Make your own song

Rock guitarist needs to learn to play guitar fast. The technique is simple, it is a matter of left and right hand coordination which needs some time to perfect this technique.

The scope of this post is to learn the very basic techniques that allow guitarist to play guitar fast using “alternate picking” (by a guitar pick). Other guitar techniques such as “sweep picking” will be covered in the future post.

In details, left and right hand technique are illustrated as follows:

Right hand technique: (alternate picking)

Rules to play:
1. Use a guitar pick.
2. Play the first note with pick down stroke.
3. Play the 2nd note with pick up stroke.
4. Play all successive notes in up and down motion of pick (regardless of the string) (more…)

Playing live is great, you will be able to connect with your fans. Being a great performer live can give you a lot of income opportunities as a songwriter. You will earn a lot of performance royalties as well as CD/merchandise related sales. But for any singer-songwriter wanting to become big, I observed they lack mastery of their songs.

Mastery of the songs is necessary for successful live performance. A lot of singer-songwriters lack dedication to practice on a daily basis. This is very important because you will able to know your songs very well in detail. Lots of singer-songwriters nowadays play guitar in addition to singing vocals. (more…)

Acoustic guitar seems to be the songwriters most favorite instrument. As I say in my previous post and articles, it is because the acoustic guitar is very handy, light, cheap and requires no electricity to play. But the learning process is tough. The most likely reasons is when you do not know where to put the notes and what are the notes in the guitar.

To start with, acoustic guitar is simply a six string instrument. These six strings have notes, they are called OPEN NOTES, because of the fact that they can be played without pressing your fingers in the fret. It is extremely important you know the name of these open notes because it is one way to identify the rest of the notes in the acoustic guitar.

Another thing that is very important to remember, is that guitar scale is CHROMATIC. “Chromatic” means it is played half-increasing or decreasing. I suggest to read this lesson first regarding Theory about musical scales. The objective is to get to know “chromatic scales”.

Below is the close-up view of the acoustic guitar sound hole with the strings: (more…)

Playing and strumming guitar chords is hard for a beginner. As I suggest in the songwriting courses for buying guitars, it is recommended to buy the standard (full size) guitars. The reasons is for you to easily cope up the size of the guitar frets easily at the beginning of your practice. When you cope up the size, the more you can easily progress in the future practice and performance even though you are still young (and your hands is small).

The tricky part in playing guitars are the chords. Chords are very important for a songwriter/performer since all songwriting methods and performance are basically based on this technique. The harder part in the earliest stage are the hands and timing. Based on my experiences in playing with this instrument, below are my suggestions on how to cope up difficulty in playing chords for the 1st time (Assuming you have the acoustic guitar already)
Tip #1: Get a guitar chord book with figures and understand how to interpret it.
Tip #2: Practice one common chords at a time: Common chords are the ones that are easy and useful. Example are A,Bb,B,C,D,E,F,G,Am,Bm,C#m, Dm, Em, F#m,Gm.
Tip #3: Position your hands according to the chord book.
Tip #4: Make the whole chords sound without a break or muffled sound. This is done by strumming downwards 2 stroke with your right hands.
Tip #5: Remove your hands then position again your hands (same chord) then strum 2 strokes downward.
Tip #6: Do this until your hands are comfortable with the chord positions.
Tip #7: Change to another chords if you feel confident that you can now shift and position your hands in the fret without much effort.
Tip #8: After positioning all basic chords as mentioned above do basic strumming practice by doing a sample songs. (more…)