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.

When it comes to learning how to play the guitar, blues music is one of the most popular genres of music.

If you’re an aspiring blues guitar player the good news is that there are several ways we can get you playing along to a blues song on guitar relatively easily.

The first of which is using a special guitar hack I call the One Finger Blues Guitar Trick.

Even if you’re a total beginner guitar player and today is your first day of learning, you’ll be able to play along to a full blues song.

So Grab your guitar and warm up your index finger because we’re about to teach you the One Finger Blues on guitar!

How To Play A Blues On Guitar

The best thing about the blues is that 99% of blues songs are written using the exact same formula.

Sure there are variations but if we understand the formula used to write blues music we can see the underlying song structure and play along using very simple chords, even if we’re new to guitar and are just getting started.

The 12 Bar Blues Formula looks like this:

Chord 1 – Chord 4 – Chord 1 – Chord 1

Chord 4 – Chord 4 – Chord 1 – Chord 1

Chord 5 – Chord 4 – Chord 1 – Chord 5

While that might not make sense if you’re unfamiliar with music theory, what we are saying is that within any given key of music (the collection of notes and chords that work together), we will be using the 1st, 4th and 5th chords in that key.

If we are playing in the key of C Major, the notes of the scale are C D E F G A B C.

C is the 1st note, F is the 4th note and G is the 5th note, therefore we only need to plug the notes C, F & G into the template above. That looks like this:

C – F – C -C

F – F – C – C

G – F – C – G

If you know how to play a C, F & G chord, you can play along to the progression above to get a blues song. You’ll also notice that there are 12 bars of music, hence the name 12 Bar Blues.

Easy 12 Bar Blues Guitar Lesson

Just to make sure you understand the 12-bar blues formula, we’re going to map it out in the key of A which is one of the most popular keys to play a blues song on guitar.

The notes in the key of A are A B C# D E F# G# and A where A = 1, D = 4 and G = 5.

If we plug this into our 12 Bar Blues Formula you get the following:

A – D – A – A

D – D – A – A

E – D – A – E

Now if you’re new to learning guitar chances are it will take you around 3 months to get really comfortable with switching between your basic guitar chords smoothly. This is unfortunate because most people want to sound good right away and are likely to give up well before they invest enough time into becoming good at their chord changes.

To make things simpler we are going to use a special chord shape that can be played with one finger.

The Secret Chord That Will Let You Play Along To Any Blues Song On Guitar

The secret chord we can play is a movable minor triad in 1st inversion.

You don’t really have to understand what it means right now, you just need to know how to play it.

To play an A Minor triad in 1st inversion all you need to do is put your 1st finger flat across fret 5 on the first three strings (1-3).

Squeeze your guitar and strum and if you get it right all three strings should ring out.

This is the A minor chord because A is the note that is found at the 5th fret of the guitar.

Once you get the hang of this chord shape, try moving your finger to fret 10 to play a D Minor chord (in 1st inversion). Your 1st finger should be holding down fret 10 of the first three strings.

Finally, move your finger to fret 12 and bar it across all three strings to play and E Minor chord.

When you can play all three chords, practice switching between them so that you can move freely without having to think too much.

Applying The Secret Chord To The 12 Bar Blues Progression.

Now that you have a special way of playing each of the three chords it’s time to apply them to the 12 Bar Blues progression.

I’ve converted the progression from letter names to numbers. All you need to do is move your finger to the given fret, bar it across the first three strings and play the chords in time with the music and you will have a 12 bar blues song!

Here are the frets:

5 – 10 – 5 – 5

10 – 10 – 5 – 5

12 – 10 – 5 – 12

That’s it! It’s literally all you need to do to play the blues on guitar!

Blues Guitar Lessons In Melbourne

If you want to learn how to play blues music on guitar then taking guitar lessons with a professional guitar teacher is the best way to go.

If you live in Melbourne and are looking for Blues Guitar Lessons in Melbourne then I would love to help you learn how to play the guitar.

If you’re outside of Melbourne then don’t worry, you can get some great blues guitar lessons for free on my Youtube channel including a special video on this topic which you can watch below

More Easy Blues Guitar Lessons

You should practice today’s lesson on blues guitar until you can confidently play along in time within the key of A.

Once you get the hang of this you can try moving to new keys like I suggest and demonstrate in the video above.

Popular keys for blues music on guitar include A, E, C, D, F, Bb, Eb and Ab, but once you get the hang of the basic pattern it won’t be too hard to move to new keys.

Today we learned how to play an Easy Minor Blues On Guitar. Stay tuned because I’ll be posting another easy blues guitar lesson on how to play a Major Blues using a similar guitar hack.

In the meantime, if you found this guitar lesson valuable you can get my blues guitar online course with over 30 ways to play along to a 12 Bar Blues which will take you from zero to blues guitar hero in no time at all as part of my Guitar Dojo Online membership.

The post Easy Blues Guitar Lesson – The One-Finger Blues appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.

The bending technique is one of the most expressive techniques that there is on guitar.

It’s also one of the hardest lead guitar techniques to get under control.

It’s one of the techniques that separate the men from the boys and the good guitar players from the truly great guitar players.

In this guitar lesson, I will give you my #1 exercise for developing the bending technique, so grab your guitar and lets get into it.

