Tag Archives: guitar lessons near me

Defeating the Scary Guitar Clown

Leave a reply

Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

If you are in my age range or better then you may remember IT. IT was a millennia-old creepy space alien featured in the 1986 Stephen King novel of the same name, and a TV miniseries in 1990. IT manifested itself to the neighborhood children in the form of a circus clown. IT would appear in a benevolent clown form and woo the neighborhood children with laughter and promises of balloons and parties, and then when he had their confidence would morph into a scary clown and steal them away to a creepy underground bunker.

In the novel and film the surviving neighborhood kids grew up and came home to band together and defeat IT once and for all … or so they thought. The fact is, in teaching guitar to beginners and up for some years now, I have found that IT is hanging around my studio. He pops up all over the place. For example, when providing feedback on technique refinements I often hear responses such as, “I’m trying, but IT (“my hand”) wants to do it this way,” or “IT wants to tense up when I try to move that fast,”, or “IT (the pick) shifts around when I try to hold IT this way.” “IT (my thumb) wants to hook ITself over the top of the neck.” “IT (my pinkie) wants to curl up into a popcorn shrimp when I make a fifth chord.”

Indeed. Creepy IT seems to be the number one barrier to progress for many students of guitar. This need not be so, because the fact is … there is no IT. There is only YOU. YOU are the Scary Guitar Clown. It is YOU who is permitting excess tension, allowing the fingers to fly and flop around chaotically, plowing the pick through the strings like a bulldozer, allowing mental focus to drift, and generally making the hands and fingers wrestle against the strings rather then dance with them.

If you like your IT you can keep IT! However, if you want maximum results in the shortest possible time then you will have to deal IT a crushing death blow sooner rather than later. The first step in conquering IT is to acknowledge that IT is YOU. If your fingers are doing anything at all other than totally relaxing, then YOU are doing it. Apart from direct physical manipulation by someone or something other than you, your fingers can not do anything except exactly what your brain tells them to do. Pinkies do not curl up into a tight ball on their own. Likewise, if you are locking up your wrist and clamping too firmly on the pick during rhythm strokes, it is YOU tightening up the forearm muscles that control the wrist. YOU are doing that, not IT! So take responsibility and avoid passing the blame to IT!

Now let us discuss for a minute why IT gets the blame for so much technique chaos. We come from the factory equipped with several levels of control over the muscular systems. Level 1 is the autopilot mode. The heart, for example, will continue to beat at the set tempo regardless of our consciousness of it or efforts to manipulate it through focused attention. Level 2 is the autopilot with manual override. The eyelids are a good example of this one. When we are awake they close and open without any conscious attention, and when we sleep they remain closed. However, we may at any time take full control of them, either blinking, holding open, or holding closed as we prefer, until we release them back into the control of the autopilot mode. Then we have the skeletal muscles on Level 3. They run mostly in manual mode with autopilot override for special circumstances, such as the knee jerk reaction when the leg responds to a strike to the knee joint.

Then we have the fingers. How do we label the control mode of the fingers? I think most entry level guitarists would say something like, “Manual mode until I try to play guitar, then Scary Guitar Clown mode,” by which they mean that it seems impossible to fully control the fingers when trying to manipulate them individually, when IT appears to take over. Is this really true? It is partially true and partially not true. The fingers run on a mix of all the above modes, but mostly on manual control. If you don’t think they have an autopilot override, try putting them on a hot stove burner and you will see how quick they go into autopilot override.

So how does this examination help us to defeat the Scary Clown Mode? We must understand four important things about the control of the fingers:

(1) The default control mode of the fingers is a hybrid of manual control of the fingers as a group, with autopilot control of the other fingers when trying to use one independently.  To illustrate, put the tips of all four fingers downward facing on the edge of a table and then use the other hand to curl the pinky until the tip touches the palm. It is quite easy, with no strain on the knuckles, muscles, or skin. Now try to do that same test with your fingers free from outside constraints, using only the control offered by your mind. You will observe that the ring finger follows along with the pinky, no matter how hard you try to separate the two. Why does this happen? Mechanically the two are completely independent. It is the default programming of the brain making the ring finger follow the pinky. The default program is to use the fingers as a group. This is great for grasping things firmly, but it is totally contrary to what we need to do as guitarists. This is the deadly IT of which we speak, and the one we must overcome in order to develop a great command over guitar technique.

