Video transcript:

Hey everybody, in this video I want to talk a bit about being interesting on the guitar. Not a subject people approach much, I know. That’s probably why so few musicians are interesting in their music. They are taught to play the same style that others have played and so only innovate a small amount at the most. So I want to talk to you about what to do to be interesting, and how to avoid the traps of commonplace music.

First of all, I would not recommend getting a teacher. When you limit yourself to a teacher, you learn to play just like your teacher. He or she shows you what they know and what they like, and your scope of knowledge isn’t broad. Instead, what I suggest is getting a guitar playing manual to teach you the fundamentals of playing. I have only ever used one, you can check it out here at this link. I’ll also put it in the description for you. You won’t have to spend a small fortune of private teachers which as getting expensive at 20-40$/hour, and you’ll be proud you taught yourself. It can take you from beginner to advanced guitarist. You don’t really need anything else except learning the correct way to practice, and actually practicing. So check it out.

Next, learn basic guitar theory as a basis for where to start. Music is not really as confusing as it appears to be. The problem with it is that it uses an arcane set of symbols that is not very easy to understand at first. We are stuck with it because so much music we have is written in the current method.

Music doesn’t exist on a page and in symbols and notation – it only exists in our heads and how we perceive it. It is purely psychological. It is like using the word ‘red’ to describe a color. The symbols we use are just an attempt to put to paper what we experience in our heads. Therefore, your feeling of what is right to play is more important than what you can write on paper.

But it is a good idea to learn music to be able to communicate with others about music. And rest assured, once you learn a bit about how it works, the rest will come easy. The manual I mentioned teaches you all of this, and scales and everything that you’ll need to know to play all popular music. Also, get yourself a map of the notes on the fretboard in standard tuning. I have placed a link to one in the description for you:

http://beginnersguitarlessons.net/fretboard.jpg

The strings are normally tuned to EADGBe, from thick to thin, and this is called standard tuning. What this does is change the lowest note each string plays, then each fret up is one semi-tone higher.

After you learn some basic theory and get yourself a map of all the notes, start playing them and seeing which sound good together, and which sound bad. Play two notes at the same time and see how they ring out. For example, if you play the 5th fret thick E string and the 5th fret A string at the same time, you are playing an A note on the E string and a D note on the A string (because you are holding down the frets at those notes). These notes sound good together because they are a certain distance apart – 5 semitones (this is an ‘interval’ and it is called the ‘perfect 4th’ – confusing, I know). Now, keep one finger on the 5th fret on the E string, but hold down the 6th fret on the A string. This interval is called the Tritone, and it is six semitones apart, which sounds what you might call ‘bad’. Of course, it has its musical uses. But due to its sound, it was actually outlawed by the Catholic Church in the middle ages because it was thought that the interval was evil. Pretty funny huh? It does sound evil, though.

Now to get to the point of all this:

What I want you to do is find out for yourself what sounds good together and what doesn’t, and create your own musical sound, rather than relying on something that already exists. Or at least, use something that already exists but alter it so that it is given new life. The idea behind music is to affect people emotionally in some way, and to surprise and excite them, never to bore them.

Don’t let musical standards get the best of you. Only learn songs if you are going to cover them and breathe new life into them (like, say, Jimi Henrix’s cover of All Along The Watchtower, originally by Bob Dylan. Both versions great songs in their own right, but different), and to practice your guitar technique.

Take Joni Mitchell as well. The reason why so much of her music sounds so unique is because she uses so many strange tunings and strange chords that people don’t usually use. She invented many of them herself. Bass players who would play with her wouldn’t know what to do, in many cases, because they were so focused on using standard scales. She would just tell them, ‘play what sounds good’.

There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ piece of music, because music is so subjective and people experience it in so many different ways, so don’t ever strive to play somebody else’s music ‘perfectly’.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about how to play guitar properly, how to learn the fastest way and how to ultimately become a very interesting guitarist, see this video as well with way more important tips all beginners should know.