The #1 Lesson When It Comes To Bending The Guitar Strings

When it comes to bending on the guitar most people focus on the physical aspects of guitar playing.

While the bending technique is difficult because it is physically demanding and requires us to develop finder strength, it is actually the listening component that many guitar players overlook.

Bending is only 20% technique, the other 80% is listening.

If you want to be a great guitar player, you need to master the bending technique, and if you want to master the bending technique then you need to become a good listener.

How To Improve Your Bending Technique

When it comes to practising bending most guitar players just bend the string and hope for the best.

This usually results in the guitarist bending the note slightly lower or slightly higher than the target note resulting in the bends sounding out of tune.

If you walk into a guitar store on a Saturday afternoon and listen to people trying out guitars you’ll definitely hear this.

The trick to improving your bending is to listen so that you can identify the note you are bending to and then bend to it so that is you are bending in tune.

To do this you have to listen to the note you are playing when practising.

Gradually over time your ears will adjust to hearing the right pitch and your muscle memory will know how much to bend intuitively, but in the beginning you need to be very deliberate in how you bend.

The Best Exercise To Improve Bending On Guitar

When it comes to bending on the guitar the best lesson I can give you is my bending to a target note exercise.

To do this exercise you need only follow these three simple steps.

• play the target note and listen to how it sounds (eg string 1 fret 12
• move one fret lower and play that note (eg string 1 fret 11)
• bend the lower note until it matches the pitch of the higher note
• repeat this 5-10 times before selecting a new note.

The exercise might appear simple, but you really need to listen so that you are bending to the right pitch, otherwise you are just reinforcing a poor bending technique.

The tricky thing is that when you are a beginner guitarist you won’t have a well-developed ear so while it might sound correct to you, it may not be in tune.

Furthermore, because you are putting so much focus on the technical side of bending the guitar strings, it takes away from your ability to listen.

To counter this I recommend you record yourself and listen back so that you can ‘count the good ones’

Watch My #1 Exercise For Bending The Guitar Strings – Video Guitar Lesson

I recorded a short video lesson on how to go through the bending exercise.

Take a minute to watch this video from my Youtube Channel (subscribe for free guitar lessons)

You’ll hopefully have better bending in no time at all from this simple 5-minute guitar exercise.

Additional Ways You Can Improve Your Bending Technique

I recommend you add the exercise above to your guitar practice routine and spend at least one week working on the exercise.

Once you get the hand of level one, you can move on to the second level of the exercise.

This involves bending the guitar string from two frets lower than the target pitch which will be a much more difficult bend to pull off.

You will need to get a feel for how much force to use in order to bend the strings to the right note, while doing this don’t forget to listen to what notes you are bending to.

I find that starting between fret 10-15 on strings 1-3 are best because there is less tension on the guitar. You can work your way further down or higher up the fretboard as you get comfortable.

Other Bending Tips For Guitar Players

When it comes to the bending technique it can be very physically demanding. Below are several ways that you can ensure your hands stay safe while you practice.

• If your hands hurt, stop! – Don’t push through the pain
• Set a time and practice this routine for the duration of the allocated time. 5 Minutes is plenty!
• Record yourself and listen back – You can’t listen and focus at the same time when beginning, listen to your recordings and figure out what to improve next

Learn From A Great Guitar Teacher

The #1 Tip for improving your bending technique is none other than learning from a great guitar teacher!

A great guitar teacher will show you how to properly bend and fix any flaws in your technique. They can also show you how to improve your ear so that you know what to listen for and can self-correct.

If you’re looking for Guitar Lessons in Melbourne and need a guitar teacher who can help you improve your bending technique, look no further than guitar lessons at Melbourne Guitar Academy.

How Often To Practice Bending

As stated before I recommend you practise this exercise for 5 minutes at a time, and gradually extend towards 10 minutes as your hands improve.

You do not need to practice this for hours every day, this will likely be bad for your fingers, especially if you are a beginner.

Aim to do this exercise at least three times per week, but of course, every day is fine if you have the time in your guitar practice schedule.

Conclusion

So there you have it, my #1 exercise to improve bending on the guitar.

I hope you have enjoyed this guitar lesson on bending and continue to improve your guitar playing.

If you’re finding it hard to control your fingers using the bending technique then I highly recommend you check out this lesson on How To Develop Faster Fingers On Guitar so that you can strengthen your fingers and make bending the strings easier.

See you in the next lesson!

The post How To Bend Strings Better – Guitar Lesson appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.

When I first started learning guitar I was inspired by the hard rock and heavy metal guitar heroes of the late 70’s and early 80’s.

I looked up to guitarists like Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Yngwie Malmsteen, Zakk Wylde and dozens of other legendary guitar players from their era.

All I wanted to do was shred, and learning how to play the guitar faster so that I could tackle some of the amazing guitar solos I was listening to was pretty high on my priority.

I used to take a weekly guitar lesson with my guitar teacher Dave at school, and would practice guitar religiously for at least four hours per day and I got very good, very quickly…

But something was missing, and I didn’t quite have the edge that my favourite guitar players had.

How To Practice Guitar For Speed

I didn’t know it at the time, but there were specific exercises that could be done to help improve one’s speed.

