Pick-Up Artists – The Skills You Need to Play the Guitar

Articles on Guitars | Topics: guitars, guitar

by Paulette Herring

Do you feel overwhelmed with the lessons you are given, the music books that you are trying to figure out, learning new skills, and the proper techniques to use while you practice? This is very common when learning to play a guitar (or any instrument for that matter). This can even occur with advanced students who are pushing themselves to learn some new technique or music. These feeling can be paralyzing and is very dangerous for you as you strive to progress. Do not push these feeling aside – deal with them. If you are feeling frustrated you need to re-evaluate your practice methods.

Learning the specifics of guitar playing in difficult, and one of the things that makes it so challenging is that you are the only person who can put the specifics of learning the guitar into place, stick with them, review and revise them on a regular basis, and set goals to make sure they are accomplished. Some people will feel overwhelmed when they realize how much there is to learn. When this happens you should not give up you should stop, think, observe, analyze your technique and put a plan into place that will help you overcome the difficulties. Some areas that you will need to understand as you start learning the guitar:

It is important to get some idea of the complete picture, an idea of the result to be achieved, and how you will get there. Figuring out how to do that is hard for students, because they do not know enough about the complete process of becoming a musician. Beginning students do not know what to practice first, what skills are important to learn first, what goals they should accomplish first. It is easy to get overwhelmed by all the materials available. It is easy to buy books, but not so simple to figure out how to use them and learn from them.

Self-reliance is the best attitude you could have as you begin learning the guitar. A teacher cannot relieve you of your own responsibility to be alert and organized.

Create and maintain your day-to-day working method.

Write things down such as schedules, routines, and the amount of practice time you do daily

Review your results frequently and make adjustments as needed

It is important right from the beginning that the student begins to develop, through proper practice, the attentiveness of sensations that lead to improved techniques. The necessary physical sensations that you want to watch for include:

The Light Finger

The Firm Finger

Historical Quote

The present century has not dealt kindly with the farmer. His legends are all but obsolete, and his beliefs have been pared away by the professors at colleges of agriculture. Even the farm- bred bards who twang guitars before radio microphones prefer “I’m Headin’ for the Last Roundup” to “Turkey in the Straw” or “Father Put the Cows Away.”

—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

Heavy and Floating Arm

A growing awareness of the body and active playing muscles

Once you have begun to train your fingers correctly, it is time to teach your fingers some of the basics of playing the guitar. It is important to make music as soon as possible. Learn a simple song and stay with that for approximately three months or until you can play it through smoothly. This is called, Vertical Growth and is the first kind of growth that you want to achieve. Once you have mastered that song, it is time to do some Horizontal Growth, adding more songs at the same skill level to build up your repertoire.

Learning to strum through chord changes smoothly is important. You do not want to be playing a song and have to stop the music every time you are changing a chord. Work with songs that you love and have a special meaning to you (as long as they are within your ability).

Many players suffer from learning and practicing scales while the hands and fingers were still full of tension and not developed properly. Because of this, they dread practicing them and their body is full of tension when they do. Scales are composed of complex physical movements, which must be studied carefully in careful detail before being put together into the movements for playing scales. Scales on guitar are difficult than they are on most other instruments. This is simply because every note is the result of the precise co-ordination of both hands, and the sound is not produced by just one finger, as in piano.

Learning a multifaceted skill like playing the guitar is not a linear process. Learning the guitar is more a set of synchronized processes, occurring and maturing together to produce the result.

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