Play for yourself and no one else

There is no one in the whole world more important than yourself; you are the greatest and best friend you could ask for, so when you play something like a musical instrument do it for yourself. Don’t practice your half and hour a day because your guitar instructor told you to. You should play for however long you want to. I never had a guitar teacher, I taught myself and I think from that I have a greater edge than a lot of people who did go to lessons. Instead of practicing specific chord changes or scales that he would want me to play I would just play whatever I wanted most of the time making up progressions based on that they sounded good. The basic point is don’t play this music instrument everyday for your half hour because you have to, play it for hours on end like me because it’s part of who you are, it’s what you enjoy to do.

Sore Fingertips?

If your just beginning the guitar and you have started playing before you have read this I am most certain that you are feeling a bit sore on your fingertips. Yeah, it will hurt for the first few weeks but if you can power through this imagine the possibilities. This pain is only a small barrier in which you have to jump to get to the other side where there is a huge boundless field filled with creativity and knowledge. There’s no getting around it, if you want to play guitar you will have to have hurting fingers for a few weeks, but let me tell you, it is sure as hell worth it.

Learning Songs from Tablature

Now this is for anyone who has no experience with tablature and can’t understand it at all. It all really is just so very simple and you will probably bonk yourself on the head once you are finished reading this. Tablature is an easy way to write down and read music for guitar players alike. Each line in a tablature piece represents each string, the bottom line representing the low E and the top one representing the high E and all the ones in between in order. The only thing that tablature doesn’t do very well is sustain and tempo, you can’t really tell how long you should hold each note for from reading this type of music. Most of the time you just have to listen to the song as you learn it and from there you will be able to get it down. You read it from left to right, I’m pretty sure you know this already and anytime that there are two notes on the same vertical line you play them at the same time. Now each number you see represents a fret on the guitar. So on the top line if you see a 3, you play the note on the third fret on the high E string. Zero’s represent playing the string open, or playing it without holding down any frets. For a final example if you know what a G-chord looks like it would look like this in tablature:

-3-

-0-

-0-

-0-

-2-

-3-

Notice how because it is a chord all the numbers are in the same vertical line. That’s all there is really to reading tablature, best of luck!

Find a Capo

Either if it’s from your father who played guitar or need to pick one up from the store you need to get one. I bought my first capo after I had been playing for about 3 years already and I regretted not having one earlier. Having a capo for your guitar opens up so many more possibilities, for anyone who is not familiar with a capo, it’s this clip that goes on the neck of your guitar and holds down all six strings at once to raise them to whichever fret you put it on. So if you put it on the third fret, it raises all those strings notes to that third fret of every string. With using a capo your whole range of what you can play is turned upside down and multiplied. I myself own and use a Kyser capo, and it works really well and its very straightforward, it has not given me any problems, but if you want to get any other type go ahead I just know that I’ve had mine for six years now and it hasn’t given me a single problem.

Creating Original Pieces

I find it that every single song that I have wrote (which is about 146 , but who’s counting?) has begun with me just fooling around playing random things until something clicks. I place the capo on a random fret, or maybe I change the tuning (dropping the high E to D or the low E to D also or maybe both at the same time) and I just jam playing random things until something sounds good to me. Let it be a single note, chord, or a progression of two chords. From there everything else grows like a tree, I base all the rest of the song from that single thing that clicked in my ear when I first played what I had started with. So when you are trying to write a song play around a bit, there are no rules on how to play the guitar. Your limits are just your imagination.

Playing in front of People

If you’ve ever played in front of people and had trouble your not the only one. Yes I too did have girlfriends at one point in my life before I settled down, and wow did I get nervous those first few times playing. When I first genuinely played in front of someone for someone it was for my girlfriend at the time and I was sure nervous, I could play just fine normally in my room and so I didn’t think anything of it learning her favorite song then being able to play it back to her, but what an experience. As I began to play I began feeling nervous and sort of jittery, I couldn’t think straight and normally when I would play I wouldn’t even have to think about what I was playing I would just do it but at that time I searched in my head for every single next note before it came up. I feel lucky to be alive now; I never thought I’d get through that. As I continued on to play though I started to come back to myself and play like I had been, it turns out that I really wasn’t playing badly at all I just was so nervous I thought I was. I played many times again after that first night and time after time it got easier and easier until no longer was I nervous to play in front of her or anyone else for that matter.

Within two months of me first starting to play in front of people I finally agreed to play my first gig at a coffee shop, and there would be more people there then I had ever played in front of. On my way there I tried not to think about it and how many people that would be there that knew me, I tried not to think of how nervous I would be when I would walk in front of everyone with that microphone in front of my mouth introducing my own original pieces I had made with all my heart, but the thought still dwelled in the back of my head. When I arrived and got my guitar out of the back seat and walked into that store to see how many people showed up I was overwhelmed, and I exaggerate not when I say the were chanting my name for I was five minutes late and they couldn’t wait to hear me play. I got so pumped up and took my guitar out and put the pickup into my acoustic guitar then sat down and looked out at everyone and began talking, introducing myself. For a lot of people including myself public speaking is a really hard thing to do, but for some reason this was different, all those thoughts of being nervous were all of a sudden vanished, and when I looked down at my guitar and begin to finger pick rhythmically my song that I would open up with I became in my own world. Nothing else mattered except that it felt like I was in my alone spot, it felt like I was back at home playing in my secret spot that I had found in the woods. It was amazing, so my advice to you for playing in front of other people would be practice it, try playing in front of someone else like your girlfriend or boyfriend until you get comfortable with it, because all it really takes is some getting used to.

Find your Guitar

Somewhere out in the big world there is a single guitar that’s sole purpose of being made was for you. It’s whole purpose in being a perfectly crafted instrument of musical creativity was to be in your hands, resting in your lap, playing exactly it is that makes you so entranced when listening to yourself play. Not all those thousand dollar guitars will be right for you, mine wasn’t. I have a really nice Gibson acoustic that cost me close to $2500 and found that it really wasn’t my guitar. Mine was a guitar that I bought a local music shop for about $560. You can’t put a price on the guitar that will be yours. You just have to go out and find it online or in a shop, and trust me you’ll find it. If you get your guitar online and when you pick that wooden thing up when it first arrives at your front door and you get that feeling, oh you know that feeling I’m talking about and if you don’t you soon will once you find your guitar, it just gives you chills up your back! That is what it means to have YOUR guitar; you’ll know exactly what I am talking about when you find it.

Copyright 2007.