All I used to do was learn songs believing that if I learned the guitar solos and licks from my favourite players I would eventually absorb what they knew and master their technique.

While this was very beneficial from a music theory point of view, I developed a lot of bad habits with my technique. This was only made worst by the fact I practised guitar so much.

That might not make sense, but If I taught myself a lick and didn’t use the right technique, I would practice it the wrong way for a few hours and over a period of several years, I had developed and strongly reinforced some really bad habits.

Even at university where I studied with some of Melbourne’s Best Guitar Teachers I would be told I had bad technique and needed to fix it… but I was never told what to fix and how to go about it.

Speed Building Exercises For Guitar

It wasn’t until I started taking online guitar lessons from a heavy metal guitar teacher who lived in the USA, was I exposed to a number of specific speed-building exercises for guitar.

Most of these guitar exercises involved identifying a specific problem in my guitar playing and then coming up with an exercise or drill that would help me correct the problem and reinforce better movements.

After all, most speed problems are a result of excess movement causing your hands to fall out of sync with each other, rather than not being able to move fast enough.

One of the best speed-building guitar exercises involved simply building up the control and coordination of my fretting hand fingers without any picking whatsoever.

It’s a tricky exercise, but is hands down the best exercise any aspiring guitar player can use to improve their speed.

The Best Exercise For Improving Your Fretting Hand Finger Speed (For Beginners)

To perform this exercise do the following:

• rest your four fretting hand fingers along string 3 at frets 5-8 (one finger per fret)
• without squeezing, move your first finger from string 1 to string 6 over and over while keeping your other three fingers touching the 3rd string (without squeezing)
• repeat this movement slowly 10-20 times
• once you have completed this movement, complete the same exercise with your second finger.
• You can complete this same exercise with the middle and fourth fingers.

You can watch a video of this process below:

It’s important to only do this exercise for 10-20 reps when first starting out. It will feel very tense and maybe even painful. The aim is to try and stay as relaxed as possible so that when you’re playing the guitar you are relaxed and controlled in every movement.

If you do this exercise every day for a week you will be able to move your fingers considerably faster and will have a much easier time playing guitar.

Additional Guitar Speed Building Exercises For Intermediate Guitar Players

In the guitar lesson video above we introduced a simple single-finger guitar exercise to help you build speed.

You can take it one step further and repeat the same exercise on your guitar but this time use two fingers.

Each of your fingers is to move in the opposite direction. For example, you would have your first finger move up to string 6 while your second finger moves down to string 1 (while your 3rd and 4th fingers remain on string 3).

Here are all the different finger combinations you can use for this guitar exercise:

• 1 & 2
• 1 & 3
• 1 & 4
• 2 & 3
• 2& 4
• 3 & 4

It’s a tricky exercise but start slow and focus on smooth movements.

How Long Does It Take To Play Guitar Fast?

Everyone improves at different rates and there is no easy way to calculate how long it takes to become a faster guitar player.

You can however take these steps to ensure that you maximise your progress and improve your guitar speed at a faster rate:

• Set goals for your guitar playing and plan each practice session so that what you are working on helps you move closer to your goals
• Track your progress and measure your speed so that you know how fast you are playing and how much improvement you are making each practice session
• Record yourself playing and watch for mistakes – If you are practising while unaware of a problem you are only reinforcing that problem. Record yourself and monitor for mistakes so that you know what to fix in future practice sessions
• Get help from an expert teacher – A great guitar teacher will identify what you need to fix and give you the best drills and practice plans to help you improve quickly.

If you’re serious about improving your guitar speed then I recommend getting in touch with us to book a free guitar lesson. That way we can assess your current guitar speed and any bad habits that are holding you back and give you the exercises you need to improve your technique and start playing guitar faster!

About The Author – Melbourne’s Best Guitar Teacher Michael Gumley

Michael Gumley is the owner and founder of Melbourne Guitar Academy – (Melbourne’s highest-rated guitar school) as well as the author of over 12 books and over 40 online courses on how to learn guitar.

Since 2015 Melbourne Guitar Academy has been helping guitar students all around Melbourne improve their guitar speed and play faster with personalised guitar lesson plans and high-quality lessons that are guaranteed to get results. If you’re looking for guitar lessons in Melbourne look no further than studying at Melbourne Guitar Academy. Get in touch to book a free guitar lesson with one of our teachers.

Find out the Melbourne Guitar Academy difference by booking a lesson with Michael now!

The post Easy Guitar Lesson – How To Get Faster Fingers (In 5 Days or Less) appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.

When it comes to learning how to play guitar one of the biggest challenges many beginner guitar students face is learning their chords and being able to develop smooth changes.

In fact, one of the biggest sources of frustration for most guitar players comes from their inability to change from one chord to the other without pausing. This in turn causes you to have to stop while your fretting hand fingers catch up and kills the fluency of the music.

The result is individual blocks of sound rather than anything that resembles the song that you’re trying to play.

In this article, I aim to give you my special 5-minute guitar practice routine that will help you memorise chords quickly and develop the ability to change between them smoothly.

If you employ the 4 guitar exercises from this article in your own guitar practice routine you’ll have better-sounding chords and strumming in no time at all.