(2) In addition to the limited degree of manual independent control we have over the fingers by default, we can cultivate greater individual finger control through focused repetition of specific movements. This is why scale practice should always be near the top of your guitar practice priorities. Scale practice is not simply a tool to remember note placement. Among other things, if done correctly it is the most powerful technique improvement tool available. With enough practice we can not only cultivate finger independence, but we can actually reprogram the autopilot portion of our finger control so that it does new things in autopilot mode, such as play through scales accurately and efficiently. This is the secret of mastering guitar technique. It is important to note here that we are reprogramming the autopilot every time we practice, regardless of whether we are practicing great technique, good technique, or slop. This is why it is important to pay attention to the details while practicing scales!

(3) Regarding the pick hand, it is very important to understand that you have already spent many years cultivating an alternate autopilot program that takes over when you attempt to exercise fine control over the pick hand – writing. Writing is similar to picking, but not the same, so when you allow the writing autopilot to take over when you go to pick, you will have poor control over the pick.

(4) Ultimately, we DO in fact have a great degree of control over individual fingers, but we must consciously choose to exert this control in defiance of the default programs. For example, I often see a tightly curled pinky when making fifth chords (power chords), and I always advise that this creates unnecessary tension, which further causes unnecessary levels of finger pressure and undue difficulties in changing from one fretboard location to another. I then advise to manual override the pinky popcorn shrimp of death while making the fifth chords. It is always a struggle at first, but I have yet to observe a student who can not eventually cultivate a new habit of keeping all the fingers straight and relaxed while executing fifth chords. Likewise, the pick hand technique always starts out with a sort of stabbing motion coming from pushing the index finger and thumb out from the side of the hand which is planted on the bridge, and then curling it back in to make the pick stroke – just like writing. With enough focused effort the student can defeat the writing program and develop a new autopilot mode of efficiently picking from the wrist, with the fingers immobile and the base of the hand planted on the guitar or strings. (See my pick technique video for in depth analysis)

Don’t let IT ruin your technique. IT is a formidable enemy at first, but by consciously choosing to control your fingers until they do what you want, you can send IT packing and make beautiful music instead. Get to work, and don’t stop until you get the desired results! 

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Managing Musical Frustration

Leave a reply

By Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

If you have been learning guitar for any length of time then you know that musical mastery is a journey rather than a destination. As with any significant endeavor, the process involves working on individual elements of knowledge and skill and then assembling these pieces toward a finished product over time. Given a good course of instruction, this is a systematic process with predictable results. However, for best results we must also take into account the human elements of dealing with elaborate long term processes.

We find that the human psyche does not always respond favorably to study and repetition in the absence of immediate satisfaction from desired results. As guitarists we must retain a sizeable amount of information and master physical tasks such as chords, chord changing, scales, and phrasing. Both the mental and physical aspects require repetition, repetition, and more repetition to the point of making them second nature. Alongside this process arises the predictable human response to delayed gratification: frustration.

Frustration is a feeling of dissatisfaction arising in response to not having what we want in the present moment. It is an inevitable aspect of any long term complex endeavor, and so you can be sure that you are not the only one suffering from it, nor does its presence have any bearing on whether or not you have “talent” for music.  Although it is not a pleasant feeling, like all feelings it can be an asset or a hindrance depending on how we respond to it.

First let us consider the less problematic level of frustration. In my lessons I have made analogy to the angry baker hovering outside the oven door with the light on and watching the bread rise ever so slowly. Although he has done everything he is supposed to do and the results are inevitable, while watching the bread rise in its normal course of process he laments that he does not already have some bread, questions whether he is a competent chef with culinary talent since he has no bread in hand at present, and throws the recipe book across the room while screaming at the stove for not having already delivered the bread he has labored for. Silly baker! The problem for this frustrated chef is that he is indulging unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to have the satisfaction of freshly baked bread. The solution for the baker is to refer back to the recipe and get a realistic idea of how long it takes for the bread to bake.

So how long does it take to learn to play guitar to the point that you can express yourself freely? Well, that is not so straightforward to answer as the bread analogy. It is going to vary a great deal from person to person due to a number of factors, but what you should understand is that it is going to happen over a period of months and years rather than weeks, so be realistic. If you are allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with frustration over some new song, skill, or technique that you started working on two weeks ago, that is not realistic and it does not help you in any way. So stop it!

Now let’s consider the more troublesome deeper level of frustration that arises after you have in fact been doing all the right things that you know to do for a long time and it still seems that you are not getting anywhere. This is the kind of frustration that can ruin your experience of guitar and often leads to reluctance to practice, long periods away from the guitar, or giving up altogether. Therefore, we must have strategies to deal with this kind of frustration in order to prevent it from derailing our musical endeavors.