Hope you really like the video, and cheers!

How To Play Guitar: If Nothing Else, Be Interesting. is a post from: Beginners Guitar Lessons

Video Transcript:

Hey everybody, what I want to talk about in this video is beginner’s frustration to learn guitar. I myself was given a guitar for Christmas when I was 16, but I didn’t start playing it more than once a week until 2 years after I had it. What a regret! I could have 2 more years of guitar playing under my belt right now and much more skill than I have now if I only started when I got it.

The problem was, that every time I picked it up I couldn’t stand that I sounded terrible, that I didn’t really know what to do, and that my fingers hurt after 5 minutes of playing.

One day I remember very clearly, though, around the time when I started to play more regularly. I heard the acoustic version of Layla by Eric Clapton play on the radio and I heard his intro solo. Immediately I looked up the tab and tried to learn it. I slowly started to play it, and over the course of a few days I knew all the notes, though my playing wasn’t great, of course. But in any case, I was pretty hooked – it sounded great to me. And I think that is what ultimately hooks all guitarists to the instrument. Just the sounds that you can be capable of producing. Playing the guitar can be comforting and exhilarating at the same time when you find the right music for yourself to play.

So the first tip – find something that you really want to play. For me it was the melody of Eric Clapton’s solo (in fact, I kept learning mostly solos when I started playing a lot – I didn’t know a full song for months and months after I started!) but for you, you might want to learn a song that you really love.

That solves the problem of sounding terrible.

For the problem of your fingers hurting, a great idea to form calluses quickly is to soak your hands in salt water for a while, then play a guitar hard. Lots of string bends and slides on an acoustic guitar will definitely build em fast. When your hands start to hurt, do not play any more. Let them heal. Otherwise, you risk getting blisters and you won’t be able to play for a long time.

As for the problem of not really knowing what to do, some good advice would be to get a guitar course that shows to the correct way to play. The only course that I ever used is at this link if you’d like to try it. You won’t have to pay tons of money for a private teacher which might cost you 20$/hour or so and you’ll be proud that you taught yourself – after all, you don’t need somebody else to teach you when you’re the only one learning. I’ll put the link in the description, as well. In the next video, which has a link at the top of the description, I talk a little more about it and also give you many more important tips like this. It is a longer video with many more important tips you should know so that you can learn guitar faster.

Hope you enjoyed the video and cheers!

Beginner’s Guitar – Getting past the learning curve fast and learning to love guitar. is a post from: Beginners Guitar Lessons

Video transcript:

Hey everybody in this video I want to talk to you about something that people have probably told you before when you learn guitar, but they might not have told you why you need to learn it. It’s something important, and I believe showing you how it works and why it is important will allow you to learn much better and help convince you to actually concentrate on it. Learning guitar simply has to do with two things – learning the correct methods to playing, and then practicing a lot – and that is pretty much it. If anybody tells you anything else they’re probably trying to scam you. If they tell you that you need to spend 20$/hour on a teacher that isn’t true either, because many of the greatest guitarists are self-taught, although it may work for some people who have lots of cash. In this video I want to talk about the mechanics of how your brain encodes tempo and how to keep tempo properly. After you watch this video you’ll understand why need to focus on keeping tempo and how you can learn to do it well.

If you want to know the correct methods to playing, I recommend this guitar course at this link here, you can go check it out if you want. It is a great way to learn guitar because it will take you from beginner to advanced guitarist. You’ll also be teaching yourself to learn, rather than wasting money on private lessons, which in my opinion also makes it less likely that you’ll get sick of it.

For now, let’s talk about keeping tempo in a way your brain understands.

Foot tapping is something you’ve probably heard people tell you before, in order to keep tempo. When you do this for the first time, it probably feels strange and is hard to do while you keep playing the notes or strumming. But practice this a lot, and try to place the notes onto the beat, instead of the other way around. Keep the beat as the base of the music and keep it constant, and them place the notes on top of it so that it sounds good and keeps in time.

