Guitar Domination

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The Guitar Teacher from Hell

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With a bit of nervousness and excitement, I took a deep breath and knocked on the door.

At this point, I had no idea that the next 60 minutes was going to be some of the most bizarre I was about to experience as a guitarist.

After a few moments, the door opened, and what I saw surprised me.

Out from behind the door came this guy with long greasy hair, tight jeans, and a big gut – looking like he had just woken up.

 

The blast of stale cigarette smoke hit me in the face as I stepped through the door.

 

“This is going to be fun” – I thought.

This was my first lesson with a so-called guitar tutor who was supposed to be the “best in town”.

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11 Guitar Tips For Beginners

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Today, I want to give you 11 tips to help improve your guitar playing.

Most guitarists follow none of these tips and some follow only a small handful at best.

Take a look below and let me know how many of these you follow.

  1. Use a click or drum beat daily (poor rhythm holds everyone back, practice playing to a click in a really simple way each day, it benefits all guitarists)
  2. Make a list of ten songs you want to learn start to finish and make sure they have some variety (e.g. a few fingerpicking, a few strumming, a few riff-based songs, etc.)
  3. Record yourself playing via video (this will help you hear how you sound and help you spot technical errors)
  4. Tap your foot when you play (if you have never done this, start by trying it with just one really simple piece)
  5. Jam with other musicians (it’s scary but try to get there and aim for it, at least one day soon)
  6. Improve your technique (nearly all guitarists I see who struggle have sloppy technique which causes pain, messy playing and holds back improvements, often for years, unless fixed)
  7. Be clear in your head on exactly what your fingers should be doing (don’t just play, visualise and see what you want to play before you do it)
  8. Practice in short bursts
  9. Do some focused pinkie work (this is the weakest finger, yet it gets the least amount of practice, hmm)
  10. Learn 3 sets of strumming and 3 sets of fingerpicking patterns (essential for everyone, yet about 1 in 10 have it – enough said)
  11. Actually use the chords and scales you know each and every day (if you don’t use them in songs, jam them, play about with them, at least refresh them, it’s good for the memory and finger dexterity)

Don’t try to incorporate all of these in one day, but these are the things you have to learn and include in your playing over time.

For example, don’t try to learn 3 strumming and fingerpicking patterns in one day, do it over a week or two. Don’t record yourself playing each day, do it once or twice a week. Same goes for jamming with others.

The idea here is that you bring these tips into your playing steadily, and as I say, most guitarists hardly follow any of the above.

With my private students, if they have played before coming to me for lessons, they usually follow none of these but once I get them doing some of the above, (after some gentle nagging!) they see some steady, solid and progressive improvements in their playing.

You can do so too.

I hope you find these tips useful and more importantly, I hope you follow them!

Dan Thorpe
Guitar Domination

This post was originally taken from Dan Thorpe’s private email list. To get blog posts like this sent to you which are full of great tips to make fingerpicking, strumming and learning guitar more enjoyable, (especially if you are over 40) then join Dan’s list. It’s 100% free, HERE 

5 Strumming Mistakes to Avoid

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I had a good lesson yesterday with a fingerpicking student of mine who previously HATED strumming.

Recently, we have made some big breakthroughs with strumming, and now she is starting to love it much more.

What we did over the past few months was to fix the important strumming errors that plagued her.

They may well be plaguing you too if you hate strumming. Let’s fix them!

 

1) Not knowing any set strumming patterns

Some guitarists just like to ‘wing it’ with their strumming patterns, but this just leads to lots of random ups and downs.

You need to know at least 3-4 strumming patterns I’d say as a bare minimum, but about 5-8 is better. Get seamless and natural with all the strum patterns you learn to the point that you can play them in your sleep. Strumming patterns are signature rhythms you can apply to anything – therefore they are super useful in a variety of ways.

 

2) Strumming the wrong strings

This is a fundamental error and one that can cause your guitar playing to sound messy. Strumming the wrong strings most commonly occurs on a D chord where the low E string is strummed.

This sounds terrible and really makes a guitarist sound like an amateur. Practice with the chords of C A G E D and strum them over and over, but only strumming from the root note.