Why Most Beginner Guitarists Struggle To Memorise Chords

Let’s get straight to it. Most books, articles, instructions videos and guitar teachers tell you what to learn, but never teach you how to learn.

You’re given a bunch of chord diagrams that you need to remember and are told to practice them until you learn them.

You spend 30 seconds getting your fingers in the right spot for the first chord.

Then you strum it once

Then you take your fingers off and spend another 30 seconds putting your fingers down on the next chord.

It might take you anywhere from 3-5 minutes to go through all of the chords on your page once each… making it a very inefficient use of your time.

Imagine going to the gym and doing one bench press, then putting the weights down and walking over to a new workout station to do a single squat. After that, you walk to a new machine and do a single pulldown…

You get the idea.

We need to practice our chords like we would be working out – Lots of consecutive reps in the time we have allocated to that exercise.

A quick side note – if you prefer video guitar lessons to written articles you can watch the video I made titled “How To Quickly Memorise Chords & Master Smooth Chord Changes: My Simple 5-Minute Routine” that accompanies this article, you’ll find excerpts embedded throughout this article from the main video found on my Youtube Channel

The Best Exercise For Memorising Guitar Chords

To combat the huge amount of wasted time, I invented an exercise called ‘Finger Pushups’ to help you quickly memorise your guitar chords quickly. This exercise will quickly help your fingers develop the muscle memory of the shape that you are trying to learn so that you never forget the chord shape again.

To perform a Finger Pushup do the following:

• place your fingers down on the correct frets
• squeeze the chord shape for half a second
• relax your fingers without lifting them off the string
• squeeze the chord shape again for another half a second
• repeat this process at least 10 times.

Once you have done ten Finger Pushups on the chord you are trying to learn you can move on to the next chord.

This exercise works so well because you’re not having to start the shape from scratch every time you don’t waste 10+ seconds finding the right spot to place them and can maximise the number of reps you get in the time you have.

It’s also worth mentioning that you are not strumming the guitar as you do this exercise. All of your attention is on your fretting hand so that you can see the shape and convert it to long-term memory.

How To Make Your Guitar Chords Sound Better

Our next exercise is an extension of the Finger Pushup exercise and adds a strumming component so we can hear what we are playing and work towards improving it.

This new exercise is called the Strum/Mute/Lift technique and is performed exactly how it sounds.

• place your fingers on the correct fets and squeeze the strings to fret the notes
• strum all the strings that belong to the chord (while listening for dead strings or missing notes)
• mute the strings with your strumming hand
• lift your fingers up 1-2cm while maintaining the shape of the chord
• place your fingers back down, adjust for any misplaced notes and repeat the process again

Continue to repeat the routine for at least 10 repetitions. Make sure that you adjust as necessary and try to make it better each time. If you just rush through it without listening for mistakes or correcting what you are doing then you just reinforce a bad habit.

Once you have done your ten reps you can move on to a new chord.

If you practice this way you will have better sound chords in no time at all!

How To Learn Beginner Guitar Chords…And Beyond

Now that you’ve learned the best two exercises for memorising and practising guitar chords you should get to work and incorporate them into your guitar practice schedule.

Now while these two exercises are great for beginner guitar players they can (and should) be used by intermediate and advanced level guitarists and indeed guitar players of any level.

To this day I use Finger Pushups and the Strum/Mute/Lift technique for any new chord shape that I’m learning, no matter how easy or difficult.

You can apply these two exercises to:

• Open Chords
• Suspended Chords
• Power Chords
• Bar Chords
• Triads
• Extended Chords
• Altered Chords

So just because this article is written with beginner guitarists in mind doesn’t mean more skilled and experienced guitar players can’t implement these techniques into their guitar practice routines.

Anyhow, now that you know how to learn chords more efficiently it’s time to learn how to change between them smoothly.

How To Develop Smoother Chord Changes On Guitar

As mentioned before the biggest source of frustration for most guitar players is having to pause and think about where they put their fingers.

Too often when they practice they do so in a way where they put each finger down sequentially.

The problem with this is that how you practice is how you play, so when you go to play your chords you put your fingers down one by one…just like you practised!

The previous two exercises should help you overcome that problem, and our third exercise “Moonwalks” should make it even easier to change.

I coined the name Moonwalks because our fingers are going to resemble the low gravity situation on the moon.

To perform a Moonwalk you are going to pick two chords that you want to practice and do the following

• in ultra-slow motion, bring your fingers to the correct frets above
• place all of the fingers down and squeeze AT THE SAME TIME
• relax your hand and lift off
• now switch slowly to the new chord shape and form it above the frets
• bring all of your fingers down once more SIMULTANEOUSLY so they arrive at the frets of the new chord at the same time!

The whole aim of the exercise is to have all of your fingers moving together at the same time and arriving at the same time. Go as slow as you need to in order to have your fingers arrive together.

Once again, there is no strum, all of your focus needs to go to your fretting hand finger.

What To Do When You Can’t Change Chords In Time?

This final exercise is the big guns we bring out when you can’t change chords in time!

This one is called Rapid Fire Changes and works 99% of the time when my guitar students come to me saying they can’t change chords in time.

You see, most of the time they have the physical capacity to change their guitar chords in time, but they have a mental block in place that prevents them from making a quick change.

