One of my favourite books to read at the moment is a book named ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear. It is an awesome, practical and effective guide on how to establish a habit and more importantly how to stick to that habit in the long term. 

In this article, we’re going to see how we can use the habit-forming techniques discussed in ‘Atomic Habits’ to make your guitar practice sessions super fun, satisfying and easy so that you want to do it every single day. 

Make It Easy

Firstly, we need to reduce the amount of friction associated with the activity of guitar practice. If getting your guitar out to practice is a long and arduous task, you are way more likely to swap guitar practice for re-runs of Friends because the former requires way too much effort to do.

How do we make guitar practice easy?

One of the most effective things you can do is to invest in a guitar stand. Get your guitar out, place it on the guitar stand and situate it in the most frequently visited room of the house (and I don’t mean the toilet). 

I recommend placing your guitar in the corner of the lounge room or dining area. Firstly, guitars on guitar stands look amazing *chefs kiss* and will add to your lounge room decor very nicely, but the main reason why we do this is that it makes it super easy to grab your guitar throughout the day and also makes it easy to set up your guitar when it comes time to practice.

Here are some extra tips on how to make guitar practice super easy: 

• Keep the guitar tuner attached to the headstock of the guitar so it’s ready to go 
• Buy a pick holder that attaches to your guitar, ensuring that you don’t have to search around the house for a pick
• Invest in a music stand to hold your songs at eye level 
• Use a music folder to organise your loose sheets of guitar music
• Use a stable chair that doesn’t have armrests for best results and guitar-playing posture
• If you have an iPad, you can make looking up songs and building your song list even easier by getting a TAB library app like Songsterr (absolutely free for the basic version)

Employ the 2-minute rule

You may know that to establish a long-term habit, the most important thing you can do is to be consistent. Easier said than done right? Life happens and before you know it, you haven’t played guitar for 2 weeks and you’re deep into the ‘Funny Cat video’ rabbit hole on Youtube instead of playing your favourite songs on your Fender Telecaster.

Well, the 2-minute rule makes it easy to be consistent.
In the initial stages of developing your guitar practice habit (1 or 2 weeks), you need to practice guitar for only 2 minutes per day. Yes, that’s right! 2 minutes. After you’ve completed the 2 minute practice session for the day, you celebrate it as a win and mark it as a successful guitar practice on your calendar or habit tracker.

I know it sounds crazy but there are a few reasons why this 2-minute rule is super effective. Everyone has 2 minutes of time in their schedule, and by initially reducing guitar practice to 2 minutes, it makes it so easy to consistently practice guitar. 

Obviously, you won’t make heaps of progress by doing only 2 minutes of practice every day but that isn’t the point. The point is to consistently practice guitar every day and prove to yourself that you are a committed guitarist who puts in the effort to practice. By making that identity change from hobby guitarist to committed guitarist who is always improving and learning new skills, you are way more likely to stick with guitar playing long term. 

Once you’ve completed the first week of 2-minute practice sessions, you can now increase it to 5-minute practice or 10-minute practice and increase it further. However, if you find yourself missing a couple of days of practice in a row, decrease the practice session time until you are practising on a daily basis again. 

Attend regular Guitar Lessons (Accountability)

The final thing we can do to improve our excitement to practice guitar is to get an accountability partner. This partner could be in the form of another guitarist friend or a guitar teacher. If your local guitar teacher offers group lessons, you have access to both super-effective forms of accountability! 

A lot of aspiring guitarists try to learn on YouTube and they show some initial progress but that excitement and progress can fade over time without that positive push of accountability and social connection. By attending regular group guitar lessons, you will be challenged and excited to complete songs to show your classmates and pushed to learn guitar skills every week. 

In addition to this accountability, your guitar teacher will help fast-track your progress on the guitar. It is easy to lose your way when you’re learning the guitar. There will inevitably be roadblocks and mental barriers that you will find challenging along your guitar learning journey. By attending regular guitar lessons, your experienced guitar teacher will have seen others struggle with challenges just like yours and will be able to guide you through these problems. A problem that you’ve been struggling with for 4 months can be solved within 10 minutes by an experienced guitar teacher!

Practising the guitar is such a big part of the puzzle when it comes to becoming a great guitarist. These 3 strategies have really helped me in my guitar-learning journey and I hope they help you too!

If you want to learn more about guitar practice check out the free guitar practice articles on the Melbourne Guitar Academy blog

Special Guest Author – Alex Stroud

Alex Stroud is a popular, kids guitar teacher from Brisbane, QLD. He specialises in teaching fun and engaging guitar lessons to kids and teenagers and is passionate about developing children into life-long guitar players. If you’re looking for guitar lessons in Rochedale, you can book a free trial guitar lesson with him here.

Alex is also a member of Guitar Ninjas a guitar curriculum for kids that gamifies the approach to learning and makes guitar lessons fun and engaging for

The post How to Make Practising the Guitar Fun and Easy appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.

