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Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

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Finding community, playing together.

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Music is a group experience, whether it’s a group of people playing together or an audience listening.

When we practice we get used to playing alone, and if you play for your own enjoyment you might not have even thought about playing for or with anyone. Some people never play for anyone’s ears than their own. Others might be experienced performers but never play with other musicians. In either case, something fundamental is missing.

There’s a tradition in Nashville called a “guitar pull”, in which songwriters pass a guitar around and play their songs for each other. Sometimes others might join in and play along, sometimes not. It’s not a performance: no fans, no stage. The players are the audience, and there’s no other purpose than sharing the songs. There’s certainly an element of trying out material to see what kind of response it gets, or just to see how it feels to sing the song when other people are listening. But it’s primarily a social occasion, and the getting together matters as much as the music. Of course, this particular tradition is specific to a particular place and a set of people with shared interests. You can find that for yourself.

 

You don’t have to have any particular aspirations to seek your own musical community.

It’s not even about the practical value of the experience, although there are real practical benefits. The greatest value is the way sharing music deepens your connection to the people you share it with, and to the music itself. A musical community also gives you reason to play and practice that goes beyond your own satisfaction, especially if you do play songs together. It’s a lot more motivating to be part of a team that’s relying on you, and the gratification you get from the shared success is much greater than the pressure of having to prepare for it. And this sense of shared success doesn’t even require playing together – just playing, together.

I host a monthly performance night at my space in Nashville, primarily but not exclusively for my students. It was intended to be a low-pressure opportunity to get some experience onstage, which in fact it is. But there’s another element I didn’t foresee. First of all, I hadn’t anticipated just how much even the very inexperienced would enjoy it! Even if they were so nervous their hands shook when they started to play, they would almost invariable come off stage elated and energized. One woman, who had never played for anyone in her life, told me after two performances that the feeling was addictive.

The most striking thing is that as people returned and got to know one other, a community started to form. They began to root for their peers, and applauded each other with genuine warmth. This has continued even as the event has grown. Even though some are far more accomplished than others, there’s never been a trace of competition and everyone is consistently encouraging across the board. The same thing happens in my group guitar classes.

 

This tends to happen any time people share music with each other, and it doesn’t have to be a formally organized event.

I’ve experienced the same feeling at gatherings of all kinds: a concert, a church picnic, a house party, and my own backyard. The fact is, almost everyone has had some kind of collective experience relating to music, whether it was being part of a crowd of thousands at a stadium concert or jamming with a good friend around a campfire.

It can be challenging to find the right musical community. But it’s important for your growth as a musician, and the enjoyment, motivation, and friendships that can come out of it can be priceless. You might be surprised how many places you can find people making music. Churches, community groups, neighborhood music schools, libraries, or the local coffeehouse all might offer some sort of opportunity. If you have friends that play, get together informally and play for each other. If you don’t, find an open mic somewhere. You can go and just hang out, you don’t even have to play. Find places where people play music, and then look for people that match your interests. Make friends and create your musical family.

What listening to new music can do for your playing

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Listening to new and unfamiliar music can really stimulate your playing, even if you don’t actually try to play it.

Many people only listen to music they already know. Sometimes it’s simply the comfort of the familiar, or nostalgia of some kind. And old song can be an old friend and a reminder of things past. When I was younger, listening to a song I loved was a rush. A good song was something to get lost in, and of course this is why most people stay so attached to the music they loved as teenagers. I’m no different, and I love music that brings me back. But that’s not always why I listen, and when I hear to music I used to love I tend to have one of two reactions. Sometimes I find that it doesn’t speak to me any more. I might appreciate what it was that attracted me then, but it doesn’t touch me now.

Often, though, I find new appreciation for the music. It’s exciting to hear details and nuances I wasn’t able to pick up on before. The rush of the new is gone, but in its place is a mature perspective on the songwriting, arranging, production, and the feeling and message itself. A craftsman’s admiration for good craftsmanship, and recognition of why my heroes spoke to me the way they did.

But I also listen to new music to put some new sounds in my ears.

