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Beginner Guitar Lessons – The Top 3 Mistakes Made When Learning The Guitar

By Mike Hayes | May 7, 2009

Guitar playing is simple really, it’s like fixing a tyre. There’s
a certain number of A, B, C type things that have to be done
in a certain order.

When it really comes down to it …those who know how to do these
basic steps are able to play really well and those who don’t know
(a) what the steps are and (b) how to do them, generally don’t
ever get to play beyond a very basic performance level.

I’ve identified three of the most common and potentially
hazardous mistakes guitarist’s need to overcome if they want to
play the guitar at a professional level.

1. Information overload – the problem has changed from lack of
information to too much information.

Today’s guitar student is confronted with an endless avalanche
of information coming at them twenty-four hours a day seven days
a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year.

It’s essential for the serious guitarist to understand how to
break everything down into tiny bit-size pieces. Let’s take a look
at a typical example.

When you are confronted with a page of new music that you want to learn it’s important to keep in mind that the very best players only learn four to six notes at a time.

The idea is to train your nervous system to play these small
number of notes as well as you possibly can, and then proceed to
learn the next six and perform them just as well as the
proceeding notes.

2. Playing out of time – if we were to break music down into it’s
most basic components we could describe music as “pitch in time”.

In recent years many new players have come to guitar and music
playing via the rather dubious route of guitar TAB which
unfortunately only addresses the “pitch” aspect of music.

This explains why it is so difficult to get two guitarists to be
able to perform together, the problem is both players are
blissfully unaware of the rhythm aspect of music.

Fortunately the problem can be overcome by (a) learning to read
standard music notation where pitch and time are treated equally
and (b) practicing with a metronome.

There’s and excellent free metronome called the “Tempo Perfect metronome” available from NCH Swift Sound. It’s very musician friendly!

3. Trying to play too fast – it’s human nature to try and play as
fast as possible unfortunately many players do not understand
that true speed comes as a by-product of accuracy.

Don’t train yourself to make mistakes!

Far too often a guitarist will play a scale or musical phrase
beyond their level of technical ability, resulting in a sloppy
series of note which if not corrected becomes the accepted level
of performance.

The first mistake should be a warning! Remember, your hands are
not the thinking part of your body they are the “doing” part.

Your hands and fingers will continue to perform whatever they
have been trained to do, so be very careful how you are training
you hands.

Typically the problem is that we hear the particular musical
piece at performance level after many hours of practice usually
by professional musicians.

The trick is to be able to slow down the musical piece to a tempo
where the student can play along with the band without making any
mistakes. Eventually, the tempo can be slow brought up to speed,
but never at the expense of accuracy.

The “Guitar and Drum Trainer v4″ distributed by “renegademinds”
is ideal for this application as the sound quality does not
deteriorate when the tempo is slowed down.

While the subject of music is endless playing the guitar is
relatively straight forward. I invite you to use these tips and
tools when you play the guitar.

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

http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
http://AdvancingGuitaristProgram.com

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