1. Acceptance – just as every rose comes with thorns, every long term endeavor has its frustrations. Frustration through the process of long term endeavors is an inevitable aspect of the human experience. It is not unique to you. It is perfectly normal, and it does not mean that you have no “talent” for guitar. Even if you have the best practice routine ever conceived, bucket loads of native ability, the best teacher in the galaxy, and six hours a day to practice, you are still going to experience some frustration, as has every musician who has ever trod this path.

2.   Short term goals – one way we can mitigate frustration is to allow ourselves an occasional victory by setting up short term goals regarding various specific aspects of our skill set. If your only goal is “to play guitar” then you are setting yourself up for massive, crippling frustration because you are never going to be finished learning to play guitar. Your goals should be specific, relevant to your overall playing goals, and appropriate to your current skill set. If you are new to guitar then appropriate goals might be along the lines of getting control of changes between common open position chords such that you can execute them without losing time, and more times than not. That is achievable within a matter of months, providing you some sense of progress and accomplishment. For an intermediate level player the goal might be more along the lines of being able to move between the pentatonic scale shapes without getting lost or out of time. Write your goals down so that you can have a record of your progress.

3. Avoid comparisons – while it is useful to analyze what others are doing well and incorporate those skills into our own, it does no good whatsoever to evaluate your overall competence as a musician by making comparisons of your current skill set to that of others. For instance, some of my clients already had a good skill set and previous lessons when starting with me, so if you started as a beginner and compare your skills after six months to those of some of my other six month clients, you will of course come up short. You have no way to know what advantages any other player may have compared to you, and even if you did this sort of comparison still does not help you in any way. As for comparisons to pros, bear in mind that you are setting yourself up to compete with people who have practiced for hours per day for many years, and their recordings (even the “live” ones) are multiple takes, and further doctored to edit out mistakes. The only comparison you can make that has any value toward increasing your skills is the comparison to what you were doing last week, six months ago, a year ago, and so forth.

4. Follow the instructions – it is often the case that students of guitar do not make the most of practice time because they do not fully follow the instructions. This is particularly noticeable in regards to details of technique. Do not allow yourself to mindlessly crank out repetitions of exercises with little attention to the details of your technique. This will rob you of the full benefit of the repetitions and will in fact reinforce counterproductive technique habits. Technique is the primary barrier to self-expression for intermediate guitarists, and it is the result of poor habits during the beginning stages. While it can seem overwhelming to manage technique details on top of just getting the exercises played, it really only takes a little bit of extra effort to pay attention to technique. Unless you are specifically working on speed itself, always practice at speeds that allow you to execute well so that you develop efficient technique over time. If you are struggling just to get the exercise played at all and have no attention left for technique, this means you are playing too fast. Slow down. Exercising patience and self-control regarding development of your technique will save you a lot of frustration later.

5. Give yourself due credit – the primary problem with frustration is that we tend to allow it to fill up our view of how we are doing with guitar, and thus it can ruin our enjoyment of learning music. Bear in mind that as a guitarist you will always be focused on learning something new, and thus there will always be some level of frustration before you. Do not allow your view of your guitar endeavors to focus on nothing other than this frustration. If you have got far enough with guitar to be wrestling with frustration then you have already learned to do some things well. Give yourself credit for those things, include them in your practice routine, and enjoy them while you wait for new things to fall into place through repetition. If all you are experiencing with guitar is frustration it is because you are choosing to see only what you can’t do yet and ignoring what you are doing well. It is a mind trap that we can all fall prey to, and you will do best to avoid it.

6. Use it – even though frustration is an uncomfortable feeling, it does have an upside in that it can provide helpful clues as to what we need to do next to improve our skills. If you are working on an exercise or song and you keep falling apart at one spot, this is a clue that you need to isolate that one spot for extra attention. If you feel frustration that you have ceased to make any progress with guitar this may be a clue that you are not practicing enough, not following the instructions, do not have clearly defined goals, suffer technique deficiencies, or in some other way need to make adjustments to your practice routine. When you run up against a barrier that provokes frustration, use this as an indicator that you need to look around and uncover the source of the problem that is holding you back. Rather than give up in frustration, discuss this with your instructor.

