Have you ever had a conversation with someone who habitually slurs their words, skips over syllables, or is otherwise hard to follow because of their lack of articulation? Did you find it took quite a bit of effort to try and understand this person? Was it an enjoyable experience? It very likely wasn’t! It’s the [...]
October 18, 2010
I have written a guest post on wrist position for the excellent blog, Not Playing Guitar. There seems to be some confusion about the wrist position of your fretting hand, and in this post I try to explain that a straight wrist is best. The link is here: How Should You Keep Your Wrist: Straight [...]
October 13, 2010
A huge aspect of guitar mastery is the proper use of dynamics. Dynamics can add a great deal to your ability to move the audience, sometimes literally: play something soft and gentle to draw people in, or play something loud and brash to get people jumping up and down in excitement. The essence of creating [...]
September 15, 2010
This is the — for now — final post in the Slash guitar lesson series of articles at The Lone Guitarist. It is a guest post by Dr. Matt Warnock of Guitar International Magazine. I often have students and players come to me asking about which books they should buy in order to learn how [...]
August 31, 2010
When you first start out on the guitar you will have a hard time putting your fingers on the appropriate strings — especially while fretting chords. You place one finger on one string, so far so good. Then you place another finger on another string, but in doing so the first finger you placed wants [...]
August 9, 2010
Many years ago I saw this programme on tv. It was about a boy aged 10 who played the drums, and he was going to meet his favourite percussionist. The percussionist was renowned back in his native India for these amazing enthralling rhythms he played on this fairly unorthodox drumkit. He travelled the world to [...]
August 9, 2010
One of the key factors to playing fast is relaxation, as I discussed in my post, “Building finger speed: Relaxation”. Your fingers, wrists and arms need to be loose. Tense muscles are rigid, and rigid muscles are hard to move, let alone move fast. But relaxation alone is not going to enable you to play [...]
October 20, 2010