How To Take Your Guitar Playing to The Next Level
Most people have to work first at getting their fingers to move on the fret board properly and playing chords when they first start learning how to play the guitar. After they learn these skills, they are ready to move on to playing lead guitar.
Playing lead guitar comes from learning the scale patterns. The problem is that many new guitar players don’t know why their lead sounds the same as their practice scales. The main reason this happens is that the new player doesn’t change the order of the notes they play.
When learning a scale while practicing, it won’t sound like much. The main idea of practicing scales is to memorize where the notes are. To use the scale in a song, you’ll need to move things around. You can’t play the scale the same way as when you practice.
You’ll need to learn some techniques that allow you to “talk” with your guitar and express yourself. Here are some of the techniques commonly used to produce your desired musical voice.
The easiest technique for a novice guitar player is to slide to another note. This is a simple technique, however, you need to start out slow when practicing. After you learn this skill, you need to work on getting precise about where your note ends up.
One way to make to make your guitar “talk” is bending. This is done by fretting a note, then use your fingers to bend the string or push it upward until you achieve the tone you want. You can start learning this technique after learning to slide.
You can get an idea of how far to bend a note by sliding up to the note you hope to reach in the bend. The note you slide to is the same tone as the note you want to bend to so get the tones to match. You must bend a string properly because if your bend doesn’t make it, you’ll sound like an amateur. In fact, the sound you produce will be awful.
When bending, it should end up in the same place you slid into. When you bend, make sure to place your fingers on the string you’re bending so that you have more strength for the bend. You can use a couple fingers behind the fret and string you are bending.
Be aware that you’re bending strings since most strings will be pushed upward. However, the sixth string needs to be pushed down on the rare times when you want to bend this string.
Once you get bending just right, anyone listeners are going to be impressed. Make sure you practice your guitar until you get it right, since bending the note incorrectly will make you sound like a beginner.
These are just a few of the techniques you need to learn, however, bending and sliding are very important techniques that a good guitarist needs to master if you want to become a better guitar player. We’ll go over some of these techniques in the future.
Check out some good blues players like Stevie Ray Vaughan or B.B. King to get an idea of what it should sound like. Use your favorite guitarists as inspiration so that you can keep picking up the guitar and learning.