7. Avoid perfectionism – if you are inclined to want to do everything to perfection, you will do best to drop that ideal now. Of course we want to have perfection as the ultimate ideological standard, but we need to balance that with reality. You are never going to play guitar to the point that you never make any mistakes. Even pros with years of training and experience make mistakes, although you rarely hear them because either you haven’t yet the ear for pitch and time to hear them, or else audio engineers edit them out of the recordings. Do everything you do as well as you can and strive for excellence of course, but do not feel like you have to perfect every detail of every exercise or song before you move on to new material. It is a balancing act, and you will develop increasingly good judgment as to where the balance is as you progress in music.

8. Employ Objective standards – progress does not always feel like progress. If you are practicing the right things, in the right way, in the right order, then you ARE making progress even if you do not feel like it at times. If you are judging your progress solely by how you feel about your playing then you are setting yourself up for a guaranteed case of catastrophic frustration. Look back to how you were doing with the same material six months ago, follow a practice schedule with clearly defined goals, and use a metronome to objectively measure your timing.

Practice patience. Learning to express yourself freely with the guitar is a complex endeavor, the result of a process that you realize success with in stages over time. Do not expect short term success regarding long term goals. Break it down into manageable pieces and work on short term success with these realistic goals. If you want to win at guitar or anything else then remember and implement this – never give up!

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Progress Pitfalls: Practicing vs. Playing

Leave a reply

Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

Practicing guitar and playing guitar are not the same thing, and it is important to understand the difference if we want to maximize our progress.  While playing guitar is the end game of practicing, and we need to spend plenty of time playing, practicing is the means to the end of playing. It is essential to practice well and not allow playing to take over during what should be practice time. Although this may seem obvious on the surface, it is very easy to drift over into playing while trying to practice. Here we will look at the differences and consider how to avoid this pitfall.  

So let us consider the differences between the two and how to avoid mixing them up. Playing guitar is the broad application of all our knowledge and technique skills into making music. Practicing guitar is deliberate focus on a narrow range of knowledge and technique skills with the specific goal of cultivating improvement in those specific areas. While playing, we focus on all that we can do. While practicing we focus on what we can not yet do, or do as well as we would prefer.

Here are some measures to avoid getting stuck in a rut by playing through practice time:

1. Consider where you are, where you need to be, and how to get there – if you have no master plan for reaching your musical goals then you can be sure that your practice time will consist of merely playing what you already know rather than making specific improvements in those things that will allow you access to the next musical level. To devise a master plan you should look to the music you wish to play and find out what kinds of chords, rhythms, scales/arpeggios, and techniques arise in that music. Focus on those things in order to play that kind of music.

2. Define goals for every practice session – if you practice with no particular goal in mind then you will get exactly where you planned to get – nowhere. In every practice session have a plan to work on improving specific aspects of knowledge and technique according to your overall master plan. Committing your plan to paper will aid greatly in keeping it in view during practice.

3. Focus on specific aspects of knowledge and technique during practice – when you are for instance practicing the scales you need for your preferred musical style, focus specifically on timing, note articulation, resolving notes, technique (relaxed fingers!), two hand synchronization, and eventually speed. You may have to break these goals down across several practice sessions per week so that you can devote adequate time and attention to each. Playing licks that you already know, or mindlessly wandering up and down through scales, is not practice. That is playing and it will not help you improve nearly as much as practicing. 

4. Push yourself to do better than yesterday – profitable practice does not come from merely repeating what you did yesterday. It comes from making it a point to do better than you did yesterday. Doing better than you did yesterday does not come from merely accepting the vague proposition that you will try do better today then you did yesterday. It comes from focused attention to the minute details of your playing, such as striving for better note articulation of scales, faster chord changes, or deliberately playing with less overall muscular tension than yesterday.

5. Maintain your attention on the details – it is very easy to allow the attention to wander off during doing repetitive aspects of a practice routine. Focus yields much greater results, and focus is an ongoing choice because the mind tends strongly toward wandering off from one thing to another. Choose to keep your mind focused on the details of what you are working on!

6. Include some playing time in your musical endeavors – it is pointless to pursue music if it is going to mean nothing but practice. Allow yourself some time within each practice session, or a few times a week if that works better for you, to just play without being overly concerned about the perfection of the details. Perfect the details during practice, and then relax and let your hands do their thing when you play. During playing time, do whatever is the best you can do and don’t allow mistakes to rob your enjoyment of it. Just play and enjoy what comes out well. As you progress through diligent practice, you will find that your playing includes increasingly fewer mistakes and more enjoyment. It is a process. Give it time.

