It's been said that a guitar is one of the few things that will actually get better if you just keep picking at it! However, if you are one of the vast majority of players whose experience trying to learn the guitar has been nothing but frustrating you might find the following tips enlightening.
Most players begin by learning a few chords on the guitar, generally this is where the frustration begins; sore fingers, difficult chord shapes and strange buzzing sounds from the guitar, if this sounds familiar... read on!
Mistake #1: difficult chord shapes - this is extremely common, even in 'easy play' guitar books newbie players are confronted with difficult finger stretches making it almost impossible for them to maintain a steady rhythm.
The solution: learn songs with easy chord shapes that require only minimum left hand finger movement that will enable the player to put more concentration into their rhythm and help them develop their groove.
The trick is to find 'cool' sounding songs with easy chords; generally the would-be player has to deal with all sorts of nursery-rhyme type songs that are very uninspiring to say the least.
Here's a couple of ideas to get you started...
* A Horse With No Name by America (2 - chord song)
* Dreams by Fleetwood Mac (2 - chord song; excluding the guitar solo)
* Free Falling by Tom Petty (2 - chord song; well... 3 chords technically)
Ok, I think you get the idea,; I'm sure you would much rather play this type of song rather than 'Mary Had A Little Frog" or "Hang Down You Shirt Tom Dooley".
To get you started here are the chords for Fleetwood Mac's hit song 'Dreams'. (capo on the 5th fret)
C Maj7
-0-
-0-
-0-
-2-
-3-
-x-
D6/9
-0-
-0-
-2-
-0-
-x-
-x-
The chord sequence for the entire song (excluding the guitar solo) is:
CMaj7 /// | D6/9 ///
You can't get much easier than that!
BTW the chords for the guitar solo are just as easy.
Mistake #2: random chords - are just that, isolated pieces of sonic information that don't make musical sense, that's why no matter how much practice some players do they never seem to make much progress.
The solution: learn the language of music - like any language music has a set of underlying principles that must be studied, absorbed and applied in order for the player to be able to successfully express themselves and communicate their ideas through their instrument.
Rather than learn 'random' chords a much more intelligent approach is to study chord progressions.
Continuing our analogy of music and language... chords could be thought of as musical 'words' and chord progressions as musical 'sentences'.
Here are a few important chord progressions to learn:
1 - 6 - 4 - 5
1 - 3 - 4 - 5
The numbers refer to the chords (triads or scale tone seventh chord structures) created for the scale of a each individual key.
To clarify...
The 1 - 6 - 4 - 5 in the key of C would be C - Am - F - G
1 - 6 - 4 - 5 in the key of G would be G - Em - C - D
Whereas the 1 - 3 - 4 - 5 progression would result in the following:
1 - 3 - 4 - 5 key of C - would be C - Em - F - G
1 - 3 - 4 - 5 key of G - would be G - Bm - C - D
Many songs are based on these two progressions; get to know the sound of each progression and keep your 'ear' to the ground listening for them in songs.
Mistake #3: 'white bread' sounding chords - boring sounding chords generally result in loss of motivation, quite often the player misdiagnoses the problem as an issue with his/her equipment often resulting in a merry chase all over the country in search of the magic guitar (save your time and money... it doesn't exist).
The solution: Spice up your 'garden variety' chords with drone strings
Here's a few neat sounding chords in the popular guitar friendly key of "E".
E
-0-
-0-
-1-
-2-
-2-
-0-
A2
-0-
-0-
-2-
-2-
-0-
-x-
B4
-0-
-0-
-4-
-4-
-2-
-x-
And now I'd like to invite you to get free access to my "How To Remember 1,000 Songs" eCourse. You can download the course for free at: http://www.guitarcoaching.com/
From Mike Hayes - The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar System
No comments:
Post a Comment