This is what I’m finding myself doing right now. Some of it is new music in styles I know well, but a lot of it is challenging and different. I’ve always been open to new sounds, and when I was a student I tried to soak up everything I possibly could even if I didn’t understand it. New York City in the 1980’s had a thriving avant-garde music scene, and it was exciting to explore it no matter how weird things got. (And they got pretty weird). I may not listen to music like that very often, but it opened my ears and mind to sonic possibilities I never would have dreamed of.

Nowadays, I find that listening to more challenging music pushes me out of my familiar routines as a player, and that’s a very good thing. The fact is, if I get complacent I’ll start to get bored. You may have experienced this yourself -in fact, I’m sure you have. As with any other relationship, sometimes we need to shake things up to revitalize our feelings. And if we’re too comfortable, the music loses something important. The skills don’t suffer, in fact they might be better then they ever were. But if you’ve ever seen a favorite band later in their career and felt like something was missing, you know what I’m talking about. No matter how much I may still enjoy playing in familiar styles, I don’t want to lose the spark. That means making sure it doesn’t become mindless.

When we’re just learning to play or absorbing a new style, we want to get comfortable and be able to play without overthinking.

When we’ve fully absorbed a song (or style) we’re able to play it without thinking at all. But not using the conscious mind doesn’t mean being unconscious. The goal is to be un-SELF-conscious. We want our playing to be effortless, to achieve a flow state where the music just happens. We don’t want it to be automatic.

Listening to new music that makes you think can make you think differently when you play. New ideas create an expanded vocabulary and new sounds from your instrument. This is essential for growth. We practice so we don’t have to be at the edge of our ability all the time, but then reach a point where we need to push ourselves back to that edge. For an experienced player, that edge is way ahead of where it was early on, but that doesn’t matter. The thing that matters is that being on the edge stimulates growth and creativity. Being comfortable doesn’t open new doors, but willingness to be uncomfortable can lead to magic.

Every great step forward I’ve ever taken in my musical life has started with a blind leap.

Sometimes that leap means a challenging song or musical environment. And sometimes it’s as simple as putting on music you don’t fully understand just to see what’s going on. That doesn’t have to be a dramatic move. It doesn’t mean enduring something you really don’t like because it’s “good for you”. But it does mean recognizing that your musical vocabulary should always keep growing, and that reaching outside your comfort zone as a listener can do the same for you as a player.

The process doesn’t have to be conscious. There’s a lot to be said for copping licks: listening and imitating. Don’t rely on tabs, although you can use them as a reference. Use your own ears too. It’s a big part of how I learned and how I built my vocabulary. But we can absorb unconsciously just from listening. You might pick up other details than specific notes: details of phrasing, tone, and articulation. Even if you don’t imitate exactly what you heard, hearing someone else’s different approach might stimulate you to look for something different yourself.

Remember that sameness and stagnation are root causes of the perpetual beginner syndrome. Recognize when you’ve let yourself get too comfortable as a listener, not just a player. Sometimes all it takes to revitalize your growth is to open your ears.

Performing makes you a better player.

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Performing makes you a better player, even if you don’t have any interest in getting up in front of an audience.

The idea of people listening might just make you nervous. Even seasoned performers can still get the jitters before they walk on stage. Some suffer from stage fright through entire successful careers. But if you don’t see yourself as a performer, just the thought can be terrifying.

Other people hear your playing differently than you do, though. Most of us are far more critical of ourselves than any listener might be. It might feel like playing for an audience puts your performance under a microscope, but in fact you’re the only one looking through that lens. Every mistake is magnified, and every detail that didn’t come out the way you intended. Most of the time, though, you’re the only one who hears it. And in most situations, even the most obvious mistakes are more forgivable from the audience than from the stage.

Not every performance is American Idol or the Olympics.

Of course we want to do the best we can. But we’re so accustomed to watching top performers in a high-stakes environment that it’s easy to lose perspective. Those top performers got to where they are by holding themselves to a consistently high standard, but they still have to overcome fear of failure every time. As with many other things in life, the only way to conquer that fear is to fail.

At this point some of you might be saying, ok, but I’m not interested in being a performer. But your playing can really benefit from getting up in front of an audience, whether you have any long term desire to perform or not. Here are three big lessons you can learn from stepping out on a stage, even if you fall on your face.

