There’s no better way to master a piece of music than to perform it. Practicing alone can only take you so far. Many people find that when they learn a new song, stubborn trouble spots persist even when everything else has become fluid. These might be very obvious things, like a difficult lick or chord […]
Core concepts 11: never stop looking for new options
If there’s a single lesson that might have the most impact on your guitar playing, it’s that you should never stop looking for new options. When we first start playing, nearly everyone learns the basic open chords. This is foundation stuff, and important to any style of music. But a significant percentage of people stop […]
Core Concepts 10: improvise and explore!
A confident player is unafraid to explore. People learn to play in two ways. One involves the guidance of a teacher or mentor, who leads the student one step at a time. The other involves exploration and experimentation: try this, try that, and see what happens. In last week’s Core Concepts we looked at the […]
Core Concepts 9: Know the rules, learn from the rulebreakers
There seems to be a hard philosophical split among musicians when it comes to “learning the rules”. “Rules” primarily fall into three categories. There are rules of music theory that explain why some notes work well together and some don’t. There are rules of technique – the right and wrong way to play. And then […]
Core Concepts 7: the best musicians have big ears.
“Big ears” means knowing how to listen, and what to listen for. All the practicing in the world won’t make you a good musician if you don’t develop your listening skills. The best players can play the right thing because the music suggests it. The specific parts each person plays are shaped by the other […]
Core Concepts 6: balance your practice time
Learning how to practice is one of the most important lessons you can learn as a musician. When you first learn to play, practicing is mostly repetition. To some extent, that’s always going to be true, and most great players spent many hours with their instrument when they were young and had all the time […]
