When someone talks about a warm-up for playing guitar, the temptation for many is to roll their eyes, turn away, and to just go on playing their favourite tunes instead.
The trouble is, many beginner guitarists struggle to actually play these tunes well and struggle with the physical aspects of playing them, so not only do the songs sound a bit rough but they also feel uncomfortable to play. In this post, I’ll explain why, if you don’t warm up, you should!
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Many guitarists have limiting beliefs, but some, particularly those who are older or lack confidence have some that don’t just hold back their playing but actually sabotage it on a large-scale – often to the point it ruins their playing.
In this post, I want to share with you some stupid myths and weird beliefs that guitarists have and help you to see why they are nonsense and why they hold back your playing.
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One of the worst habits a guitarist can have (and one I used to be very guilty of committing myself) is the habit of ‘bouncing’ their fingers off the fretboard. I talked about this briefly in my Ultimate Guide to Practicing Scales but want to expand upon this, as it is a very important subject.
In this post, you will learn why ‘bouncing’ your fingers can really hamper the way you play guitar, why fixing it will make a big difference to the accuracy of your playing and how to actually fix it.
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Today I am going to take you through a really powerful concept and one that will save you many hours, days, weeks and months learning and improving your guitar playing.
If you apply this simple method of learning the guitar you could make a couple of years’ worth of progress in much less time. It would be wrong and inaccurate of me to give you an exact figure but this method will save you time.
That is the possibilities of ‘Power Burst’ learning.
As you can see from (my rather dodgy) illustration, the F Major chord can be one hell of a frustrating chord that makes people want to curse to the high heavens or make grown men and women weep with anguish and smash their guitars up in frustration.
One of the best bits of advice I was given on how to help students make faster progress is to give them the ability to empower themselves.
Many years ago a fellow and more experienced guitar teacher told me about this powerful concept.
The idea of teaching you to empower yourself is this: You learn the ability to understand and see exactly how to spot your own mistakes when learning and practicing the guitar.
Guitar by Yngve Bakken Nilsen, licensed under (CC BY-SA 2.0)
A lot of my students know how to play quite a few songs. Some of those who have played for a while know anything upwards of 10 songs.
A while back, I noticed that some students would neglect to practice some songs so I got to the bottom of it and asked them why hadn’t they practiced these songs.