1. Keep going, no matter what.

Every time you play a song, it’s a performance whether anyone’s listening or not. Begin at the beginning and hope to get to the end. When you’re practicing alone, you’ll probably stop and try to fix the mistakes as they happen. You can’t do that in front of an audience. The overall flow of the music is more important than any missteps along the way! But takes practice to be able to make a mistake and smoothly keep going without getting derailed by the error. You need to be able to make corrections if necessary, and stay on course when things go wrong. (No outfielder want to bobble a fly ball, but what really matters is that you get it to the first baseman in time). Having an audience gives you an imperative to keep going and make it to the end of the song.

2. You need to really know the music.

The all-important corollary to item 1. There are a thousand things that can go wrong in the midst of a performance, from mild distractions from the audience to outright obstacles like broken strings (or worse). You might not be able to hear yourself, or be blinded by stage lights, or forget the words. But none of that matters (again, see item 1).

When these distractions happen, you quickly realize whether or not you really know your music. If you haven’t absorbed it fully, it’s hard to keep going when something interrupts your concentration. But when you do know the music well enough to be able to pick it right up at any point, you’re able to go deeper into it. Your playing can become more expressive and subtle, the lyric more meaningful. This level of familiarity with the song should be a goal in itself.

3. The connection is meaningful.

Once you get past the nervousness enough to actually notice the people listening, something amazing happens. You perceive the music differently when you have an audience, because you start to hear it from the listener’s perspective. And when they feel something, you feel something back. A performance is actually an energetic loop: the energy that comes off the stage comes back from the audience and feeds the performance.

One reason songwriters perform at “writer’s nights” in Nashville is that a performance is a test of the song. Not just in terms of the overt audience reaction, but also in the experience of the performer. If there’s a part of the song that’s forced or unfinished, you can feel it when you hear through a listener’s ears. Some of this is pure self-consciousness and can be another distraction (see item 2). But when you’re sure of yourself you’ll be more able to convince the audience too. When you’re not, you’ll know there’s more work to do.

Most of all, playing for an audience is extremely gratifying and FUN! It makes playing music into a larger shared experience, and creates a connection between everyone in the room. On the largest scale that shared experience can include thousands of people. On even the smallest scale it can be intimate and meaningful.

I run a monthly performance night at my studio in Nashville for players and singers that aren’t yet comfortable getting onstage. When you’re just getting started, it’s intimidating to try to develop your skills onstage in a setting where the bar for talent and skill is so high. The event I host is an opportunity for beginning players and performers to get their feet wet, and the response has been amazing. The need for it was clear, but I didn’t expect just how much people would enjoy and appreciate the opportunity. It’s become one of the most enjoyable things I do here for that reason. If you’re in Nashville and think this is something you would enjoy, I encourage you to get in touch. But no matter where you are, I encourage you to find an opportunity for yourself. Start with an audience of one and build from there, the benefits and the satisfaction are the same. Then as you grow, your enjoyment will grow too.

What’s The Best Way To Learn To Play

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There’s no best way to learn to play an instrument, period.

And no right or wrong way, no matter what anyone might tell you.

I stumbled across a blog post the other day in which the writer took a quote I had given in an interview and used it – negatively – to make his point. I had made reference to peeking at books of sheet music in music stores when I was a teenager, and writing down the chords on my hand. The writer took this comment as an opportunity to suggest that this wasn’t the way to really learn, and that he suspected I eventually learned to just hear it myself. This happens to be true, but I was puzzled by the way he chose to make his point.

I have heard musicians with naturally gifted ears express disdain for others that studied formally, and “educated” musicians speak condescendingly about the self-taught. These are both equally useless perspectives, not to mention at least mildly and needlessly insulting.

People tend to develop a bias towards the method that worked for them. That’s fair enough, especially if there were methods that didn’t work. But everyone learns in their own way, and it’s shortsighted to dismiss any approach out of hand without considering whether you might benefit from it yourself. The best way to learn to play is to gather as much knowledge as you can from as many sources as you can. You still need to do the work yourself to put the pieces together, and this was our blogger’s point. But to suggest that all the different ways you could acquire those pieces don’t help is just plain silly.

Reading music

You don’t need to know how to read music. Your favorite musicians probably don’t, unless your favorite musicians are in the jazz or classical world. In popular music you’re more likely to read chord charts – essentially a general roadmap – than written notes. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in learning.

