Improving your guitar skills may be a daunting task for many players on any level, especially for beginners. The reason why is because they might not know what they should focus on next, or the means to achieve it. If you’re feeling stuck or don’t know what to improve next, have no fear since this is exactly why we’ve come up with no less than eight awesome tips to help you improve your guitar playing skills. Heads up, it takes a lot of practice.
Invest Your Time
One of the things that are especially important if you want to improve your guitar playing skills is the time you invest in it. If you’re only a part-time player, the chances are you won’t improve as quickly as you would with a consistent playing schedule. The key here is that you don’t stop once you reach your comfort zone, or you’ve been in it for some time. If you’ve already mastered a specific feat, move on, learn something new. This constant improvement is bound to drastically improve your guitar playing skills, and the truth is there is no way around it.
Warm-Up
Before you start playing your guitar, it might be the best idea to warm up first. The writers over at Metal Insider have shed light on the fact that many famous guitar players insisted on having good warming up time because it allowed them to hone their skills. It’s best advised to start with pure physical exercises such as attacking all four fret-hand fingers. The speed will take to do this will indicate to you how warmed up you are. This is also a good tip if you happen to live somewhere where it’s mostly cold because your fingers can get pretty stiff.
Practise Chord Changes
Another tip that will help you improve your guitar playing skills is to practice changing your chords while strumming. It goes without saying that you should learn the basic chords, but to go a step beyond and into the progress you’re looking for is to learn how to interchange them quickly. Learning how to coordinate your hands while doing so is one of the hardest things to master, and requires hours and hours of practice to get there. However, once you master this, it will make a huge difference in your playing and will lay the ground for future improvements.
Record Yourself
There is no better way to be aware of your current playing style and technique than being able to see it firsthand. Because it’s so tricky watching yourself playing in the mirror, you should simply record yourself while practicing. This can give you great insight into our technique and see where you falter so you can better correct your mistakes. Another reason why this guitar playing tip is so great is that it allows you to correct yourself even though you don’t have a guitar coach that would usually see you through your mistakes, especially if you can’t afford one.
Experiment
Experimenting with your sound is one of the greatest ways to improve your guitar playing skills. To better help you achieve this feat, it might be a good idea to invest in some extra gear. A good example would be an Univibe pedal because it offers plenty of sound modulations for you to experiment with and broaden your guitar playing horizons. Maybe you want to add some texture to your sound or make it seem more like some of the famous guitarists’ sounds, the options are endless. There are many kinds of these pedals to choose from too, so invest your time in finding the one best suited for your needs.
Keep Track of Your Progress
As with any other person that is looking to improve their skills, guitar players can face motivation problems too, which is about the worst thing that can happen if you were looking to improve your skills. The solution to this problem might be to track your progress and be aware of the milestones you’ve passed. It’s otherwise important to keep a log of your process because it will push you to keep a daily routine which can significantly impact your motivation and help you achieve your goal of improving your craft. While it may seem obsessive, it’s a sure way to keep you on track and keep you motivated.
Learn Scales
Here we’ll be focusing on how learning scales will significantly benefit your guitar playing skills. Scales are very important to understand music theory and above all, they are the foundation and the tool to help you improvise over songs and learn solos. See where I’m going with this. Learning scales will set the foundation for future progress and help you improve with each new step you take. Practicing with scales (major, natural, and harmonic minor, Dorian, blues/pentatonic) will also help you broaden your understanding of music overall and ultimately help you with your soloing skills.
Aural Skills
Many guitar players will tell you that if you want to become better at playing guitar, you should improve your aural skills too. Nothing can skyrocket your skills like learning to transcribe songs by ear rather than reading the guitar tabs or watching video lessons. While it is quite good to learn from tabs and these kinds of resources, improving your aural skills can prove very beneficial as your core guitar skill. While this was somewhat of a mystery back in the day, nowadays there are many resources to provide you with guidance on how to improve your aural skills so there is no reason why you shouldn’t.
Improving your guitar skills has many aspects to it and we’ve tried to cover most of them from keeping a consistent practice regimen to using guitar equipment such as pedals to help you explore your sound. These tips are bound to help you achieve steady progress in your journey but only if you’re consistent with your playing and if you allow yourself a little bit of equipment to give you more options and hence more experience and skills. Be sure to follow them and improvement will surely follow.
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