 

3) Strumming all the strings all of the time

When you strum every available string within a chord all the time, it starts to grate on the listener’s ear – like Justin Bieber and his whiny pop tunes. It’s so grating on the ear!

Instead, alternate at various points which part of the chord you strum. Mix up hitting just the bass strings (low E, A, D), the treble strings, (G, B, high E) and all available strings at different points. This is done more on down strums and gives us a really cool sound.

 

4) ‘Harp Strumming’

This occurs when you drag the pick over the strings in a way that creates the sound of a harp.

You want a crisp, fluid strum through the strings. If you use a pick and struggle with this, grab a thin pick (go as thin as 0.4 for now if you need to) and grip it softly. Don’t twist and turn your wrist when strumming as this will make things worse.

 

5) Having a weak upstroke

Hmm, a common error and the biggest tip I can give you here is to try to focus on just hitting the G, B and high E strings for up strums and leaving the other strings in the chord for the down strums.

This creates a nice little bit of contrast with your down strums. Keep practising up strums over and over on one chord, ensuring you grip a soft pick lightly as stated before.

After systematically fixing the above (some are quicker to fix than others), Christine, my student, really started to enjoy strumming and creating some big, strong grooves that oozed class.

In the past, her strumming sounded stilted and although not terrible, anyone could tell it was a bit “off”. Yesterday, I actually enjoyed hearing it. I love those moments when I can sit back and just enjoy listening to a student play.

Those are nice moments.

 

For more help with your strumming, my strumming course goes into all of the above in more detail (but in a structured step-by-step way).

This course is NOT to be confused with my strumming book. It is shorter, but it is a video so that can be better for some. It was also one of my earlier sets of video recordings, so it is not as smooth as it could be in terms of production, but it has always had great feedback.

The most important thing is – it does what it needs to – it will teach you how to strum properly, in a step-by-step way, and you will have some fun while learning how.

Check it out below if you are interested. (By the way, if you have bought my Ultimate guide to Strumming book, you will get a discount on this course, more info below).

Strumming With Soul

Dan Thorpe
Guitar Domination

P.S. This post was originally taken from Dan Thorpe’s private email list. To get blog posts like this sent to you which are full of great tips to make fingerpicking, strumming and learning guitar more enjoyable, (especially if you are over 40) then join Dan’s list. It’s 100% free, HERE 

10 Tips on How to Improve Your Beginner Guitar Technique to Reduce Pain and Play with More Freedom

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guitar technique

Today, I want to start off a new series of my top ten tips for all the important aspects of guitar playing. Each lesson I`ll send you ten quick but very powerful tips that will help you with a specific subject so you can make improvements in this area and get past the most frustrating hurdles on the guitar. Today, it is… guitar technique.

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How to Improve Your Chord Changes on Guitar by Avoiding One Dangerous Habit

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chord changes guitar

If you struggle with chord changes and find they are slow, awkward and are ruining the flow of your songs and maybe they even want to make you throw your guitar out of a ten-storey building hoping it will land in a burning car, then you will definitely find this post helpful. 

There are multiple reasons for slow chord changes but one of the biggest culprits is one not many are aware of and even those who are, have no idea how to fix it.  In this post, I`ll show you what the issue is, why it crops up and more importantly how to fix it so your chord changes, especially those when changing from G to C, become faster and smoother.

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12 Ways How to Play the Bb Chord on Guitar (Plus Tips and Ways to Avoid)

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Bb chord on guitar

The Bb chord on guitar is definitely one of the hardest barre chords around and it is the one that gives a lot of beginners and intermediate guitarists a lot of bother. Today, I`ll show you some ways to simplify this, play it with better technique (which no one really teaches), how NOT to play it and even ways to “invert” it for a sophisticated take on the chord.

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2 Super Simple Fingerpicking Exercises To Improve Your Fingerstyle Tone, Accuracy and Patterns

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Watch on YouTube

A lot of guitarists can play a few fingerpicking songs and knock out some fingerstyle patterns but a lot don`t ever do any exercises for their fingerpicking hand. Yet, they wonder why they lack speed, dexterity and agility with their picking hand. This video, featuring two simple fingerpicking exercises will help you with this.  [Read more…]