I’ve been trying to get better at guitar lately. I guess I’ve been playing off and on for almost thirteen years now, but still don’t consider myself to be very accomplished. The guitar is a bit of a tricky instrument, in that it really can’t be learned just by reading books and thinking about it. Which is probably true for most things, but somehow took me a long time to figure out!
One thing I tell people who ask me about picking up the guitar is that it can be very frustrating at first, because so much time in the early learning stages is spent just developing the finger strength and muscle memory necessary to get the notes to form cleanly. And once you’ve got that, then you have to spend even more time getting the strings to be quiet when you
don’t want them to make noise!
I’ve been trying to put together a bit of a practice routine, gradually building things up as I get a bit better. I thought I’d post it here because a lot of the resources are online, and it’s often pretty difficult to sort the useful training stuff from a million “Learn how to play in ten minutes!” lessons. The thing about guitar, is that it does take a lot of time. But it’s like science in a way - as soon as you learn one thing, five new questions present themselves.
1. Stretching. Often overlooked, but a pretty good idea. I usually start with the stretches recommended by John Petrucci (
yes that John Petrucci) in
this video.
2. Warmups and Finger Exercises. As I mentioned above, learning to play the guitar involves lots of workouts for your hands (both left and right). Your fingers need to be able to fret notes cleanly, to bar strings, to move fairly independently of each other. You also need to commit several types of movement to muscle memory: switching between common chord types, switching between strings, etc. Unfortunately, the only way to develop these skills that I know of is just lots and lots of practice. I think I read this joke somewhere else, but if someone wanted to write an accurate guitar book, the title could be something like “How I Learned How To Play The Guitar In Just 10,000 Gruesome Hours”.
Anyways, there are tons of exercise books out there, and most will probably get the job done. The one I’ve been using is called “
30-Day Guitar Workout”, which has been good for me because it really breaks things down to the simplest level possible (chromatic scales on a single string), and builds from there.
3. Fretboard Navigation and Ear Training. The guitar neck is pretty big. My electric guitar has 22 frets. Including the open string, that makes 23x6 = 138 possible positions to play a note in! It would be helpful to know what each of those notes was! I’ve found
Fretboard Warrior to be useful for this. I started out doing 5 minute stretches on this, now I just do 2 minutes at a time.
Ear training is important for any musician. It’s fundamental to figuring out what other musicians are doing, and also for your own playing. To be able to correlate your fingers with the sound you want your instrument to make, you need to have your intervals down. One good online trainer is at
Good Ear. I recently downloaded the Phobia Bundle from
Major Third, which has nice Mac trainers for Chords, Scales, Intervals, and Inversions.
4. Scales. Learning scales is quite different between the guitar and the piano. Whereas on the piano you need to learn a new major scale for each key, on guitar if you learn, say, a C major scale, you can play a D major scale by moving your fingers up two frets. So in a sense it’s easier to play in different keys on a guitar. To pay for our sins though, we have to learn each of the different scales in different positions on the neck - it’d be quite limiting to only play a C major scale using a single position.
Learning scales is something I’ve been lax about, but am trying to get better at. Right now, I’m doing mainly
major scales in CAGED positions, but also natural minor and minor pentatonic scales. Next up, modes of the major scale and the other minor scales!
Like learning how to make the guitar make noise, then spending more time to make the guitar
not make noise, learning scales can be frustrating. The goal is to learn them so well that when you’re playing a melody or solo you
don’t sound like you’re just playing up and down a scale.
5. Chords and Harmony. Playing more than one note at a time. This is an area that I’m still developing in my practice routine, so I don’t have too much to say here. But it is important to practice
the basic open and barre chord shapes until you can move between them easily. That’s probably where I am now. Going forward, you need to be able to build chords all over the neck, and to do that, you need to really understand chord construction and music theory - this
music theory book is a good one aimed at guitarists.
6. Video Lessons. A lot of guitar playing is difficult to learn from books, or just figuring out by yourself. To really “
learn how to make it talk” you need to go beyond the ‘words’ (i.e., just the chords and notes) and really develop your phrasing. There’s a million little tricks and phrases that are part of the guitar lexicon, but can be difficult to pick up by ear. The best thing to do, I’ve heard, is to find a good teacher. There’s lots of videos on the web as well, but the quality is decidedly mixed. One site I like a lot is
Justinguitar.com - he’s got a lot of really good video lessons, and a killer Australian accent!
7. Real Books. A lot of time learning guitar is spent learning other people’s songs, exactly the way they played them. That’s helpful to a point, but it’s also useful to be able to figure out how to play something your own way. This kind of study is common for other instruments, but not so much for guitar. One thing that’s very common in jazz, not so much in rock, is Fake books - books with basic chord progressions and melodies, that still leave a lot of room open for interpretation (
here’s a good start). On the guitar, I think a good exercise is to go through a chord chart and try to figure out voicings for the various chords. This is really good for building your chord vocabulary and your sense of harmony. I like to figure out chord voicings with the help of
Guitar Pro, then try to play the melody along to the chord voicings I’ve picked. Here’s an example of voicings from “Autumn Leaves”:
OK, that ended up being a lot longer than I had expected! This routine usually takes me about an hour. I’ll say more in other posts - this is really just warmups and technical exercises here. But to wrap up, some caveats and closing advice. As a caveat, I wouldn’t recommend this kind of routine to anyone just starting out, or people looking for different things out of their playing - it’s important to match your practice routine with your goals as a player.
Get a metronome (either
online or
software or
hardware), use it! Keep track of your progress. Record yourself if you can. Do it every day if you can. Don’t cheat. Get it right at a slower tempo before you go faster. When you get frustrated, remember that most rock, folk, and country songs can be played knowing only four chords. Remember that this stuff is just the groundwork that you need to lay down to allow yourself to get to the music - playing scales really fast isn’t an end in itself. End your practice by rocking out to some AC/DC.
