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I like to play finger style tunes so that's what I practice; I have little ambition to perform and play for my own pleasure so speeding up and making the pieces I play smoother is my practice regime.
I never actually get good at anything because by the time I get 80% of the way there I've thought of something to add on or modify, and I work on the new something until I've 80% mastered it and thought of another improvement which I can't play yet but start working on. You get the picture. I spend many hours a week doing that. You could say it never gets me anywhere because I never actually get good at anything. Or you could say that it is the perfect way to keep stretching my abilities and improving my technique, and something which gives me a little frustration and a lot of pleasure, week after month after year. Both statements are true.
PS: just to be clear, this is all solo acoustic stuff, which is essentially fancified rhythm playing free of awkward constraints like having to leave room for the bass player and not being able to suddenly stick an extra half-bar in just because you feel like it.
PPS: as for pentatonics, I don't even know what they are. I mean I know that they are the same as proper scales except they have some of the notes left out, but I have never been able to see the point of doing that and without looking it up I can never recall which notes you have to remember not to play.
there is TAB or painting by numbers as I call it. Playing the guitar is more than playing a guitar solo just like the record but
that's wat we do and we have all been there. I am an older guitarist so have a different grounding in the way I learnt.
I soon discovered sheet music wasn't that great but it helped a little so the only option was to use my ears !
I listened to most types of music I didn't want to do scales and couldn't get my head around them so I relied on the little
ability I had and found my way around the guitar neck because of my limitations but in a way it payed off because I
I had to put more feel in to playing guitar to make it sound good ( to my ears anyway ) I developed my timing and rhythm
I bought two books " 500 chords for the guitar " and I discovered the books did show you 500 chords but hey where just
inversions. You will see on YouTube "secret scale" " what the pros do " "How to be a better guitarist" it's just click bait !
for someone trying to get more views !
Practice is important but it's what you do when you practice because we tend to play what we can play rather than try
something we can't play ! Sitting and playing scales fast to me is just that playing a scale so it's a case of what you do
with that scale. The best thing I got out of scales is right & left hand coordination but scales are useful.
I do teach guitar and I advise people to learn chords and I don't mean just the basic chords go beyond that and learn
inversions I know they don't want to but I do feel it's important as it will help every other aspect of your playing.
The other thing be open to all types of music because there is always something in there that will help with your
guitar playing.
We do get hung up on the flavor of the month guitarist but we should look outside of that ! I would suggest watching
True-Tone Lounge on YouTube where you can see really good player and many of them session players and they
will give you a good insight into how they got to where they are.
I notice these days is everyone is into recording which is not a bad thing but with music you need to play with other
because there will help bring out the music that is within you.
Case in point - our singer has announced she wants to do Footloose - yep - that cheesy Kenny Loggins song from the 80s.
As a certain Freddie Bulsara once remarked "well... I'm just a musical prostitute, my dear" so I got under the hood.
It's a 3 chord wonder - A and D for most part but with G thrown in at times. Peace of pie.
So far so simple...but wait ... the pre-chorus is a walk up featuring a diminished chord and some Alex Lifeson like chords...
the intro part is a fiddly alternate picked / bendy thing. Some nifty major pentatonic riffs as well.. and the syncopation is all over the place...you've got to be dead on the timing with those chord stabs.
The breakdown Loggins does live features a string skipping descending sixths idea - really neat.
Core basics I utilise again and again during a top 40 set (and that's before we come to the effect changes and vocals/ harmonies).
and this is how pro players approached it...
Live From Daryl's House - "Footloose" - YouTube
Thinking back though I used to flounder around trying to play blues scales fast, wondering why I never got anywhere.
If I had to give one tip to would-be improvers, it’s to learn to play whole songs.
I see alot of trial students claiming to be "intermediate level" as they've been toying around with a few chords, 1 shape for a barre chord and 1 incorrectly played pentatonic scale. They only seem to know 2 strumming patterns as well, and one is nearly always the swung blues shuffle one.
They cannot read or follow chord charts, they are confused on how long a bar or half a bar length is and can't seem to find voicings to suit and change quick enough. Once the backing/drum track goes on they dissolve and eventually have to stop as they can't play anything over it. Also for acoustic pop playing the tied 16th note strum patterns exposes them, when they can't do it sufficiently well enough to stay in time but change the chord smoothly.