What happens is that they are putting their fretting hand in control and waiting until all of their fingers are in the right spot before they start strumming…

As a result, they are always stopping and waiting until they are ready.

This is the completely wrong way to approach this.

Instead what you need to do is put your strumming hand in control (and to make him a ruthless taskmaster.

What happens is you are going to pick out two chords to change between them, strum four times per chord and switch instantly without breaking the strumming pattern.

That’s right, instantly!

Even if your fretting hand fingers aren’t in the right spot yet, you’re going to keep strumming and correcting any misplaced digits as you go.

The results will be pleasantly surprising!

After a few attempts, you’ll likely make the changes almost instantly, and all we had to do was change the way you thought about things.

So a step-by-step process is as follows:

• fret the first chord
• strum the first chord four times
• instantly change to the second chord and strum four more times
• adjust any missed fingers on the remaining beats of the bar
• switch back to the first chord and repeat the process

It pays to start slowly to give yourself more time to change, but the trick is to NEVER STOP STRUMMING!

Make your fretting hand play catch-up, just like someone who has missed the train but can still catch up and jump on!

How To Master Your Chord Changes

By reading this article you’ve discovered four new exercises to help you learn and master your guitar chords

• Finger Pushups
• Strum Mute Lifts
• Moonwalks
• Rapid Fire Changes

Use the first two exercises to help you better learn and memorise your guitar chords and the second two exercises to help you develop the ability to switch between chords smoothly.

Using these exercises on the individual chord changes within a song that you are learning or a collection of chord progressions will dramatically improve your guitar playing in a short period of time

Why do these exercises work so well? It’s because they cut out a lot of time wasted switching between chords. It is a much more efficient way of practising. This further compounds when you use these exercises on chords you don’t know or switches you can’t play smoothly.

Don’t waste time practising things you can already do. Instead, allocate 80% of your practice time to improving your deficits and you will make unbelievably fast progress towards mastery.

Lessons From The Best Guitar Teacher In Melbourne

Michael Gumley is a professional guitarist, musical educator and entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia.

He is the founder of Melbourne Guitar Academy, the author of the Guitar Ninjas Curriculum and the Head of Guitar at the music educator website Topmusic Pro. Michael’s goal is to raise the standard of musical education globally by empowering both teachers and students with better tools and resources to learn guitar so that they can avoid learning guitar the hard way as he did.

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Are you undertaking VCE Guitar as part of your secondary schooling? Do you want to know how you can dominate VCE guitar and get the best mark possible? Do you have a burning desire to be the best guitarist you can be and go on to be a future musician? If you’ve answered a big fat yes to any of these questions then get excited because In this article I am going to outline everything you need to do to smash year 12 music and improve your guitar playing out of sight in 2022! If you’re in a younger year level or you’ve just started guitar and aren’t quite sure if you’re going to undertake VCE guitar, continue to read on because what you’re about to learn will not only help influence your decision to study guitar more formally, but will give you a special advantage that those who wait much later to become serious about learning guitar will kick themselves for missing out on. 

All right, let’s go!

 

Some of the best years I had in my own guitar playing were my formative years taking lessons in high school and completing VCE Music (Victorian Certificate of Education) majoring in guitar as my primary instrument. There is something magical about learning guitar as a teen because not only are you learning the instrument for the first time, you’re also discovering new music which will go on to shape part of your identity. In this article I am going to talk about how you can come to dominate your VCE studies so that you excel at guitar and get a fantastic study score. While this article specifically mentions VCE Guitar (Victorian Certificate of Education) reflecting my home state of Victoria, Australia, the principles outlined here can be used by guitarists Australia-wide and indeed worldwide who are completing guitar as a subject in their secondary school education. I hope to share with you some insights and strategies that will no doubt make you the top of your class in music and give you everything you need to excel.

 

While I’m a firm believer that having fun on our instrument comes first and that the way we’re assessed in musical exams is often incongruent with the day to day dealings of a professional musician, I am even more firm in my belief of being the best you can and always striving to do a great job. When I was 15 I wanted to be the next Eddie Van Halen and had a burning desire to be the worlds best guitarist. There was several other guitar students in my year level also completing VCE music. Some of them wanted to get a good score, but most of them just went through the motions, put in a little bit of effort, and only did so, so.

 

I was a late starter to guitar and only picked up the instrument at age 15, but quickly became one of the best guitarists in my school and went on to have the highest subject score at the end of year 12. Part of this result came about due to my burning desire to succeed and the hours of practice I put in, while the rest of it came from being organised and having a plan to follow. I definitely did not have natural talent, and was several years behind the other students in my class, but I went on to get a great score, and more importantly coach dozens of other VCE guitar students to getting great results in their VCE Music.

 

Here are my tips if you want to not only succeed at your VCE guitar studies but to become the best guitar player that you can be and use these formative years as a launchpad into the rest of your music career.

Tip 1: Get Organised

The biggest asset you have when you are young is the abundance of time. The sooner you start guitar the better, and if you can compound the time you have by being organised and working with purpose it will make a huge difference to your development. When it comes to being organised the first thing you need to do is have a plan. The plan you make and the action you take will be determined by how much time you have before you have to do your exams. Ideally you don’t want to wait until the first day of year 12 to think about the pieces you will be performing. Instead, you want to plan these pieces as early as you can so that you can maximise the amount of time you have to work on them. 

