First off let me just say I’m generalising here. What I’m about to say doesn’t apply to every guitarist at the intermediate level. It does however apply to a large amount of the ones I have listened to for many years. If you are one of them, and there’s a chance you are (although you might not realise it), get ready to be offended … Your guitar playing sucks! You haven’t got better, you have got worse!<\/p>\n
Your timing isn’t as good as you think it is. Your articulation is poor. Your bent notes are not in pitch or in time. You aren’t muting strings that shouldn’t be sounding. Your scales and licks consist of notes that are hard to decipher, there’s no clarity between the notes. Your rhythms are messy and inconsistent. You aren’t listening to the beat and most of all, you aren’t listening to your guitar! Harsh words I know but I’m not about to apologise. If this concerns you, I’m doing you a favour.<\/p>\n
Myself, and another musician I often play guitar and sing with, we have a pact. When we sound like c**p, we tell each other and we tell it straight. No beating around the bush, no hard feelings. Why? Because most people don’t like to offend you. If you ask them what they think, they’ll always say you sound good. But what if you really do suck and you’re about to play to a crowd of two hundred people. What they have actually done is traded their awkwardness for your humiliation. Not their fault, that’s how most of us are wired. But it doesn’t do anyone any favours.<\/p>\n
Now obviously I can’t know what you sound like because I haven’t heard you. But do yourself a favour and record yourself. Listen critically to what you really sound like. Ask people to be honest. Even for the experienced player it’s sometimes very difficult to spot when you don’t sound very good. There is however something guaranteed. Guitar played incredibly basic, but done well, will always, without fail, sound much better than something complicated played badly.<\/p>\n
I have lost count of the amount of guitarists that would sound much better if they just played down strokes on the quarter note and nothing else. Most of them aren’t necessarily bad, their playing is just a bit messy and needs tidying up, but they can’t see it and won’t believe that they will sound far better if they done much less. The most common problems without doubt are timing, consistency and an unawareness of unwanted string noise. All of these things can be cleaned up with a bit of practice, but first, you have to realise it’s a problem. That’s the hard part because most of the guitarists that suffer from this don’t notice it. <\/p>\n
Whether you believe this affects you or not, remember this. As an intermediate guitarist, you are never too good to practice the basics. Do yourself a favour and fire up a metronome, play something simple and play it perfectly, cleanly and in time. Make it a part of your regular practice. Record it and learn to listen to yourself with a critical ear, you won’t regret it. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First off let me just say I’m generalising here. What I’m about to say doesn’t apply to every guitarist at the intermediate level. It does however apply to a large amount of the ones I have listened to for many years. If you are one of them, and there’s a chance you are (although you … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guitar-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":383,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guitar-chords.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}