If you are aiming to be a great guitar player, a solo guitarist, or even start writing your own licks, learning the guitar chords is a vital first step. Using chords while playing your guitar or essentially playing a solo means you play both practically and theoretically. “Chord” refers to a combination of three or more notes played together by strumming your guitar strings. Reading the below, you’ll see that playing lead harmony over chords is crucial than you may realize. 

 

How will learning chords help you?

-To understand the songs better

-To improvise the music

-Helps you memorize arpeggios better

-And also to compose your own songs/solos

 

Soloing is a direct spotlight moment, and there are certain lead techniques and theories to follow in order to capture the attention of the audience leaving an everlasting impression. 

Applying scales over single chords – most logical start..

Scales & chords are built from tones & intervals. By knowing the intervals, you can balance the chord with a scale that uses the same tones. Before we head to the theory, let me start by listing you down a few important tips that may come in handy when you work hard towards mastering your solo skills.

• Key of your solo

Solo is a musical conversation. During a conversation, you don’t usually barge in and start a whole different topic all of a sudden, and even if you do, the chances are that it would be a distraction to the actual topic breaking the concentration of the listeners. Soloing is somewhat the same. You need a good structure for your solo. For which, before anything else, you need to identify a root/bass note to establish the key of your solo. This is defined by the root note of that chord, which in turn becomes the root note of any scale you might use. It’s also called the “bass note” and is often the lowest note in the chord, commonly the low E, A, or D string on your guitar.

• Identify basic (triad) chord type

There are four basic qualities of triads and they are; major (1-3-5), minor (1-♭3-5), diminished (1-♭3-♭5), and augmented (1-3-♯5). 

• Intervals

Your solo can be made more interesting by adding sufficient intervals. Pausing here and there will give the audience a break to capture it better. Don’t fear the silence in between.

• Recurring theme

A recurring theme will help you to tie everything in your solo and whole performance together, giving it a cohesive feel. 

• Playing over chord changes

You should be changing your notes in your solo to match the chords in your song. 

The Theory;

 

The base of your soloing techniques consists of bends, legato, speed, timing, etc. The easiest way to play your guitar solo using chords and over chord changes is by visualizing the chord progression in the form of chord shapes. 

 

Let’s start by using the E and A form barre chord shapes;

 

“E form” major chord 

You should be confident in the major and minor triads in any key. Locate each chord in the progression.

Note:  When selecting your chord shapes, try and choose the ones that are close to the previous and next chords.

Chord in the progression: Ex: Amaj / Emaj / Bm / Dmaj

 

Once you have successfully identified your chord shapes/tones, you may start playing chords in progression one chord tone at a time. 

Ex: For Abmaj- play either the root, 3rd, or 5th of that chord. play the root 3rd or 5th of the chord that changes, etc. You can also use your 7th chord shapes (e.g. Cmaj7, C7, Cm7) as a tone if you know that already. 

 

Minor keys

 

Use the same process, find the chord tones using E and A chord shapes, and continue playing through one note per chord. If you know your notes across the fretboard and the basics, this wouldn’t be complicated. 

 

It’s highly recommended that you stick to the basics and practice until you remember the shapes and you can conveniently distinguish the tones and chord progressions, before moving on to any of the chord extensions (advanced level). 

 

Tension & Resolution

 

A good solo contains tension & resolution. During your solo play, there could be a lot of tension that gets resolved to achieve the final resolution at the end. The strongest resolution of all is created by playing the root of the key over the key-chord. 

 

Pentatonic scale 

 

Pentatonic scales are about the easiest scales to learn and are very versatile. They come in two tonalities; Minor & Major. 

 

Using the Pentatonic scale to solo over a song;

The root on the Pentatonic minor scale is the first note on the 6th string. 

For instance, the 6th string-5th fret is an A. Use your index finger on this fret to start a Pentatonic minor. If you want to move this to A major, just slide your hand up the fretboard towards the nut, so your pinky finger is now playing the 6th string-5th fret. Your index finger is now on the 6th string 2nd fret. This is not the beginning of the A major Pentatonic. Your pinky finger on the A on the 6th string 5th fret is the first note. Now, play the same Pentatonic pattern for A major.

 

Repeat!

 

You can choose your favorite songs to solo over, using the easy Pentatonic scale and practice over and over again. This is not only fun, but it will also practice your hands and mind to the chord shapes and patterns and will make you start performing already. Along the way, you can start learning other patterns and extensions as well, and don’t forget to record your progress at each step. Eventually, before too long, you will start surprising yourself with amazing soloing skills in you which you are starting to master from now onwards. 

 

Bonus Tips:

• Your guitar solo must be the highlight of the song. Make it memorable!
• Consider intervals and silence in between. Play when you breath-out and stop when you breath-in. The most basic pattern goes with any style. 
• Play less in the beginning and as your solo progresses, add your best licks. Give it a dynamic lift making your solo the hero of the song. 
• Consider your guitar & guitar tone. Ex: a clean sound wouldn’t go well for heavy metal tracks. 
• Use arpeggios to support the chord changes- the center of gravity

The post How To Play A Guitar Solo Using Chords appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.