3 Unique Tips For Perfecting Your Guitar Technique

Enough of the standard list of guitar tricks and tips that everyone has heard of. Here are 3 completely different ideas that will get you thinking and give you a bunch of things to try that you might never heard of before!

Learning is intrinsically a creative process and an engaged, enthusiastic and questioning mind will be your most important tool in making your guitar dreams a reality.

Have you thought about the time you play in the day and how this could affect your progress? Try practice in the morning for technique and evening for musicality and expression. Why? This is because the human brain works differently at different times in the day as it naturally has different demands and requirements at different times. We can use this to help push our skill on the guitar forward in the easiest way.

In the morning you will generally have a more analytical focus and be able to get more out of looking at your technique. Playing exercises, trying out some technical challenges, anything physical and around your skill and dexterity. You do not want to be thinking of playing a full piece from beginning to end. But rather extracting the lines you want to work on. This will give those harder sections that can bring down a performance that extra effort to make them feel manageable.

On the other hand the evening and night will see your mind change to being far more artistic! Expression and musicality will feel effortless as you will feel more than think. As such, now you can take a different approach. Throw out the exercises, scales and ignore trying to push forward your skill. Instead connect with the music and create the experience you want to portray to your audience.

Play on as many different guitars as you can. The good ones and the bad ones! Having to adapt to each instrument very quickly will break your hands out of habits learned to work on only your instrument. This will help you have a constant and instant control. How? Simply by being used to responding to the different capabilities that different guitars had to offer. This will feed back onto your main instrument and will significantly improve your sound on your own guitar.

This is both in the context of the different styles of guitar: Electric, Acoustic, classical… as well as different guitars purely under one style. If you have ever played a Stratocaster next to a PRS or perhaps a Rickenbacker you will notice a very large difference in the input it needs to get the best sound out of it. However, the real skill in a guitarist can be seen in also picking up a cheap and cheerful Squire or Stagg and being able to get a similar response.

Variety helps you improve. Don’t just improve upon what you are already doing, try something new along side this as often as you can. And you can get as creative here as you like.

Perhaps you can delve into different styles you have not tried before? Blues, Jazz, Classical, Bluegrass… Each one will not only widen your knowledge, but will also help you find your weaknesses. This will help you to work on the gaps in your playing that may have been hard to by sticking to the same music.

Not only can you try different styles, but how about cultures of music? Folk music from more obscure origins can be fascinating. For example did you know that because of the use of modes on a harmonic minor scale, Klezmer music* combines both two flats and a sharp?

Another idea could be music composed for different instruments. These would be almost guaranteed not to follow the idiomatic approach most guitar music follows. One of the issues of using an instrument to compose is that the physicality of the instrument can dictate the next note you use.

For instance a pentatonic scale on the guitar follows the left hand finger pattern of alternating between finger 1 and 3 or 1 and 4. This means moving up by a third (from string 3 to string 2) or fourth (from string 2 to string 1) for your next note could mean moving up a string using the same finger (finger 1 to 1 or finger 4 to 4). This movement is more difficult and as a result can have a strong influence on your choices when composing.

By playing music from different instruments your hand has the opportunity to get used to different shapes and patterns. In turn meaning this will not have as much of an affect on you. Paganini in notable in this. Fun fact, he wrote more for the guitar than the violin! This makes his violin music very guitar like in many places. No wonder so many electric guitarists have done versions of his popular violin caprices.

Creativity in how you learn not only keeps it exciting but also engages your mind far more than keeping to the ordinary and mundane. Mindless repetition does not offer results nearly as effectively as a mindful and creative process. So keep your ideas inspired! Have you got any specific sticking points in your playing that you would like ideas for? Post a question and let me help you!