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Mastering Musical Memory

Leave a reply

Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

One of the greatest areas of struggle for most guitarists is remembering the numerous chords, scales, chord progressions, and other odds and ends that we must employ to reproduce our favorite songs or to improvise. While there is no way to make memorization of large amounts of information easy, there are things we can do to make it more predictable and consistent and thus produce better results and faster progress in our playing.

Psychologists advise that lifestyle greatly affects memory. While this article is specifically directed at musical pursuits rather than memory in general, it is worth mentioning that a healthy diet, regular exercise, and adequate sleep allow our memories to function at their maximum potential. If you want the best results from your musical endeavors, take good care of yourself!

For musicians, we need to focus specifically on two components of memory: procedural memory and declarative memory. Procedural memory, for our purposes, refers to that aspect of recall pertaining to executing physical tasks. In musician lingo we often refer to this as muscle memory. Declarative memory is that aspect of memory that allows us to recall facts and figures, such as chord shapes, scale patterns, and the intervals of the root notes of chord progressions. So now that we have a view of the two aspects of memory we need to master, let’s look at some specific strategies.

Improving Muscle Memory

  • Repetition – there is no substitute for repetition. You may have heard something of the old adage among guitar players about “playing until my fingers bleed”. While this may sound like a ridiculous hyperbole, I have in fact literally practiced extreme bends for certain licks to the point that one of my fingernails began to separate from the nail bed and seep blood. While I don’t recommend this, it does illustrate the point that repetition is the key to muscle memory. The more you repeat good executions of a given technique, the better you will play it. This is also incidentally one of the keys to overcoming “stage fright” – embed your skills so deeply into your muscle memory that you can execute them accurately regardless of any distractions.
  • Consistency – you will get much better results from your muscle memory by practicing a moderate amount of repetition daily as opposed to trying to cram in a large block of repetitions on the weekend or the day before your next lesson!
  • Focus – repetition of slop leads to playing slop. It is extremely important to pay attention when practicing scales, for instance. Be sure that you are relaxed and using the most efficient motions possible for each note. When you are learning something new it is important to practice it at a speed that will allow you to play it accurately and efficiently. That often means “excruciatingly slow”. If that is what it means then do it that way. You will never have speed without slop until you thoroughly train your muscle memory to execute the required motions as efficiently and accurately as possible. Then gradually increase speed, maintaining a balance between speed and accurate execution.
  • Test – it is critical that you push the limits of your muscle memory by testing it routinely. Once you have learned a scale pattern then work on playing through it without looking at your fret hand fingers. Likewise, once you have learned a new chord then get started with applying the chord in a chord progression without looking at your fretting hand. Observe mistakes, correct them, and repeat. This will greatly increase your speed in mastering technique.

Improving Recall

  • Focus – as with muscle memory, focused attention on the details of new information will greatly increase your ability to recall that information. While this may seem obvious, it is important to be aware that we all have a tendency to allow our thoughts to drift randomly. For maximum understanding and recall it is imperative to willfully interrupt the random flow of thought and focus your attention while trying to digest new information.
  • Focus – see item 1. This is so important that I am repeating it to help you remember it!
  • Relation – as often as possible, try to relate new information to things that you already know. For instance, if you know the first position A Major chord shape then it is not so difficult to recall that the A7 is simply A Major minus the middle note. Likewise, all of the A form bar chords are an offshoot of the A Major chord shape, so if you know the A Major well enough then the various bar forms are not so hard to remember.
  • Isolation – break complicated sets of information into parts and memorize the individual parts first, then assemble them into the complete set. For instance, with a new scale pattern memorize the notes on two strings. Then move to the next pair of strings, then the next. Then go back and put them all together into the complete pattern. For a tablature score, learn one line. Then move to the next and learn that one. Then play the two together. Then learn the next line, and then add that to previous two. Repeat until the song is complete. Then repeat until your fingers bleed!
  •  Consistency – as with muscle memory, recall responds well to repeated exposure to the same information. This is why it is much more productive to practice a half hour a day than to run practice marathons on the weekends.
  • Vocalize – where feasible, find some way to say out loud what you are trying to memorize. Speaking things aids the memory in storing them. Example: when trying to memorize notes along the fretboard, say the notes out loud as you are playing them. This will greatly speed up your ability to recall the names of the notes.

Following these recommendations will greatly increase the rate of speed of your mastery of all things guitar. We all struggle with memory, but these strategies will assist you in increasing the rate at which you conquer various elements of musicianship. Remember this: never give up!

