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Many guitarists start out with the dream of becoming a great guitar player and
it’s well within the reach or anyone willing to put in the work to learn their craft
but the work is what stops many people. Practice won’t always be exciting and
will sometimes be downright boring if you don’t go at it with a plan and some
discipline.
When you first start to play guitar, it’s easy to practice because you’re basically
just sitting around noodling away and getting to know the instrument, you have
no real direction or agenda and things are pretty simple. Sooner or later you’re
going to see or hear other guitar players that are playing things a little beyond
your current ability and you’ll want to ramp your skills up so you play that well.
The good news is that everyone starts basically at zero and builds on their skills
from there. How fast you excel or how far you go is entirely up to you but you
can rest assured that having disciplined practice will allow you to go further
faster.
You’ll want to pick specific times for practice. Pick times when you can
concentrate just on the task at hand without anything interrupting you. Have all
of your household chores and duties done and out of the way, homework done,
dog walked, and everything else that could interrupt and interfere.
Create a practice plan and stick to it until each topic is very well understood and
you can play it very fluidly and easily. You can break things up into categories
like this for example:
- Warm up
- Major Scales
- Free jamming
- Minor scales
- Riffs from songs you like
...and so on.
The idea is that you’ll stick to the plan every day until you‘ve master the topics.
Play slowly and cleanly and with a metronome if possible.
Resist the urge to want to play fast too soon. It will come with time, but you’ll be
a much better guitarist if you take the time and effort to cleanly pick every note.
So you want to practice regularly and with a plan as well as playing everything
you learn very deliberately so as to get it perfect before you move on. Once
you’re confident that you’ve got it down, move onto something else to keep
challenging yourself.
Learning to play guitar is fun and rewarding and all of the hard work pays off
when you can confidently rip thorough other people’s songs as if you wrote them
yourself, but how do you go about developing your own sound? It seems like to
would be pretty boring to just sound like everyone else.
There are two lines of thinking when developing your own sound. The first is that
to some degree, you ARE going to sound like everyone else. If you were to take
all of your influences, the guitar players you admire and have been learning from,
and mix them all together the sound that comes out would be you plus your own
flavor.
To take this and develop your own sound from it, you’ve got to be open to new
things. You’re going to start out emulating all of the guitarists who’s playing you
enjoy and you’ll learn all of their songs and licks. Without realizing it, you
automatically be putting your own twist on things which will lead to developing
your own style and sound.
As you go through some lead passages, the original guitarist might have used all
down strokes with the pick will you might decide to alternate pick and this will
create a slightly different sound. Developing your own sound comes from your
preferences and the choices you make including picking as mentioned above but
also how you hold the pick, how aggressive you pick the strings and even how
you hold the pick.
If you take one of the guitar greats and make him play on a totally different guitar
and amp setup, it’s still going to sound like him with his signature sound and
playing style. While you may not notice it right away, the same will be true for
you. If you play anyone else’s gear, it will still sound like you.
To develop your style, listen to players in other genres and decide what you like
or think might work for you. A country guitarist can take ideas from a rock
guitarist, or jazz, or blues even. As you build your bag of tricks based on what
sounds and licks sound good to your ears, you’ll start to hear your own sound
come around and it will be made up of all of the practice you’ve had over the
years. | 