Guitar Lesson 3 – It’s GO Time

Practical Guitar Lessons

Guitar Lessons You Can Use

Guitar Lesson 3 – It’s GO Time

If you are just starting out, then you may think this guitar lesson is premature. The topic of this guitar lesson is confidence. It is a lesson that I will hammer on over and over again in these guitar lessons. I am going to present for your consideration the notion that even before your first guitar lesson, it would be a good thing to try to land yourself some gigs.

‘Wait a minute’ you are thinking. ‘I don’t even know how to play yet; how can I play a gig.’

The answer is of course that you probably can’t do it very well, but you certainly can do it, and you will learn a lot - much more than you would learn if you went to an initial guitar lesson with an instructor. Also instead of paying a teacher, YOU may actually get paid. Don’t shoot for too high a fee in too primo a venue or you might get sued when and if you crash and burn. A birthday party at a friend’s house would be a good start - or even better at an enemy’s house.

Confidence plays a huge roll in success at playing guitar - even more so than guitar lessons. While this may be an exaggeration, I will stand by the notion that if you have enough confidence and NO guitar playing knowledge, you can perform better than someone with some guitar knowledge and no confidence.

You will probably not directly learn confidence in guitar lessons although it is true for most people that the more you know and the more you practice, the more confidence you will have. You can get confidence indirectly through guitar lessons, but you can also get it by attacking it directly.

One thing I’ve noticed at recitals in which many students file up on stage one by one to perform a chosen piece is that they are anywhere from well prepared to not at all prepared from the perspective of their instrument and their recital piece, but most are not at all prepared from the perspective of their confidence.

One student in particular was playing the drum set. His teacher played guitar, and the boy played the drums. From the start the poor kid was lost as to what to do. I could actually read his lips as he said ‘This one?’ or ‘This one?’ as he pointed to the various drums/cymbals of the drum kit. I felt like yelling out, ‘it’s the drums kid, just hit ‘em.’ Had he been my student and taking guitar lessons, I hope he would have been better prepared. Just hit them in any order with any rhythm at all, but with confidence.

If you can’t find gigs, don’t despair and go pay for guitar lessons. Set up on your front porch with your band mates and play a couple of sets. I used to set up on a friends porch when his neighbor had New Years Eve parties; we really sucked but the guests always clapped and looked happy to see us playing. Seriously, I had not had any guitar lessons at that point. You couldn’t even recognize the songs we were playing.

If you are taking guitar lessons, remember this: don’t get so caught up in the material from your guitar lesson that you bypass the opportunity to play with confidence. Think of confidence as your main goal and the guitar lesson material just as the medium in which you are demonstrating that confidence.

You can also visualize roll models - Joe Pass, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Eric Clapton, Chet Atkins, etc. Here is a good guitar lesson exercise: Think of yourself as your guitar hero and play as if you are him. Become so immersed in the sensation of being that guitar hero that you don’t even respond if someone calls your name.

I’ll end this guitar lesson by suggesting that a good guitar hero to emulate is the character Mendlebaum from the TV show Seinfeld. He was the old man played by Lloyd Bridges who tried to lift things over his head and who over estimated his own abilities, crying ‘It’s go time’ as he proceeded to throw his back out from attempting to lift a TV over his head. Keep that attitude in your head when you go to your next guitar lesson or if you are not taking guitar lessons, have that attitude when you play your next gig.

Thanks for checking out these guitar lessons. More later….

Guitar Lesson Number Two – A Dose of Reality

Practical Guitar Lessons

Guitar Lessons You Can Use

Guitar Lesson Number Two – A Dose of Reality

If you are a reader who has never taken a guitar lesson in person from anyone (and even if you have, depending), it would behoove you to locate some scales online and print them off. Put them in a three-ring binder labeled ‘Guitar Lessons’. Scales can be found all over the internet either in standard music notation, tab or as dots on a guitar fingerboard. I like the dots-on-fingerboard approach since that shows the pattern pretty well.

If you take guitar lessons from someone, you will probably be introduced to one scale at a time. On internet guitar lessons (I’m talking free online guitar lessons here), you can easily be overwhelmed with the amount of scale patterns available. It doesn’t matter whether you print off one or ten as a starting point for your ‘Guitar Lesson’ book. It does take time for your fingers to be programmed with the scale pattern so you may find that even though you have a ton of material from on-line guitar lessons, you will still have to approach it at a real-time guitar lesson pace.

