The other day I talked about my complete disdain for most technical exercises out there in the land of guitar.
Today, I want to give you a tip on how to play the most commonly taught one ever, but specifically…
How NOT to do it and how you should practise it instead.
There are a lot of technical exercises out there in the land of learning guitar.
Most are too complex and too intricate to be beneficial to most guitarists, beginners, and intermediates alike…
Especially when guitarists do them the way most people teach them.
A fair few of you have asked about why my Fingerstyle 101 book is so inexpensive but why my membership programme is pricier in comparison.
Good question.
The answer is simply because the membership is for the people who are dedicated, passionate, want more direct support, enjoy quizzes/challenges, and…
Want to improve faster than they would otherwise. (The membership is actually pretty reasonable in price and much cheaper than lessons).
Below are 6 of the most commonly made fingerpicking errors I see on a day-to-day basis with students.
Take a look and see how many of these you make.
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.
“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”.
One of the biggest frustrations for anyone learning to fingerpick is this…
The annoying thud that you hear when you go to pick a string, only to accidentally pluck the wrong string.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
There are three aspects of music. These are harmony, melody and rhythm. Harmony covers things such as chords and when more than two notes are being played at the same time. Melody covers riffs, lead ideas, and anything that you can hum. Rhythm is pretty self-explanatory.