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute

The Guitarist’s Best Friend (And Worst Enemy!)

Leave a reply

By Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

Aspiring guitarists grapple with a number of challenges in perfecting the craft. From memory failure to reluctant hands, we all struggle with predictable challenges along the path to mastery. Some of these issues are inherent flaws in the human machine about which we can do little but struggle. Others are more within the realm of our choosing, and choose well we must if we wish to have the best possible results for our efforts.

Among the numerous assets we have to help us overcome barriers to progress, none is more potent than the power of habit. Mastering the guitar is very much a matter of cultivating good habits, both mentally and physically. Contrarily, allowing bad habits to persist will torpedo our efforts. Unfortunately the default setting of the human machine is toward counterproductive habits. On the other hand, through exercise of our will we may choose to cultivate good habits that support musical excellence. So we must persist in a productive practice routine with various repetitive mental and physical exercises such that basic skills like chord changes, scales, and rhythm patterns become habitual. Once these things become habitual we can then keep them habitual with only a bit of routine maintenance, and then we are free to focus on the more exciting and gratifying subtleties of making good music.

So let’s take a look at a list of techniques and strategies that will assist in cultivating good habits. These are not randomly selected tidbits, but rather key areas of fundamental knowledge and technique where I observe students struggling time after time. You can use the power of habit to help you get these fundamentals out of the way as soon as possible so you can move on to more interesting things.

Practice Scheduling – set up a designated place where you will practice. Keep your guitar handy on a stand and your practice materials and metronome already out or readily accessible. Make an effort to practice at the same time of day as much as possible so that it becomes a habit, where you then feel uncomfortable if you don’t get started at the appointed time.

Fretboard Note Recognition – set aside some time each time you practice to target some area of the fretboard for note memorization. Break this formidable task into small chunks according to various schemes of dividing the fretboard such as notes along one string, one fret, etc. Make it a habit to memorize the notes along any one such scheme every week.

Chord Changes – changing chords quickly and accurately is the most significant barrier that beginning students struggle with, and one of the more frustrating. It is one of the keys to making really satisfying music, so it is important to get this under control as quickly as possible. Many students tend to develop a habit of pausing the rhythm at chord changes and allowing themselves ample time to change chords. While this is impossible to get around at first, it quickly becomes a habit that persists long after the student is actually able to change chords without losing time. Avoid this trap by always making the effort to target the first beat of a measure for having your chord change complete. Be there on the 1 count!

Chord Strumming Technique – while focusing on changing chords, many fall prey to a weak pick attack consisting of a half-hearted push of the pick through the strings along with a short pick stroke. Cultivate a habit of starting each down stroke at the top of the guitar body and follow through to the other side of the guitar body. Then reverse this for the upstroke. Do not push the pick through the strings as this sounds harsh and unpleasant. Perform the pick stroke with a lively snatch of the forearm, allowing the relaxed hand/wrist to follow along, and thus drag the pick quickly and lightly along the top of the strings. This is not going to happen by accident. Force it until it becomes automatic.

Playing Scales with a Legato Feel – when practicing scale patterns always allow the previous note to run into the next note with no silence in between. This means you must maintain pressure on the previous note and snap your fingertip onto the upcoming note while simultaneously making the pick stroke for the new note. Pay attention to this important detail and keep paying attention to it until it becomes a good habit!

Playing Phrases in Time – to get started with solo phrasing, always play your scale notes on the beat and resolve on the first beat of the underlying chord change. This may be obvious to the mind, but getting the fingers to cooperate does not happen automatically. It is very easy and very common to get absorbed with fingering notes and lose track of the timing. Make it a habit to pay attention to the beat while phrasing, and play your notes on beat.

Habits can work for you or against you. Ensure that they work for you by diligently following the tips above every time you practice. Cultivating good habits will greatly increase your rate of progress.

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Practicing Guitar for Maximum Results

Leave a reply

By Chad Crawford, Guitar Instructor Greenville Guitar Lessons by PMI

If you have been playing guitar for any length of time then you know by now that the one supreme key to results is this: practice! However, it is possible to practice routinely and still get poor results. How is this? It is by practicing the wrong things, in the wrong order, and in the wrong way.

So how can you know what to practice, what order to practice it in, and how to practice for maximum results? Follow the recommendations below to make the most of your practice time.

