Music

Guitar Lesson 11: Getting Started Right

I’ve recently acquired a handful of new students on the guitar. Nearly every student starts out with the same problem: bad technique. I haven’t written a lesson in quite a while and I thought I should devote some time to this very important subject. Often, their complaints are:

These kinds of issues, as I stated before, are limitations due to bad playing technique. Usually, people can’t play faster because they don’t know how to play something slowly. Or, their hands hurt because they have bad posture and their hands don’t fret notes properly. Or, when they’re trying to play something technical, their picking leads them astray.

Here are some of the problems in the order we’ll address them:

Flying Fingers

Victor Wooten is a huge proponent of “economy of motion.” This makes sense because he’s frikkin’ fast. Even though Victor usually talks about his picking hand when talking about economy of motion, we can still apply the concept to our fretting hand

For playing guitar—or any stringed, fretted instrument—you want to keep your fretting-hand fingers close to the fretboard. In fact, you want to keep them as close as you can possibly control. This is important because you should always be “ready for action.” You don’t want to go into battle unprepared and you don’t want to play Fracture with your fingers an inch or two off the fretboard. The song is too fast to tolerate bad technique. This morning, I saw a guy named Ray Cummings play Chet Atkins’ Cascade with such an incredibly small amount of effort. Watch his fingers:

Do you see how light and easy he plays? Don’t be fooled, this song is really difficult to play. Do you see how close his fingers are to the fingerboard? Do you see how his fingers are never bent in weird ways? How he sits up straight when he plays? How his thumb is always firmly anchored behind the neck? How his right elbow isn’t jabbing into his body? How his fingers point THROUGH the fretboard with his fingertips doing most of the fretting work? How his picking hand is anchored in the same position? How he keeps the minimum number of fingers on the fretboard while he’s playing? These are all techniques you should emulate when trying to improve your playing style. Do yourself a favor and watch this video over and over, emulate what Ray does, and try to incorporate his physiological style into your daily practice routines.

In order to get started on improving your fingerings, here are some philosophies to remember, a few of which I believe I’m stealing from John Petrucci’s Rock Discipline video:

Let’s start with a simple, classic fingering exercise:

|-----------------------------------------1-2-3-4-|
|---------------------------------1-2-3-4---------|
|-------------------------1-2-3-4-----------------|
|-----------------1-2-3-4-------------------------|
|---------1-2-3-4---------------------------------|
|-1-2-3-4-----------------------------------------|

Practicing this fingering exercise using the points I’ve mentioned above will significantly improve your technique whether you’re playing basic chords in church or speed-metal. Also, try changing up the order of the notes—instead of playing 1-2-3-4, try 2-3-1-4 or 1-4-2-3 or whatever. Be creative!

Another thing you want to keep in mind is to always always always play using alternate picking. In case you don’t know what that is, go punch yourself in the face and then read the next sentence. Alternate picking is a picking technique where you play every note with an alternating pick stroke starting with a downstroke and following it with an upstroke.

Please see the following video for my demonstration of the above exercise using the techniques I’ve outlined. I’ve also inserted some other fingering exercises I believe I read in the Steve Vai 10-Hour Guitar Workout from some ancient issue of Guitar World or some other mag.

Strange Picking

I already mentioned a little bit about picking technique in the last couple of paragraphs, but there’s plenty more to picking than alternate picking. The way you hold the pick and where your picking motion comes from is of utmost importance!! Many of my students, both past and present, have come to me with poor picking performance and speed. The problem usually lies in which muscles their picking originates from.

A common mistake beginning guitarists make is picking up a plectrum (another word for a pick) and playing however they feel comfortable. Like anything else, there’s a proper way to pick and discipline yourself. Of course, Robert Fripp would likely chastise me for what I’m about to demonstrate, but these techniques have helped me to never worry about carpal tunnel and I’ve always been able to pick 16th notes at 200 bpm and faster.

Picking speed, strength, and accuracy comes from accurate muscles. In many sports, it is rare to develop technique by using the muscles in your hand. Instead, you’ll usually use your wrist and the stability, smoothness, and accuracy of your wrist. The same goes for picking on the guitar. What I’ll usually tell my students to do is:

That’s exactly the motion you should use to pick. Notice where all the motion comes from: your wrist. Your elbow has nothing to do with it, nor do the muscles in your hand.

As far as how to hold the pick, I generally make a hook with my index finger, place the pick above my fingernail, then rest my thumb down in order to keep the pick in the same place. Couple that with the chopping motion described above and you should be set for some solid picking. What you do with your other fingers while holding the pick is your own business, but don’t tense up too much because your hand will want to tense up when you’re playing fast. The looser you can keep your hand, the faster you should be able to pick without straining yourself.

Choppy Notes

To me, the primary difference between a beginning player and an advanced player is the quality of the music produced when the two are playing the “same” notes. One aspect of beginner and intermediate players that bothers me is the “choppy” feel of whatever they’re playing. They don’t hold notes for their proper duration, sometimes notes overlap when they shouldn’t, and, this is the hardest one to master, when the notes played seem to be dependent upon the limitations of the instrument. For instance, you can’t play a C and a C# on the B string at the same time whereas you can do that on a piano.

The best way to learn how to play notes properly is by playing with a metronome, starting slowly and then getting faster after you’ve mastered playing something slow. Start off playing any song with straight quarter notes and don’t allow yourself to hear any gaps between the notes. Play each note with the clicking of the metronome. Please see the following video for an example of how to do this:

Video coming soon!

Recently, I wrote a piece for a new album I’m working on and it has a repeating, droning rhythm guitar part. Here’s the tab of the basic gist:

Left-hand fingering above the tab

  3 1   2   1 4 3
|-------------------|
|-------3-----------|
|-----0---0-------0-| repeat 3 times
|---2-------2---4---|
|-3-----------5-----|
|-------------------|

    1       1 2
|-------------------|
|-------0-----------|
|-----0---0-------0-|
|---2-------2---0---|
|-0-----------2-----|
|-------------------|
Then, it does something MUCH harder:

  3 2   4   2 1
|-------------------|
|-------3---------0-|
|-----0---0---------| repeat ad nauseum
|---2-------2---0---|
|-3-----------2-----|
|-------------------|

Looking at the tab, it doesn’t seem like that’d be so hard. But, when I first played through it, I wasn’t happy with how it sounded. I wanted the notes to ring as long as possible (particularly the notes played on the G and B strings) and overlap as much as possible, to make it sound more like a piano with the sustain pedal held down. So, I made some adjustments to how I was playing the song and came up with the final version, as you can see in the following video:

So, you see, there’s a lot more technique to playing that song than you might have originally thought. And, to me, it’s those differences that stand out and help me to challenge myself to become a better guitar player. I think it also makes the piece more enjoyable for the listener since choppiness is not typically a sought-after quality in guitar playing.

Conclusion

Obviously, there’s a lot to being a good guitar player, but if you master these simple techniques, you will drastically increase your musical output. People will be more impressed in the actual sound of what you play and the deceptive simplicity of your playing abilities. You’ll also be more capable of playing a wider variety of styles with greater ease. When technique isn’t stopping you from learning a song, you’re one step closer to learning it without much practice!