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!