What to practice:

(1) Playing guitar is a complex combination of mental and physical skills. In order to master the subject we need to break it down into manageable pieces. What specifically to practice is too big of a subject for a short article. However, what we can do here is narrow down the possibilities. The most important thing you need to consider is your goals. If your goal is too generalized it will not help you nail down what you need to practice. For instance, if you set an overly broad goal such as, “I just want to be able to play guitar,” this is not going to help you identify what information you need to learn and what techniques you need to master. If you are not sure about your goals then you should give some thought to what kind of music you like to listen to. Then you must identify what you must learn to do to mimic this kind of music. Those are the things that you need to practice. Make a list of those things and then go to work on them every time you practice. Do not get bogged down in practicing one technique or one song. Practice a variety of things pertinent to your goals.

(2) A common problem I see among aspiring guitarists is the tendency to want to know and master everything about guitar. While the idea is not a bad one in theory, the reality is that music has been under development for several thousand years. It is a huge subject. Some universities offer doctorate level programs in music. As a hobbyist you do not have time to master “everything” about guitar. You are going to have enough on your hands just to master one style and play fluently in two or three related styles. So don’t waste your time learning exotic scales and chords if your intent is to play popular radio songs. Learning obscure modes is not going to make you a better player if you are still struggling with applying the pentatonic scales. Master the basic chords, scales, and techniques and then work on applying them effectively. Once you have reached a level that you can enjoy playing the basics then it is time to work on the more complicated stuff, and then only if it is applicable to your goals at that point.

(3) At the other extreme is the tendency to want to learn only bare minimum requirements for playing specific songs. There is a bit of controversy in the music teaching community as to whether learning specific songs is a good approach to musical mastery. I think learning songs can be very helpful to mastering knowledge and techniques on the condition that the songs are incorporated into a balanced program of learning music in general rather than just learning the bare minimum information and techniques to play the specific songs. Taken by itself, learning songs is a dead end that leaves many aspiring guitarists frustrated and burned out. Don’t let this happen to you!

How to practice:

(1) One of the recurring problems I see with students of guitar is the tendency to get into a self-defeating routine with practice. It is not that a practice routine itself is problematic. Practice certainly does need to be a routine undertaking. The problem develops in that practicing specific exercises becomes a matter of mindlessly running through the same material with no specific mental focus on improvement. Practice becomes an exercise in repeating the same stuff from yesterday in the same way. This is the number one issue I see that impedes progress. When you practice any skill, it is important that you focus on doing it better today than yesterday. Whether it be memorizing some chord, scale, or song, or improving the speed or finesse of chord changes or scales, it is important to push yourself to make an increment of progress every time you practice something!

(2) Another common problem is the tendency to rush through practice. While speed is essential in executing chord changes and phrases, you must balance speed with accuracy. Rushing through every exercise as fast as possible will only delay your progress. Make the effort to ensure that your execution is accurate as well as fast. This often means that you will have to slow something down to a tempo that may be completely unrealistic for actual playing and then practice at that speed until you can execute the technique fairly well. Then gradually increase speed as you are able.

(3) Finally, be sure to practice as often as possible! Learning guitar is all about memory in terms of both mental recall and physical muscle control. Every day that you do not practice you lose a bit of recall and muscle memory. That is just the way the human machine functions and there is not much we can do about it. Therefore, it would be best to practice every single day. However, this is not feasible for many hobbyists. In this case, make it a point to practice more days than not … at least five days a week.

Follow these guidelines to ensure that your practice routine is leading to progress rather than frustration!

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Unlocking Musical Creativity

Leave a reply

By Chad Crawford, PMI Guitar Instructor

Among the challenges we face as developing guitar players, cultivating a sense of artistic creativity may seem among the most formidable. Many assume that creativity is a mysterious insight arising from the recesses of the fortunately gifted minds of a select few. In fact, creativity is not a mystery. As with all things musical it responds to focused effort to cultivate it.

So how do we get from having “no creativity” to the point of being able to write songs and play improvisational solos?

First let us address the occasional Mozart who shows up with tremendous innate musical ability. For most musicians, other artists, engineers, inventors, writers, etc., natural talent is not the key to creativity. So the Mozart’s are irrelevant in terms of understanding how a person of typical native ability can develop creative prowess. We should then waste no time considering natural talent, and most importantly avoid falling prey to the common misconception that creativity is something that one either has or does not have by inheritance.