The best thing you can do is make a list of all the songs you will be learning and performing in both VCE Guitar Units 1 & 2 in year 11 as well as unites 3 & 4 in year 12. Look at the List of Prescribed Works For VCE Guitar with your teacher and determine which pieces you will be performing in your Year 12 recital and your year 11 performances. My recommendation is to aim to learn 12-16 pieces in a 2-3 year period starting in year 10 (or earlier) so you have plenty of time to learn the pieces, refine them and perform them so that by the time your recital comes around every note of every piece is already ingrained in your muscle memory.

 

Next is to make a list of all the technical work you need to perform for your classroom assessments and to plan out when you will start working on it with your teacher. A big mistake most people make is only learning their technical works (chords, scales, arpeggios etc) to be able to play them well enough in an exam. You need to understand each technical item on a theoretical level as well as how to put it into practice in actual music. Don’t just learn it to forget it, learn it so it becomes a tool in your arsenal as a professional guitarist.

 

Lastly, make a list of all the music theory that you need to know then go out and learn it. As guitar players music theory is often one of our weak points (and no wonder with how boring they make it to learn in the classroom). Despite what most of us think about music theory, the better you are with it the better your musicianship skills and subsequently your guitar skills will be. Blitz your theory and ever other element of music becomes easier!

Tip 2: Learn The Fretboard

The biggest gap in my knowledge when I was completing VCE Guitar was the fact that I barely knew the instrument. Sure I knew the locations of the notes in open position, but I didn’t know anything beyond the 3rd fret and didn’t even understand how bar chords worked because I didn’t know the notes on string 6. I memorised a lot of patterns in isolation, and I could repeat things like a parrot, but If I didn’t have music in front of me or I had to jam with others, I was totally stuffed because I didn’t know anything.

These days one of the first things I do with advancing guitarists is teach them the fretboard because when guitarists know their fretboard they can see how the notes become scales, the scales are arranged into chords and arpeggios, and how the chords are put together into keys. We can combine this knowledge with our music theory and use it to bring any concept or sound to life on our instrument.

 

If you can learn your fretboard and have a deep understanding of how the guitar works it will unlock so many things for you and help you make so much more sense of the music you are playing. Make it your mission to learn the fretboard and increase your understanding of your instrument.

Tip 3: Make It Your Mission To Understand Music Theory

I’ve already touched on this earlier but I cannot understate the importance of learning your music theory. Music theory is like having a treasure map that will tell you exactly where you need to dig to find the treasure. Contrary to popular belief learning theory will not limit you in any way nor will it stifle your creativity or make you sound like everybody else. Instead it gives you a framework to create whatever sound you’re aiming for and to have a deeper understanding of how music works.

It is essential that you know how scales are constructed, how chords are created, and how major keys and the circle of 5ths works. This is a practical understanding of music theory that will help you make sense of the contemporary music you are playing and all the scales and chords you need to learn, but most importantly it will show you how it is used and applied to real music. Don’t confuse learning music theory with sight reading. Learning how to read music is important, but it is secondary to understanding what is going on.

Make it your mission to understand theory. This might mean getting a few extra books, taking a short course, getting specific theory lessons from a teacher (most of which are so eager to teach students who actually want to learn music theory) or easiest of all, watching some videos on YouTube explaining it all to you (man I wish we had the resources that are now on Youtube back in my day!)

 

At the end of the day music theory isn’t actually that complicated, and the benefits you’ll get for your guitar playing from putting a few hours into theory will far outweigh any short term confusion and frustration.

Tip 4: Know Your Pieces Inside Out

When I first learned my VCE Guitar Pieces I had no idea about how to properly learn songs and as a result it would often take me a few months to complete an entire piece and commit it to memory. These days I use my special 3X Rapid Learning System when learning new pieces and am able to memorise more in an hour than what I used to in a month.

The key is to be able to learn your pieces efficiently so that the majority of your time goes into practicing each piece with the intent of improving them and making things better rather than spending all of your time trying to memorise the piece and just get the notes right.

When you practice with purpose you get very good, very quickly, and the compounding effect of your improvement makes everything else you do easier and easier. On top of all this, the sooner you learn your pieces, the longer you have to refine them. If you’ve learned all of your pieces a year out, you can focus on performing them so that by the time the VCE Guitar recital comes around you’ve already played the songs hundreds of times and perhaps even performed it dozens of times so that you’re used to playing under pressure.

 

You don’t want to be 2 weeks out of the exam and still be scrambling to learn and memorise pieces, this is a recipe for a mediocre result. Prepare your list, learn your songs ASAP and spend as much time identifying problems and improving the pieces as you can.

Tip 5: Learn From A Great Teacher

The person most responsible for you getting a great mark in your VCE class is you, and there is no way to get a great mark without putting in effort. Having said that, employing a great guitar teacher to give you quality guidance and direction with your guitar studies will make a world of difference to the end result, not just of your VCE Guitar score, but your guitar playing across the board. If you’re learning from an average teacher because they are the only teacher at your school – Find someone else!

You need to take responsibility for your outcome and the best way to do that is to go out and find a great guitar teacher who can get the best out of you. You owe this to yourself!

