, part of the time to something you find not as hard and a portion of the time to playing stuff that you are good at and find really fun.  Sometimes giving the mind a rest from something you find particularly difficult will actually allow you to become better at it while your mind processes how to do the task subconscienciously but you still gotta practice!

 

Learn The Basics

Lot’s of guys want to learn that solo they heard their favourite guitarist play right away and skip the basics.  Bad idea!  Your guitar playing is like a house.  A beautiful house built on a crappy foundation will start to crumble despite it’s good looks.  You need to build a solid foundation of your guitar playing in order for you to progress in the right way and become an accomplished guitarist.  Unfortunately, like with anything in life you really can’t cut corners when it comes to learning the basics. Learn notes and chords, rhythm and lead in order to become a well rounded guitar player.  Don’t be just a one trick pony.  I am not saying you need to be a master at all of them but you should be comfortable in each genre of guitar.

 

Come back next week for Part 2 of Essentials to Learning Guitar

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Here is a great site for learning guitar – Guitar-Chord.org – Learn guitar chords and chord progressions.