Some scales that are good to look for are major, minor, major pentatonic, minor pentatonic, blues pentatonic. The good thing about the dots-on-fingerboard charts is that they show the pattern which can be played anywhere along the neck.

If you really want to be good, it will be good to practice these patterns slowly up and down using a metronome. You can speed this up by turning the metronome up a notch over time, but don’t be too concerned at first if you are not hitting lightening speeds. The good thing about this approach is that you don’t have to pay while you practice and get some basic scales under your fingers.

Take your guitar to the lake and sit under a tree and practice scales. If you get bored, play them at different locations on the neck. People tend to complain about playing scales. Some guitar lessons may not even include scales or only with more advanced guitar lessons. But a little goes a long way with scales, and as it does take time to get your fingers to automatically play a scale run, it is good to get started early. If you get to your advanced level guitar lessons, and you are just starting to play scales, then you are starting from scratch.

If you did nothing other than play scales in your bedroom all day for years and never took a guitar lesson, you would be surprised at how good you would get. If you’re like me you can’t play all day since you are working to make money (maybe for guitar lessons). In that case you will have to spread it out over time which is all the more reason to start as soon as possible.

Rainy days are great for playing scales. Or would you rather drive to a guitar lesson in the rain?

Beautiful days are even better. Would you rather sit by the lake or in a small room for your guitar lesson?

Make sure you play the scales up and down. You may find scale patterns that go all the way up the neck. This is good, but to start why not just stay in one position. You can play it at different locations on the neck, but don’t worry too much about moving your hand up the neck during the scale. Leave shifting your hand up the neck as you ascend the scale to later guitar lessons.

That’s enough for now. Hope you enjoyed this guitar lesson. In future guitar lessons, I’ll touch on fun things to do with your scales to make it even more fun.

Thanks for reading Practical Guitar Lessons!

Guitar Lessons - First Things First

Practical Guitar Lessons

Guitar Lessons You Can Use

First Things First

This article relates to guitar lessons but is actually drawn from experiences playing the violin. Those taking guitar lessons will benefit as will those studying the violin or other instruments.

Once, before I ‘got good’ I was listening to the radio. There was an interview with an internationally famous violin soloist. She was telling of her grandfather’s influence in her musical life. She described how he had played a recording from the opera Aida and how he had made commentary while it played. He pointed out that the soloist had used only one breathe to sing a particular melodic phrase. She had gone on to use her grandfather’s wisdom on musical phrasing in her own work as a soloist.

As I mentioned, this was before I ‘got good’ (although I had had a number of guitar lessons as well as violin lessons), and at the time I felt a little ashamed that my own advice to my next of kin would be something more along the lines of:

1.) Always tune your violin just before you go to your lesson. In this way your teacher will believe that you have been practicing all week.

2.) When playing in orchestra and you have not practiced, play with the wood of the bow on the strings instead of the bow hair. Yes, turn the bow upside down. In this way you can play confidently, and the conductor will not hear any wrong notes.

While these two guidelines are a bit subversive, they do work to a degree. They will not, however, help you that much when you are finally standing on stage before an attentive audience. It will be necessary to have put in some time actually playing your instrument. But if you have read this far, you probably have enough desire to play as well as enough knowledge gleaned from guitar lessons to take you quite far.

Ok, so this article is on guitar lessons but doesn’t seem to have a lot of guitar lesson stuff in it. There are three points just touched on that I want to highlight in this ‘Guitar Lesson’.

1) Always tune your guitar – BY EAR!! Use the fifth (or of course fourth for the B string) fret and/or use the 7^th fret harmonic, but before doing that try to get it using only your ear. Play two adjacent strings while turning the tuning keys and try to hear when the interval is correct. Only use your electronic tuner afterward to fine tune.

2.) Play with confidence. If you play with confidence, it actually doesn’t matter that much what notes you play. Here is an exercise: Think up a pattern on the fingerboard and play that pattern confidently. For example, play all notes on all strings one at a time on the 5^th and 6^th fret in any order without hitting the same note twice. You can spend several guitar lessons worth of time doing this kind of thing, and you haven’t spent a dime on guitar lessons!

3.) Don’t wait until you are ready to go onstage or play gigs. You may never be ready. More guitar lessons may not make you more ready. More guitar lessons will cost you more money. It takes a lot more nerve to play for a crowd when you suck than when you are great.

Thanks for reading Practical Guitar Lessons!