First of all, learning to read musical notation gives you a way to indicate rhythm. This is one of the great flaws of guitar tablature, which is otherwise a very useful shortcut. Tabs show you where to put your fingers, but not when it happens or which finger to use. Also, even chord charts will sometimes include rhythm figures even if they don’t indicate individual notes. If you’re going to learn anything at all about notation, learn to understand written rhythms.

Second, reading music gives you the means to explore thousands of method books, etudes, and exercises, thought out by master teachers and musicians over hundreds of years. My teachers go from J.S. Bach to John Coltrane to Jerry Garcia. I need my ears to use them all, but it’s a whole lot easier to follow something as complex as a Bach invention or a Coltrane improvisation when you have a reference.

Online Resources

Before the internet, you had three options when you wanted to learn a song. Find the sheet music (if it existed), find a teacher, or work it out by ear. Now, if I had to choose one method of learning above all the others it would be playing by ear. But even now with all my years of experience, I’ll take all the good supplemental resources I can get, and the internet is full of them.

YouTube is probably the most useful free resource, given that there are thousands – maybe millions – of guitar lessons on every subject imaginable. It’s also great to be able to reference live performance video when learning a song and actually see what a player is doing. This is really helpful for things like fingering and other subtleties of technique.

When you use YouTube, though, don’t just take one person’s word for it (including mine). Watch several lessons on the same song. It’s valuable to get several different perspectives. The notes of the song are what they are, but interpretations are still subjective. Besides, one person’s way of teaching might illuminate something that another doesn’t.

The same caveat goes for tab and chord sites like UltimateGuitar and Songsterr. (There are many others, but these two are my go-tos). Often there are multiple versions of a tab, and you should always look ar more than one. First of all, some will just be plain wrong. Others might simplify a song more than you might like to. Most often there will be subtle variations between one and another. Just as with YouTube, it’s worth getting different perspectives.

Formal video lesson sites like JamPlay and TrueFire can also be very helpful. (Disclaimer, I’ve been a contributor to JamPlay for several years and have seven courses on the platform). These are subscription-based services in which a membership buys you access to their video library. The courses are often structured sequences taught by professional instructors. Others are taught by artists you know, some of whom are excellent teachers. Some are not, but even so it’s nice to watch a player you admire up close with multiple camera angles and included tabs.

Private Lessons

Private lessons help keep you accountable in a way that working on your own can’t. A teacher can help you set specific goals, make a plan to reach them, and keep you moving along the way. In some instances, a single lesson can have a great impact on your playing. However, no teacher can move you forward if don’t do the work.

Think of your teacher the way you would an athletic trainer or physical therapist. The work you do in the sessions is important, but the work you do outside the sessions really determines how much you get out of them. Sometimes just having someone to “work out” with once a week is a goal in itself, and that’s ok. You can absorb a lot in a single interaction. If it maintains a connection to playing music and gives you some gratification besides, that’s great. But you’ll see the greatest improvement in your playing if you commit to a practice schedule along with your lesson schedule. Work with your teacher to determine what a reasonable workload is for you, and stick to the plan.

Playing By Ear

Learning to play is not an either-or proposition, and choosing to focus on one approach doesn’t mean you can’t also incorporate another. My most successful students all learn new music on their own outside of their lessons. They might do this by working from tabs, or watching YouTube videos, or reading sheet music. But all of these methods need to incorporate another approach to really work: listening.

Learning “by ear” is simply listening to music and trying to duplicate the sounds on your instrument. At first, it’s pure trial and error. But that trial and error process helps to train your musical ear: your ability to differentiate between sounds and recognize specific relationships. Over time, you can build up a vocabulary of sounds that are familiar when you hear them. After a while, you won’t even need an instrument to know how to play some songs, because the patterns you hear will tell you what to play.

Ultimately, playing music is ALL about pattern recognition. Yes, there’s a visual aspect in that you place your hands in specific positions on the guitar neck. But what “playing by ear” really means is that you start to connect the patterns you hear with the patterns you see. This is the way naturally gifted musicians learn to play. Some people can intuitively make the connections, while others need to learn how.