Now let us consider what creativity actually is. Is it really assembling something out of nothing in a mysterious seizure of inspiration from quarters unknown? No! Even Mozart had to sit with paper and pen and work his inspirations into orderly, flowing pitch and time relationships. Consider this quote from prolific inventor Thomas Edison, whose record on creativity speaks for itself: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”.

Creativity is neither an unknowable mystery, an accident, nor a fleeting peek into the ethereal mists. It is rather a predictable result of a process involving mastery of the fundamental elements of an endeavor, and then applying those fundamentals in such a way as to generate beauty of function and form. This does not require creating something from nothing, or even something totally new. Rather, it means assembling the known into that which effectively solves problems or manifests beauty. It is well within the reach of anyone willing to apply themselves to the process. 

Now let us consider how this applies to music, and specifically to guitar. Music is fundamentally two objective phenomenon: pitch relationships and time relationships. Musicians assemble these relationships in such a way as to create the more subjective phenomenon of an emotionally satisfying flow of tension and release. This does not require the creation of anything new, but rather a well developed awareness of how pitch and time relationships work together to create a satisfying flow of tension and release.

So let’s break it down now even more specifically to the things we need to have mastery over in order to make music that satisfies ourselves and our intended audiences.

1. Know the notes on the fretboard – everything we do as musicians involves assembling notes in melody (one after another) or harmony (in unison, such as a chord or double stop) with reference to a tonal center (key). If you do not know the notes then you are limited to playing by patterns or by ear. While playing by patterns and by ear are useful tools, if you wish to cultivate maximum creativity then you need to allow yourself as many options as possible.  If you can visualize the letter names of the notes you are playing then it is much easier to choose resolving notes for phrases, or make useful alterations to chords to achieve just the right shade of mood.

2. Know the names of the notes in the Major Keys – the Major Scale is the starting point for all we do. Everything else is an alteration of some sort to a Major Scale. If you know the names of the notes in the key you are playing, and can also see them as you play them on the fretboard, these together will give you a great deal of power to achieve a desired musical effect without having to always guess your way through things with experimentation.

3. Understand Intervals – intervals are the building blocks of the pitch aspect of music. A thorough understanding of intervals will allow you to know what effect a note is going to have before you play it. If you know your intervals then you will be able to create musical effects at will, alter scales and chords to create precise shades of emotion, and transfer musical ideas from one key to another with ease.

4. Understand the effects of the basic divisions of the beat – along with pitch relationships, relative timing between pitch events is one of the fundamental components of music. A good set of timing relationships by itself is very powerful (think of a powerful drum intro that sets the mood for a song).  If you understand the basic divisions of the beat and how to modify them to tastes then you can create strong shades of mood at will.

5. Understand scale harmonization – knowing how to translate a particular scale into chord sequences will enable you to assemble pleasing chord progressions in a matter of moments. Knowing the chords in the key and the notes in the chords will also give you a lot of useful options for resolving solo phrases.

6. Listen to a lot of music – musical inspiration is often a residual effect of exposure to other music. Saturate your creative muse with immersion into a wide variety of music, and pay attention to the individual details such as the vocals, drums, and bass. In doing so you will cultivate a deeper intuitive understanding of music, much as a child learns to speak by regular exposure to speech.

7. Start from the known – creativity is often a matter of slight alterations to common ideas. Learn the signature licks, chord types and sequences, and rhythmic ideas of the masters of your preferred style. Then experiment with alterations until you uncover ideas that express what you wish. 

8. Constantly refine your technique – if you have ever wondered how an accomplished guitarist can play something very simple and yet have it sound very beautiful and powerful, the trick is often in the technique. What many experience as a “lack of creativity” is in fact a lack of technique refinement that will make an otherwise great idea sound lifeless or even just plain bad. Technique development is not just a matter of mere repetition. It is essential to pay attention to the quality of sound (a.k.a. “tone”) during technique development practice. Don’t rush through technique exercises with the goal of merely getting them over with as quickly as possible. Listen carefully to the small details. Strive to improve the quality of sound resulting from each pick stroke.

This may seem like a hopeless lot to get done along the path to creativity. Bear in mind that learning music, including the creative aspect of it, is a journey. It is not needful to be “finished” with all other aspects of musicianship before experimenting with creative application of known musical elements. The point of this article is that creativity is a predictable result of identifiable methods, and therefore is accessible to all who are willing to work for it. Cultivate the appropriate knowledge, technique, and persistence, and then you can be sure that your creative muse will show itself!

Copyright © 2005 Palmetto Music Institute. All Rights Reserved.