When I did VCE guitar I was definitely the best guitar player in my class, but I was only slightly above average on the state level. Considering I had only been playing for 18 months when I started VCE guitar I think I did reasonable well, but if I could have my time again and apply what I know now to the whole process there would be a totally different outcome. Fortunately I’ve been able to live vicariously through dozens of students and give them systems to efficiently learn songs, effectively improve their skills and score much higher in their VCE than I ever did (including one students who got the highest score in the state in 2016. The teacher I had was a great person and made every lesson very fun, but they didn’t help me get the most out of my lessons or become the best I could, and that has caused me to be years behind my potential and is one of the driving forces behind why I put so much effort in to my students and creating the best guitar program for them possible.

 

You can practice for 3+ hours a day, but if you’re lacking direction you might only get 30 minutes of actual progress for all your hard work. A great teacher will help you get more done in less time so that you make dramatic improvement in your guitar playing skills and can reinvest the time you save into become even better, or mastering music theory, or working on your ear training. You need to take responsibility for yourself and find a VCE Guitar Teacher in Melbourne who can help you become the best guitarist you can and dominate your VCE Guitar studies.

In Conclusion

So now you have 5 tips that will help you dramatically improve your guitar playing and musicianship while studying VCE Guitar in 2022. Implement one of these tips and you will see a big increase in your outcome. Implement all 5 tips and you will improve beyond belief. Some of the ideas here might seem challenging, but I assure you if you want to be a truly great guitar player, this is what you must do, and with the right guidance and balance of skills (including music theory) you can get much further with much less effort, and become exponentially great with the effort that you put it. Happy studying and good luck!

 

To Your Success in 2022 and beyond!

About The Author

Michel Gumley is the owner and head teacher at Melbourne Guitar Academy. He is passionate about helping aspiring guitarists become the guitar heroes of the future and has coached dozens of students through VCE Guitar successfully including the highest score in the state of Victoria in 2016. If you’re looking for a Melbourne VCE  Guitar Teacher that will help you reach peak performance in your own guitar studies look no further than Michael.

If you have any questions about guitar or how to do really well in your VCE studies don’t hesitate to comment below or reach out to Michael on social media via @MichaelGumley

The post How To Dominate Your VCE Guitar Studies In 2022 appeared first on Melbourne Guitar Academy.

One of the common things I hear from many new guitar students is how difficult practice is in the beginning, and how hard ongoing practice can be both mentally and physically.

 

While this is true, I wanted to bring to your awareness that there are different types of practice for different things, and that having an awareness of many different practice strategies can greatly aid us in our effort to become better guitar players.

 

By definition practice is the repetition of an activity with the intention of improving it. If we want to get better at something, we need to practice it. There is no getting around that.

 

But working harder isn’t always the best thing to do and can even lead to unnecessary burnout and unwanted frustration. If we work smarter (while still working hard)  we can get a lot more out of our practice and get a lot further along in proportion to the time and effort we are putting in.

 

In this article We’ll look at the Three Phases Of Practicing and even head back to the garden and touch on a real story to help drive the metaphor home.

 

Let’s start with our story…

Our Very Own Private Jungle

During the recent lockdown we moved back into a property which had been rented out to tenants.

 

Needless to say the tenants had not done a good job of maintaining the property.

 

There were a few things they hadn’t done, but the most impressive was the backyard.

 

I mean it was so poorly maintained I was impressed at how out of control it had become.

 

The grass was knee high, and the smaller weeds were above my waist. There were even a few thistles that were taller than me and I’m over 6 foot tall.

 

On top of that you couldn’t actually tell where the lawn ended and the garden beds began. It was just one big mess that looked like the amazon jungle.

 

One of the first weekends after the move I took upon myself the daunting task of getting it cleaned up.

 

I fired up our lawnmower and pushed it onto the grass only to have it immediately choke out.

 

I fired it up again, rolled it forward a few inches and again it choked out.

 

I repeated this for about 20 minutes and mowed a total of 40cm before giving up.

 

If you’ve read my article about not giving up guitar and quitting too early then you’ll know that you should always seek an expert before giving up.

 

So I called a gardener to come and give us a quote.

 

The gardener arrived, took one look at the amazon jungle we had growing out the back and shit his pants. He told us it was too big a job for him and got in his car and quickly drove off, nervously looking over his shoulder several times as he drove off into the distance.

 

The second guy arrived and quoted us almost $2000 and 3 weekends to get in under control.

 

The third guy (Good Old Jim) quoted us a much better price but said it was a big job and would require some help.

 

In the end it took three people a whole weekend to get the garden back under control which was a huge initial investment of time and effort, but it was done, and we now had a livable backyard and could walk around without fear of getting eaten by giant snakes or getting lost for days at a time.

 

Jokes aside, after the initial cleanup it only takes us 5 minutes to mow the front yard and less than 10 minutes to mow the backyard which we do once a month.

 

We still pull out the occasional weed as well, but our garden is at the point where we only need to put in a little bit of effort every now and then to keep it maintained.

 

We had one big initial investment of time + energy which was really really daunting at first, but once the hard part was over and done with we can now put in the bare minimum of effort to keep it in order.

 

So how does all this relate to guitar?

