I recently wrote an article looking at why natural talent on guitar is a myth, and hopefully, debunked several ideas and theories that hold guitar players back. So I thought today, we could look at the other side of the coin, and look at what really determines your ability level on guitar:

1) Daily Time Invested into Practising

This is an important principle that affects nearly every human skill you can think of. It applies to learning to tie your shoe laces, learning a language, and learning how to play guitar:

You’re a guitar player. You’ve listened to some Yngwie Malmsteen, Jason Becker and Steve Vai tracks (…. right…?) and now you want to shred on guitar.

I know exactly where you are coming from! I remember feeling exactly the same when I was starting out my guitar journey. It’s a bit frustrating, especially when you are starting out, and you want to play music several years beyond your ability level.

But - you can get there!

So - you want to learn guitar. Awesome! But where do you start? Being a beginner on guitar, it can be difficult to know what your options are. In this article we look at the different options you have.

Learning guitar is great fun. It is challenging, rewarding, it’s a productive use of your time, a creative outlet and if you want, it can be a great social skill. But where do you start? There are quite a few options, so let’s look at them:

The guitar is one of the most popular instruments in the world, but getting started can be daunting. In this beginners guide to playing guitar, we cover some of the basics of the guitar, including notes and chords, and also some easy beginner songs that you can play today.

Let’s get started by naming the different parts of the guitar, so we know what we are dealing with. The guitar has a few basic parts: the body, neck, strings, bridge, headstock, nut and tuners.

This is the first video in a short series that introduces sweep picking for beginner - intermediate level guitar players. Take your time working through it and you will find you quickly master the art of sweep picking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-2xdKuw2T4

Video Notes

This is a guide to sweep picking on guitar. 

This is the first of three videos, that are a beginners guide to sweep picking on electric guitar. sweep picking. We look at four different sweep picking exercises, that should take 2-3 minutes each. 

Sweep picking is one of the most fun skills that you can learn on guitar. This is Part 2 of an introductory course to sweep picking. Watch the video and notes below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNM2mhwP3V4

You can see part 1 here

Video Notes

Exercise 1

Hold the pick against the first string. Feel the tension in the string against the pick. Tense your arm up and pull the pick through the string, catching the pick on the 2nd string.

In this lesson, we do some more work on the fundamental technique that is involved with sweep picking.

Video Notes

How to sweep pick on guitar part 3 - this week we are still working on the fundamental training for the technique.

We are going to combine the two previous exercises.

Exercise 1

Take the diagonal arpeggio shape we used. Little finger starts on fret 15 on the 4th string. The pick sits against the string. We use a count of 3 for this:

Learning scales on the guitar. This is something that a lot of people would agree is necessary, but unfortunately, a lot of guitar players find this to be very frustrating and boring.

Having a basic knowledge of scales allows you to do a lot of things on guitar, such as improvising, or writing your own guitar harmonies.

This article will address the reasons guitar players often find the process boring and frustrating, and also provide a set of solutions, so that you have some new approaches to learning scales, can create more freedom and creativity in your guitar playing and also learn scales faster than you ever have before.

Shredding is a fun and awesome skill, and it took me some time to figure it out. Here are the top lessons I learned

When I was a kid, listening to Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai, I had a bad case of shred-lust. The only thing I wanted to do was play as fast as I possibly could. This had good and bad consequences. The good was that I could put huge amounts of time and effort into practising. The bad was, for a long time, I neglected skills like phrasing, ornamentation and vibrato.

There’s guitar practice, and then there is guitar practice.

And there is a lot we can learn about effective guitar practice from looking at sports.

Sports researchers have put a lot of time into finding out why some football academies consistently create great players, while others don’t.

One variable they looked at was the time spent at the academy. They compared a top academy with a lower ranking academy. Interestingly, the lower achieving academy had their students playing more than the high ranking academy.