Want to know why some people learn to get good at playing
guitar so fast? There has to be some secret that they are
using that is known to only a select few, right?
Well in my view you're right, there is a secret. There is a
secret that they know and use everyday that I thought you
would like to know. Well OK, I'll tell you, its practice
and lots of it.
Now OK, I know that's not what you wanted to hear but
before you move swiftly on to see if anyone else has the
magic pill, bear with me for a moment or two and I'll
explain what's going on here and how you can use it to
skyrocket your playing.
Let's go back to when you were a small child, when you were
just born in fact and look at an analogy that I think will
clear up a lot of frustration.
I liken learning to play guitar to learning to talk. Think
about it for a moment, when you were first born you
couldn't speak a single word. You could yell at the top of
your voice to let Mom or Dad know you needed feeding or
changing but that was about it.
What's more it didn't matter what language your parents
spoke, you couldn't speak it at that age. However, by the
time you were 5 years old you had mastered almost the
entire structure of your language and thousands of words
and phrases. It didn't matter whether that language was
Spanish, English, any of the Chinese dialects, Arabic,
Jewish or any of the hundreds of languages on Earth.
You developed that level of expertise by listening to your
parents and copying what they said and how they said it,
over and over again. In other words you practiced
constantly until you perfected speaking your mother tongue.
So practice is vitally important no matter what you try to
achieve. There is an old saying that practice makes perfect
and it is as true today as when it was first uttered. If we
look at some of the great guitar players we see that they
were just totally dedicated to getting as good at playing
the guitar as was humanly possible.
I once read that when Eric Clapton was a young boy he took
his guitar everywhere with him, he even practiced while
waiting for the bus! Tommy Emmanuel got his first guitar at
age 4 and practiced so well that by the age of 6 he was
touring with his family band, and by the age of 10 had
played his way across Australia.
Practicing is vital, but if we go back to our analogy we
see that we didn't learn to speak on our own. We didn't
have to figure out what language our parents spoke and set
about learning that by ourselves so we could talk to them.
We had lots of our own people around us to listen to, to
work on our speaking skills with and to encourage us to get
better.
Tommy Emmanuel had his family to play with. His mother
bought him his guitar at age 4 to accompany her while she
played steel lap guitar. He was playing in a band from the
start. All great musicians start playing with other musos
early on in their playing career.
It gives them encouragement to practice, interact with
other people and to get better. Today we are fortunate that
with all of the modern technology available we don't have
to miss out on this great experience of playing in a band
if we don't have any fellow musicians around, we can use
backing tracks.
Backing tracks are a great way to practice your skills with
a live band feel any time you get even a few minutes to
practice. They are basically tracks of music without the
lead guitar but recorded with the drums, bass, keyboards
and all the other instruments present in the original song.
Some tracks also have the rhythm guitar while others leave
it out to allow you to play rhythm yourself until you get
better at playing lead.
Practicing guitar on your own can be one of the most soul
destroying things you can do. Guitar backing tracks are the
modern secret to unlocking the potential inside every
guitarist who desires to take their skills to the next
level. This is because these backing tracks don't make
mistakes. They are there over and over again to provide you
with the support you need to try again to learn and master
new skills.
In many ways you feel that you don't want to let you new
band down which encourages you to try again when without
the band there you might just give up for today!
Guitar backing tracks can help you to grow in your ability
to improvise solo and lead work on stage. By having a
rhythm section behind you, with all the spots open for you
to solo, you can practice and work on experimenting with
improvisation and creating better and better solos. Being
able to improvise is an extremely important technique for a
guitarist to learn, and it takes a lot of practice. But
guitar backing tracks can help you to get the most out of
your practice time as well as make it much more fun.
The golden rule for practicing is to do at least 20 - 30
minutes every day. Practicing a little and often like this
is far better than going for an hour or 2 once a week. Once
you get used to working with backing tracks you'll find
that whenever you get a few minutes you can be playing with
a full band and not only getting a lot of pleasure but
improving your ability faster than ever.
----------------------------------------------------
Trevor Greenfield has been marketing online for over 10
years and playing guitar for many more years than he cares
to remember. Now he has finally found a way to combine both
of these passions with the launch of Guitar Members.
Visit http://www.guitarmembers.com and see for yourself how
Guitar Members can help skyrocket your guitar playing to
the next level.
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