Paul Swanson Guitar Tuition
Professional guitar tuition for all levels in Leamington Spa and Warwick
Is *Your*
Technique?
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I Just Want
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Interested in
Technique
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I’m Not Interested in Technique
I Just Want to Play Music.
It’s easy to think of technique as merely playing fast or flash, and without doubt it’s tough to do either well without strong technique. However it’s easy to misunderstand the less obvious benefits enjoyed by a player with strong technique.
Firstly, the ability to play fast (cleanly) generally implies strength and independence in the fingers of the fretting hand. It may not be obvious (and wasn’t to me for a long time), but this same strength and independence offers these benefits.
1. Better Chord Changes
2. Better Hammers, Pulls and Slides
3. Better String Bends.
4. Better Vibrato
5. Better TONE!! The Holy Grail for Guitarists (both acoustic and electric)
If you really don’t want to improve in any of these areas, that’s fine, but it means you’ll probably always sound the same as you do currently. It’s your choice.
Secondly, let’s consider the area of mental technique, which most people view as musicality. Here’s a pretty good test for you to try out. Put on a backing track or metronome and play your favourite song over the top. The challenge is to make sure you can tap your foot in time with the beat.
If you can do it in perfect time, great. Try it with something you are less familiar with but that you know well enough to play comfortably. Keep doing it with different songs/solos/riffs until you find one where you are unable to tap your foot in time. This is a strong indication that you don’t fully understand what you are trying to play.
By moving from this stage, to the stage where you can comfortably tap along with the problem piece you have improved your mental technique or musical understanding. Other similar things will also become easier to play as your mental technique improves.
Finally, let’s imagine a player who performs a piece at 120bpm, but is able to execute in practice the same piece at 240bpm. Think how easy by comparison the performance is. The extra headroom gives a huge amount of space in the brain for what we can consider the “musical” side of things.
There is time to think more as the music is being played. When playing so comfortably inside the top speed, it becomes possible to effectively sit back and hear the music as if an onlooker. The result is a performance which looks almost effortless because it is! Most of the mechanical movements are taken care of by careful programming of the brain (mental technique/muscle memory) and the player is almost a pilot flying through the music
By contrast, a player who performs the same piece at his maximum practice speed of 120bpm cannot help but be rushed, for he is at the edge of his ability. He knows that if he makes one mistake the whole thing will fall apart. This creates pressure which impairs his performance and knocks his maximum speed down. He is now trying to play something at 120bpm that he can only play under pressure at 100bpm, and you can imagine the result!
Every time you improve your physical or mental technique,
you improve everything you can play and everything new you learn will be easier.
Conversely,
If you are not improving your physical or mental technique,
you are not improving anything you can play, and anything new you learn will
only be learned to the same level you are already at.
Think back to the first things you tried on a guitar. They probably hurt a bit and felt like hard work. You were pushing your hands/fingers/arms outside their comfort zone, which made them stronger and created improvement in your physical technique.
At the same time, you most likely had to concentrate, making your mind work hard to learn new shapes/patterns/movements. You were pushing your brain outside its comfort zone thereby creating improvement in your mental technique.
To sum up, technique is the foundation of everything you do on a guitar.
The better you deal with the mechanics of playing (both mental and physical),
the more musical you can be. And to improve your technique ....
Keep your practice outside your comfort zone.
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Learning the guitar is all about taking what seems impossible, getting it to a stage where it feels achievable, and steadily working toward making it feel easy. Anyone can do this, to any level they want, with a combination of desire, commitment, patience and naturally, good instruction.