Whenever you are learning something new, it’s often daunting and takes a whole lot of effort and brain power to get on top of.

 

Then once you understand it, you need to invest more time into building up the skill. You might even hit the wall and feel like giving up, but once you push through that point and have a breakthrough the practicing will be much easier and you won’t have to put in as much effort.

 

Congratulations, you can now enter maintenance mode, where you routinely come back and practice the item in order to retain it in your memory or keep it at a certain level of proficiency. Rather than put lots of time into it, you put in the bare minimum you need to keep it at the right level so that you can recall it when needed.

 

When you’re in maintenance mode, life is easy, and guitar playing is fun. Then you go and reallocate that time into the next skill or concept that needs attention.

 

Let’s take a more in depth look at the Three Phases of Practicing with a few examples chucked in to boot.

The Three Phases Of Learning Guitar

When you are first learning something, a lot of your attention needs to go into actually learning and retaining information about what you need to do. This learning phase is often the most mentally overwhelming because it requires brainpower to take in teh new information as well as effort to practice.

 

This is often the hardest because you’re learning and practicing at the same time, and when you don’t quite have a solid grasp of the concept, your attention is divided between retaining the information and implementing it in your playing.

 

Eventually once the penny drops and you don’t have to think about the information side of things, you can more easily move into practicing.

 

Think back to when you first learned chords. There was lots of mental effort involved in simply comprehending how to read the chord charts, where to put your fingers,  and the names of the chords, which made trying to play them really really hard.

 

Fast forward a few weeks, once you remember the names and the finger positions required for each chord, you have a much easier time of actually practicing them because your focus is less about the individual information about each chord, and more about improving your technique.

 

Think learning how to do a new exercise at the gym and how cautious you are at first compared to a few weeks later when you’re comfortable with it.

 

The third type of practice is something that I call maintenance mode practice. This is where you understand the topic well, have already invested plenty of time into developing the skill or techniques to a high level of proficiency and can then allocate the bare minimum of time into maintaining your skill level or grasp of the knowledge.

 

This kind of practice is useful when you already know something well, but don’t want to forget it, or can already perform to a high standard, but need to keep your chops at a high level.

 

The lifecycle of your guitar practice when applied to learning the fretboard, might be as follows:

The Learning Phase

You have to spend a whole practice session learning the musical alphabet and how the notes are arranged across the strings. You play each string 3 times forwards and 3 times backwards to make it stick, it takes a long time and is a little bit daunting or frustrating.

The Learning Phase requires the most mental effort to understand the topic, and may take a few additional sessions for you to really understand the topic and to make the info really stick. The goal of the learning phase is to understand and retain the information so that you can improve upon it when practicing.

The Improvement Phase

You now understand the concept and are actively working to improve it. You no longer have to spend 30 minus every session reviewing the information and trying to make it stick, you spend 10 minutes practicing the exercise. In fact, it only takes you 1 minute to do the first two strings because you know them so well, and about 2-3 minutes each for the other strings. 

In the Improvement Phase you keep working at something session after session with the attention of improving it. Sometimes it will be easy, and other times it will be hard, stick with it.

The Maintenance Phase

After a couple of weeks of memorising the strings you will notice that you can get through each one in a matter of seconds, and that doing things three times is rather mundane & unnecessary.

If you reached this point then Congratulations, you have entered the Maintenance Phase. This is where it is more beneficial for you to reduce your practice time from say 10 minutes down to 2 minutes so that you are running through things enough times to ensure you retain them in memory or skill, but don’t waste time playing over things for no additional benefit.

The Maintenance Phase & Beyond

At this point you can either reduce the amount of time you put into practicing something and reallocate it to something in the Learning or Improvement Phases, or find a more difficult level of the task at hand to further your knowledge in the area. (Think playing up and down the string using a more difficult pattern to challenge yourself and further consolidate your knowledge).

 

As you learn more and more things, you will have to invest a larger chunk of time and brainpower into learning them (The Learning Phase), and a lot of effort into developing your skills (The Improvement Phase) but eventually as things get easier and easier you practice them less and put more time into other practice items which need the attention (The Maintenance Phase). You will gradually have more and more things in Maintenance Phase over time which you touch base with less frequently so that you don’t forget them or have your skills go backwards. It eventually becomes a juggling act which you can better learn how to manage with a Rotating Guitar Practice Plan which is a topic for another time.

 

Hopefully after reading this you have a better understanding of how the three phases of guitar practice work and can adapt them into your practice routine. Doing so will allow you to take the right mindset to each phase and apply the right amount of time and effort to the skills and concepts you are trying to learn and improve. Doing so will make practice much more enjoyable and seem a whole lot less daunting.

About The Author

When he isn’t adventuring deep in the heart of the Wantirna South Jungle Michael Gumley is teaching the best guitar lessons in Melbourne Eastern Suburbs from his home studio in Wantirna South.

Michael has the personal mission of raising the standard of musical education worldwide and hopes to do so one student at a time with enlightening articles that offer deep insights into the psychology of learning and the art of practicing.

If you’re struggling to make progress on guitar consider booking a FREE guitar lesson with Michael so that he can share with you some effective practice strategies to help you move forward.

Visit the Melbourne Guitar Academy main page to book a free guitar lesson in person or live on Zoom.

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