Subdividing different note values is another, they can't seem to play a scale 3 different ways, in eights, in quarters and in triplets. Once the click goes on they struggle to stay in time and change.
They may also know the famous generic riffs in rock and pop but the timing is all wrong. To play the riff well you gotta get the timing right. Smells Like Teen Spirit springs to mind, the intro. The off-beat pushes in the Back in Black riff another. That kinda thing. The Wonderwall strumming pattern, countless people can't play it right.
The great players like Jimi, Eddie van Halen and David Gilmour so to speak have a great sense of timing and feel, in order to play those licks and riffs.
Most learners first come only wanting to play the "cool" stuff as they've seen someone else doing it on YouTube or whatever and want to copy that within a short space of time.
The main two areas I always focus first on with anyone playing as a beginner or even as an intermediate are rhythm and knowledge of the fretboard. Get those up to speed and you can pretty much learn any style as they're applicable to all genres.
Another weird thing I've noticed in past few years is kids aren't even wanting to learn the guitar parts, they just want to play the tune, which is usually the vocal line. Kids coming to me looking to play James's vocals from Metallica for example!?
Most of the time I have to learn songs ... playing in 4 bands at the mo so there's generally songs to learn all the time, done 8 numbers this week.
What I do like to do though, is take a song or an instrumental and work out how I can play it as a solo piece on guitar ... normally electric but sometimes acoustic. So working out how to get the bass note, the chord and the melody on top all at the same time. It's easy to do on piano but a lot harder on guitar so really satisfying when it comes together.
With practice though I always tell my students ... practice the bits you can't play, don't waste time on playing bits you can play properly. Too many people do that which doesn't make use of available practice time.
Arpeggios are just scales with notes missed out as well really. I never understood why they are so useful until recently
I'm so reassured by much of what's been scribed because as an old boy relearning I now know that I'm heading in the right direction.
I normally spend some time in every session just playing along with backing tracks on YT ... I don't study all the scales, just try and play by ear and figure out the feel and flow of the music. It's not efficient but these days the tech is so user friendly you can just repeat immediately and pretty soon your fingers are landing on the right sounding frets.
I play chords and inversions with the rhythm line to get used to the feel of the music then once I get fluid with one or two backing tracks in both rhythm and solo then I stop, load up some tracks I wanna learn and just play them ... badly of course, but on repeat I can turn bad into acceptable (for me) quite quickly.
When I next play after that I recap where I got to and refresh my learning for the first 20 mins or so then start on something else, usually based on what I've heard on the radio that day. I'm sure my methods are all wrong but I don't have get exposure to tons of music and different genres so that's great for me
I am now motivated to try some of the other practice and learning techniques and see where that leads ... isn't this forum just great for helping us all to improve? I love it
The other stuff is very important, especially knowing how different notes sound in chords and how two and three note chords sound against each other of over the main one, as are turnarounds and getting the right notes, but the basis of actually relaying the story of song to someone is almost anti music in a way, if that makes sense, maybe there is a science to it, but possibly not.
Edit: The stuff you can't play because you can't hear or remember it in your head, because you don't understand how the notes interact in the chords, the picking style or how the licks are played to make that sound or how the phrasing goes. That is the stuff you should be learning, otherwise you'll never learn anything and keep repeating the same stuff over and over. If I can play it and therefore understand it, then I can hear it in my head and play it. Although people's brains work differently.
Learn a song on your own. Learn how to play it in a band. Play in front of people and learn what they respond to.
as I said, completely wrong, I think.
or possibly
Too many guitarists dont write music.
lawyer, you go to law school,
medical doctor, you go to a medical college,
engineer, you go to an engineering college.
guitarist, . . . . er . . . .you teach yourself at home,
and therein lies a big part of the problem. Essential parts of fundamental music theory are left out.
I would say that most of us who are self taught concentrated on playing the instrument, and did not learn about what a Minor Third or a Flat Fifth is, for example, or even how to read music until much later.
I think that is a major gap in one's knowledge in the early stages of learning.
https://www.harmonycentral.com/forums/topic/1706890-did-jeff-beck-know-music-theory/?do=findComment&comment=28482648