The reason why this is important to practice is because music always has a beat (and the brain finds it stimulating that is has a constant beat, and often is irritated by it when the timing is even a little bit off), and you need to be able to keep the beat properly. It helps you to tap your foot because you have brain centers that control your movement, and coordinate it and in order to coordinate it, your brain centers need to be able to keep time. This timing is thought to occur within the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. They need to be able to move your muscles in the correct sequence, and with the precise correct timing in order to execute complicated muscular movements.

So moving a large part of your body in rhythm helps you to keep time, because you have brain centers that actually keep time for your muscles. So use your muscles to keep time, even if it just a head bob. Move a large part of your body to the beat, and it will seem much easier to keep it. Try the opposite and you’ll see what I mean – don’t move anything, even your eyes, and try to keep a beat. It will seem much harder and you will feel yourself ‘looking’ for the beat. You might start to rely on the beat of your heart. Cool, huh?

Anyway, if you want to learn more about how to play guitar properly, how to learn the fastest way and how to ultimately become a very interesting guitarist, see this next video I made as well with way more important tips all beginners should know. And if you want to learn the correct methods to playing the guitar that will take you from beginner to very advanced, check out the jamguitar.com link I mentioned earlier, it is a really great guitar manual. Take care and cheers!

How The Brain Keeps Tempo–Keep Time Easier is a post from: Beginners Guitar Lessons

Video transcript:

Hey everybody in this video I want to talk to you about something that you have probably never been taught before when it comes to learning guitar. It’s something that I think should underlie your entire guitar career though because it has to do with the fundamentals of learning to play. Learning guitar simply has to do with two things – learning the correct methods to playing, and then practicing a lot – and that is pretty much it. If anybody tells you anything else they’re probably trying to scam you. If they tell you that you need to spend 20$/hour on a teacher that is a lie too, because many of the greatest guitarists are self-taught, although it may work for some people if they have money to burn. In this video I want to talk about the mechanics of how your brain learns, to make practicing more efficient for you. After you watch this video you’ll be able to spend much less time learning because you’ll understand how you learn and the best way to learn.

If you want to know the correct methods to playing, I recommend this guitar course at this link here, you can go check it out if you want. It is a great way to learn guitar because it will take you from beginner to advanced guitarist. It will show you how to play simple songs and it will also show you how artists like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page and Tommy Emmanuel get the sounds out of their guitars that they do. You’ll also be teaching yourself to learn, rather than wasting money on private lessons, which in my opinion also makes it less likely that you’ll get sick of it.

For now, let’s talk about how you learn.

Guitar is all about imprinting your neural tissue with patterns that allow you to play guitar. When people who have played for a long time and are good at guitar play, they do not remember individual notes. For example, I know how to play the song Bron Yur Aur by Led Zeppelin. I only learned it once – and now it is imprinted in my muscle memory. When I play, I don’t think about the sheet music or tabs, I only just let my fingers play and make sure it ‘feels’ accurate and ‘looks’ correct when I am fretting. But I don’t really have a clue what I’m playing. I couldn’t just tell you what notes to play right now, without picking up a guitar and actually going through it slowly myself.

It comes automatically – it’s like my fingers know what to do somehow. Interesting thing that you’ll find – if you screw up or are interrupted at a point in a complicated song you’ve learned, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to resume from the exact same note you left off on. You’ll have to go to a major turning point or a point in the song you remember very well that your mind uses as a kind of reference point.

When you learn a song, your mind remembers it from certain reference points and then encodes the rest of the notes in relation to those already learned. This is how the brains of most people work. Unless you are some kind of autistic savant who can remember all the names in the phone book, your mind will have consciously at hand only the most important details, and you will not be able to access the rest of the information unless you use reference points that stimulate that point of your mind.