Again, this is not an either-or proposition. You can have a good natural ear and still have to learn about what you’re hearing in order to really develop it. Most people fall somewhere in the wide middle between musical savant and tone-deaf, and even the “tone-deaf” can learn to play. Start listening critically when you learn a song. Ask yourself what you hear. Do you hear single notes or chords? High pitched or low? Can you hear when the chords change? Can you differentiate between the instruments? Odds are, when you start listening for these things you’ll start to hear them.

The bottom line is, there’s no “best” way to learn to play. But there are lots of methods you can use, and while you might resonate more with one then another there’s something to be gained from them all.

Walking the walk

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I’m writing this on New Year’s Day 2018…

…and like so many of us I’m taking the opportunity to think about what I can do better. I spend so much of each day giving advice, and I believe in what I’m saying. All the positive feedback I’m getting reinforces that belief, along with the results so many of my students are seeing. But I don’t want to be the proverbial shoemaker whose kids go barefoot.

I had a very productive and satisfying year in 2017, meeting many of the goals I set for myself. I’m going into this new year with a renewed sense of confidence in what I’m capable of. It’s a good feeling to have, especially because I’ve written a lot over the past year about the role of confidence in creating accomplishment and the role of accomplishment in creating confidence. You gotta walk the walk, as the saying goes.

But if there’s one thing I really feel I could do more, it’s…wait for it…practice.

I spend a lot of time working on music. Learning or arranging songs for shows or for lessons. Finding something new to appreciate in songs I’ve known for years, even just to learn the song for the pleasure of it. I need to acknowledge my JamPlay audience for their role in this part…so many of our open Q&A sessions are explorations of songs that I thought were familiar but had more layers to uncover. I almost feel bad about not spending as much time as I used to listening to new music, because I’m enjoying this process of rediscovery so much. So that’s part of an ongoing learning process, and something I wholeheartedly encourage you to do as well.

When it comes to practicing, it’s as hard for me to make the time as it probably is for you.

I’ve become a very accomplished player over the past 36 years, but there’s so much more for me to learn. I’m feeling a personal need to spend some time going back to the drawing board. I haven’t worked seriously on classical guitar music in a long time, and my interest has been getting steadily stronger over the past year. So this is something I want to recommit myself to, even if it only means fifteen minutes a day while I’m having my coffee in the morning. Now that I’m saying this publicly, of course, I have all of you to keep me accountable…so look for more classical performance videos to follow. It doesn’t have much bearing on my musical day-to-day, and may not for yours either. But I want to set the example myself, again…to walk the walk.

I also want to write another record’s worth of instrumental pieces for electric guitar. My Flying CD, released in 2004, was a very gratifying project and I grew a lot as a player making it. It’s time for me to get back into my own beginner’s mind and see where that creativity leads.

I think it’s important for our continued personal growth to work at a challenge for the sake of the challenge.

The added focus and mental sharpness that requires is its own reward and has its own benefits. So there’s really no such thing as wasted effort. But in the end, what this comes down to is my desire to make beautiful sounds on the guitar – ugly ones too, when it fits the mood! And I want to continue to become a better guitarist and more complete and fulfilled person in the process.

Thank you for walking this path with me, and know that I’m recommitting myself to making sure I’m moving forward along with you. Here’s to a productive and fulfilling new year.

The Perpetual Beginner: 5 tips for smoother playing

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Many guitar students come to lessons with the same basic problems. They’re problems that aren’t hard to solve, but are easy to miss. You might be mostly self-taught, or maybe you’ve had lessons that weren’t as effective as they could have been. Some people have just had bad advice. But in every case, there are a few simple things than can make a real difference in a very short time.

The heart of the problem is that playing guitar can be awkward at first. You have to feel natural with the guitar in your hands, and that usually takes time. Some people are immediately comfortable; these are generally the ones with the most natural aptitude. Others get adapt but eventually hit a roadblock. And some just continue to struggle.

Not a “right” way, but a better way.

If you pay attention to the way different players approach the guitar, you’ll see lots of different approaches. So I don’t like to say that there’s a right way and a wrong way. For every example of someone that plays with the “right” technique, there might be two that don’t. The body is very adaptable, and lots of people develop approaches on their own that work. But our bodies are also mechanical, and all mechanisms have a way to operate with maximum efficiently. So if we’re going to set a standard for technique, efficiency is an excellent measure.

