GUITARHABITS

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The Eight Amazing Spider Exercises for Dexterity

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The spider exercises are one of my favorites. The spider is a cross string picking exercise that is designed to develop dexterity in both hands.

If you’re having trouble with either your right hand or left hand coordination and you want to see real improvement then these are the perfect exercises.

Do you think your hand coordination is superb then try the exercises below to confirm your assumptions or go back to your room to practice some more. :)

Depending on your skills the spider is not exactly for the faint hearted. It can be quite challenging but careful once you get the hang of it, it’s a really addicting exercise that won’t get rid of you.

How to practice
Start out slow, real slow and play through each exercise a couple of times until it feels comfortable. Once you can play the exercises slowly without faltering try playing along with a metronome. Again begin real slowly and gradually increase the tempo of the metronome.

Pay attention to the quality of the exercise. Make sure all the notes sound clean and clear. Apply alternate picking technique with your right hand (down,up,down,up).

Focus fully on the exercise. Observe your left and right hand while playing and see if there’s anything that needs to be corrected or improved. The slightest change can make a huge difference.Continue Reading

The Importance and Value of Learning Lead Guitar Solos

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When I first started playing electric guitar (4 years after I picked up the acoustic guitar) all I wanted to do is learn those almighty guitar solos of Slash, Nuno Bettencourt, Joe Satriani, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Scott Henderson, Marty Friedman, Kirk Hammet, Dimebag Darrel and other great legends.

It was the best thing ever. Unawarely I built my guitar vocabulary like that.

After a while fellow musicians, guitar teachers and guitar players from around town that I looked up to were advising me to develop my own style and learn to improvise. It was the obvious next step to becoming a better guitar player.

I practiced scales, sequences, licks, arpeggios, intervals, just about anything I could get my hands on and continued to work on my improvisation skills. Freedom on the fretboard at last.

Then I started playing in bands doing covers, creating and performing my own music. Playing some more and more and more. Time went by and I gained a lot of gigging experience, developed my own style, learned a lot of new things, but on the other side I also stopped building and expanding my guitar vocabulary.

Years later I got back into transcribing and practicing solos by other guitar heros that found my interest. It was refreshing, inspiring and opened up new worlds. It took my soloing to other places and improved my playing once again.

To gain input and keep educating yourself you got to keep practicing, studying and memorizing guitar solos regularly. It’s like reading a new book or watching a brilliant movie to fuel your inspiration.

Besides that there are also other important reasons and benefits to learning lead guitar solos.

Check them out:Continue Reading

How to Build an Awesome Repertoire

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Building, learning and mastering a repertoire is part of being a musician. It’s your chance to show who you are as a musician.

It’s a great feeling to be prepared and feel confident whenever someone asks you to play something, to perform spontaneously in front an audience because you know you can or just to be able to play a bunch of songs when you’re relaxing at home, on the beach, on a holiday or when you’re hanging out with family and friends without having to rely on your sheet music.

You will feel free and liberated.

Building a repertoire when you’re playing in a band can be a fun challenge too.

Depending on the number of musicians, what kind of musicians and instruments in the band (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, male vocal, female vocal, bass, drummer, keyboard, trumpet, violin, cello, accordeon, steel guitar, etc.) they will definitely influence the choice of songs and the styles you pick for your repertoire.

For every instrument so many ideas come to mind. Such a pleasure :)

So how do you go about building your own repertoire?

Let’s take a closer look.

Picking the right songs
Take out a paper and pencil or a laptop if you prefer. Choose songs you love and songs that are appealing to the audience. It’s likely that the songs you choose will remain on your repertoire for quite a while so choose wisely. If you’re playing covers and you want to play songs that do well by a large number of people then songs by the Beatles or Eagles or always a good pick. Of course it also depends on the style of music you play, the average age of your audience and where your show is located. Continue Reading

8 Most Important Open Guitar Chords For Beginners

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The Most Important Open Chords for Beginners

Where do you start when you want to learn to play guitar? Well, the first thing you want to do is learn ‘open chords’, a basic strumming pattern and then start practicing some beginner songs.

The chords are the building blocks for your songs, they give you the harmony. The strumming delivers the rhythm and together they are the accompaniment for your or someone else’s singing voice which in turn provides the melody.

The 8 most important chords every beginner guitar player should learn first are: C – A – G – E – D – Am – Em – Dm. (you can memorize the first 5 open major chords by the word CAGED)

Songs with Beginner Chords

With these simple chords alone you can play an endless amount of easy songs. For example there are about a million songs that use this chord progression: G – D – Em – C (also called the I – V – vi – IV progression).

Songs like “I’m yours” by Jason Mraz, “With or without you” by U2 and “She will be loved” by Maroon 5 can all be played with just these 4 chords. Not all of these songs are originally in the key of G but you could easily fix that with the help of a capo and play it in the appropriate key.

The open chords are also the starting point and components for the more advanced chords that follow like barre chords. All barre chords are derived from open chords. If you’re interested check out The Four Most Essentiall Barre Chords. 

How to Play The Beginner Guitar Chords

In the video lesson below I’m going to show you how to play each chord correctly step by step and how and where to put your fingers on the strings.

Continue Reading