So the point of this whole discussion is to help you get to know your mind better and how you learn, so that you can learn to play much faster with better dexterity and timing.

What you should take from this is if you come to a point in a song where a chord change is hard for you or switching to another note quickly is hard for you, simply practice it over and over until your muscle memory encodes it. Practice just the change first, over and over, then practice it with the surrounding notes, over and over. Sometimes it might be very hard and you might get tired after too much practice, but don’t worry.

If you get tired of practicing the same thing, let your hands and your mind rest. You’ll come to notice something that happens after you rest – the next time you pick up the guitar, you’ll very likely be able to play what you were practicing much better than you ever could. That is because your brain encodes the muscle memory patterns you want it to, then after you rest your mind, you are able to use them more effectively.

So find something to practice that you can’t do very well, and then practice it like I’ve described above.

Really, all you need to make sure is that you’re practicing correctly, and then practice. That is the secret to becoming great at guitar.

If you want to learn how to practice correctly from a real pro source, I’d recommend that guitar course I mentioned earlier, because it is cheap and it can take you from beginner to pro guitarist… You won’t have to waste 20$/hour or more on a guitar teacher. Click the jamguitar.com link in the description if you want to see more about the course… If you want to learn more tips like I’ve given you in this video to get an even better start on learning the guitar, check out the video link at the top of the video description. In that video I also talk more about the guitar course I mentioned apart from some more important tips for beginners guitarists. So cheers, and good luck!

How Your Mind Learns Guitar – Use it to learn guitar faster! is a post from: Beginners Guitar Lessons

Music therapy has been around for many years. It is recognized as a tool for helping patients with emotional and behavioral problems like depression and ADHD. While the usual instruments used are the drums, cymbals, and other instruments that do not need too much instructions, the guitar is now being introduced as an option to consider. Learning to play guitar requires some finger dexterity, and this comes with limitations as to who can learn to play guitar. Nevertheless, allowing disabled children to handle the guitar is a start towards giving them new hope and opportunities.

One of the uses of easy guitar lessons for disabled children and senior citizens is as a motivational tool. For children with ADHD, they develop the drive to sit down for at least half an hour to strum a guitar. It gives them a chance to learn how to focus on making sounds, and eventually playing simple songs.

Senior citizens are also open to learning to play guitar, mainly because it is reminiscent of days when the guitar was a popular.

The beauty of learning to play a guitar is that by learning a few chords, you can create music. After learning the basics, which includes how to care for the guitar, there is a lot of freedom to play anything. Even just strumming the guitar can relax children and senior citizens easily.

Music appreciation through easy guitar lessons can also help children with autism or learning disabilities, as well as speech and emotional problems. Furthermore, by learning to play the guitar, the children and senior citizens have a unique opportunity to enhance their social skills.

In Manhattan, an innovative approach by the Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center uses music as a means for getting patients to release tension and anger. They believe that music can heal the spirit, just as medicines can heal the body. With music, they can connect with the rest of the world and the people around them.

With easy guitar lessons, children are taught how to follow schedules, and the need for practice. They also get a lot of free time to just play the instrument of their choice. Learning to play guitar is just one of the ways to draw out a child or a senior citizen, and make them feel important.

Here are some guidelines you can use in helping a child learning to play guitar:

1.    Keep the pace slow and repetitious. While you may find it boring and redundant, they won’t.
2.    Give prices or tokens as a reward system
3.    Insist on practice
4.    Give them a choice of songs to learn, making sure that the songs are appropriate for their level of playing
5.    Start a band with drums, guitars, and any other instruments you can think of
6.    Give them a chance to vocalize how they feel about the easy guitar lessons, and if they want to pursue the lessons or not
7.    Inject fun into every lesson

These are just a few of the things you can try if you have a disabled child or a child who has gone through emotional distress in his life recently. Music has a gentle way of healing broken spirits.

Easy Guitar Lessons For Disabled Children and Senior Citizens is a post from: Beginners Guitar Lessons