Inefficient technique breaks down into several main categories. If you fall into any of these five traps, addressing them can make your playing much more fluid.

1. Too much tension

Tension in the hand, wrist, arm, neck, and shoulder can all limit your ability to move freely. The most common tension traps are the base of the fretting hand thumb, inside of the forearm, and the shoulder of your picking hand. One limits the free movement of the fingers, and the other two limit the free movement of the arm. All three will keep you from playing smoothly and accurately.

2. Too much grip.

Many of people habitually grip the neck too hard. Some have been told they’re supposed to. If it takes a lot of effort to hold the notes down, there might be too much tension on the strings. This can create tension in the hand as you work harder to compensate.

Sometimes this is because the action is higher than it should be, or the strings might be too heavy. Having the guitar adjusted or switching to lighter strings can help a lot. Some players choose heavier strings and higher action in order to produce a bigger sound, but that’s a choice for a more experienced player. When your guitar is set up for optimum playability, it shouldn’t take much work to make a note sound.

If the guitar is set up properly and you’re still having trouble getting notes to sound clearly, we need to look at item number 3.

3. Too much bend in the wrist, or not enough in the fingers.

A relaxed and efficient hand position is easy to find, it’s the way we’re made! Hold your hand out in front of you with the thumb on top and let it relax. Odds are, your fingers will curl slightly. To make a fist, you would just bring the fingers into the palm. This open, relaxed form is essentially the way your fretting hand should look on the strings. The neck of the guitar sits between the thumb and fingers, but the basic position should be similar: straight wrist, curled fingers. To reach different formations you sometimes will need to drop the wrist or extend the fingers (or both), but these are variations on the basic form. A straight wrist gives you more leverage and therefore holds the strings down more efficiently.
The same goes for curled fingers. The fingertip will generally hold the string down more efficiently on the treble side (thinner strings). Reaching the bass strings can require a little more extension. As a rule, drop the wrist and extend the fingers when you need to make a reach. This is much more efficient than trying to stretch curled fingers apart.

4. The thumb thing.

Lots of people get hung up on the position of the fret hand thumb. Many teachers will misguidedly insist that the thumb needs to stay behind the neck and not creep over the top. If you’re holding the guitar in the traditional position with the neck elevated at an angle, this will take care of itself. There are times this will be the right thing to do; classical and jazz guitarists generally hold the instrument this way. Some electric guitars balance this way naturally, others don’t. We often hold both acoustic and electric guitars with the neck closer to straight, or only slightly elevated. This will naturally put the tip of the thumb above the top of the neck. Artificially trying to hold the thumb down will force you to bend the wrist more dramatically, sacrificing strength and creating tension. The position of your wrist is the most important factor: the position of your thumb is a by-product.

Do expect your wrist to move, it should be flexible! You will need to bend it to reach some chords or to make an extended stretch. Sometimes turning slightly to one side or the other will make it easier to place the fingers. But locking the thumb to keep it below the top of the neck will absolutely limit your ability to move freely.

5. Too much movement (or not enough)

Playing well requires the ability to consistently hit a target. If your fingers fly away from the fretboard, you’re wasting energy and moving AWAY from your target. Keep the fretting hand relaxed and the fingers floating over the strings. That way you’re never far from the next note you need to hit.

When it comes to strumming, you do want to be able to swing the arm in a fairly wide arc to produce the optimum amount of sound. (This, of course, requires a relaxed arm!) Faster strumming demands a smaller arc, covering less distance and moving more from the wrist than the arm. (Ditto). Smooth picking on single notes requires very little movement at all…consider how thin the pick and string really are! Think of single-note picking with a flatpick as a movement of the thumb: dip and return. The wrist should follow smoothly, but if your pick is moving past the next string you’re moving too much. This is essential for building any kind of speed or facility with the pick.

 

All of these points follow the same basic concept: relaxed playing starts with a natural, relaxed position of the body. We often find ourselves bending our bodies around the guitar in an effort to see what we’re doing, make a reach, or press harder. The intense focus on where your fingers land makes it very easy to lose track of the rest of your body. If you start by identifying these five traps, you can start developing a sense of whole-body awareness. This is what makes great players look effortless, and will make your playing much more smooth and confident.