Author: admin

To Watch Or Not To Watch

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When you’re first learning to play guitar, you might find yourself constantly hunching over watching either your chording hand or your strumming (picking) one.  Of course you need to do that when you’re very new to playing because how else are you going to get a sense of where the strings and the frets are?After awhile, however, you may find yourself at a disadvantage if you are habitually watching your hands.  How can you read chords and lyrics or tablature and watch your hands at the same time?  Well, you can look back and forth, but you’ll likely lose your spot on the page pretty easily.   And once you’ve firmly established this habit, it’s pretty hard to break.  I’ve had some students who’ve come to me after having played for awhile, with the habit of watching their hands.  That’s pretty much the first habit I try to break them out of.

Eric Clapton NOT looking 🙂

The truth is, after awhile, you don’t need your eyes for playing guitar any more!  You won’t believe it until you try it.  Even with my beginner students, I work to get them to stop watching pretty soon in the game.  They don’t believe they can do it either, until they try it a few times.  The fact is that your fingers have muscle memory and they will begin to remember the shapes of the chords pretty quickly.  They might not always hit the right string or the right place on the fret, but the shape will be there.  Certain chords will come more quickly than others…for instance and ‘A’ chord where you place all your fingers in the second fret, is easier to find without looking.   A ‘C’ chord does not come as easily to some, so this one will take more work.

If you have a habit of watching your chording hand, try it out.  Discipline yourself to move between two chords that you know fairly well.  You’ll be surprised at how many times your fingers will hit the right spot without the need for looking.  If you MUST look, look AFTER you move, not AS you’re moving.  This will help you to get out of the habit too.

Now of course you’ll notice that there are dots on the neck of your guitar indicating certain frets.  Most guitars have fret dots on the 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 12th frets.  Those dots are there to help you see your way to another fret, especially when you are playing up and down the neck.  And this is because sometimes you need to look in order to hit the right fret.  Classical guitars do not have these fret dots, but most other guitars do.  And when you watch Eric Clapton play, sometimes he looks down so he gets to the right fret, although most of the time he doesn’t have to look at all.  So there are certainly instances where glancing down helps.

But the sooner you get out of the habit of looking, the sooner you will be liberated!  How many times have I seen a guitar student’s fingers go to the right chord, and then look and second guess themselves?  The eyes and the thinking can actually GET IN THE WAY of playing more smoothly!  When you don’t have to look any more, you will be depending on your muscle memory and your touch rather than your eyes and your thoughts, and that’s a lot faster!

So do yourself a favour and break yourself of the habit of watching your hands…and the sooner the better 🙂

IJ

Beginner’s Guitar!

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If you check the Beginner Guitar Videos tab above, you’ll find the eight beginner guitar “classes” that you can try out while you’re sitting at home, bored out of your mind in self isolation. These will remain up long after this virus has gone its way, but please pass the link along to anyone you think might be interested. The videos are also up on my YouTube channel.

We’re all in this together!

IJ

Getting Out Of A Strum Rut Part 2

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In Part 1 of this article, we discussed how keeping your hand in motion is key to strumming, and learned how to play along with a couple of basic strums.  The standard strum that I used as an example, can be played more than one way, however!  So let’s review what the first way sounded like:

This time, we’re going to put the emphasis on the DOWN stroke and have a shorter up stroke, and that changes the feel of the strum entirely.  Take a listen and play along if you like:

This gives the same strum a swing or “country” feel. Notice that I’ve drawn the up strokes shorter to help you remember to play them more quickly. Play along with it for awhile if you need to, in order to get the feel right. Then go back and play the first one so you can duplicate the difference yourself and get a sense of how to achieve it.

When you’re listening to a song that has an acoustic guitar strum in it, you’ll often notice that the strum doesn’t necessarily stay consistent throughout the song. Sometimes that’s because once a strum pattern has been established, sometimes the guitar player will change it just slightly here and there. That’s a natural way of playing. But often a strum pattern will actually be longer than one measure.  Here’s an example from a 70′s song by the band America called “Horse With No Name“. First I’ll just show you the whole strum:

Horse With No Name Strum

Notice now the first measure or bar has our regular pattern with a swing feel, so the up strokes are shorter.  The second measure, however, has more up strokes than down strokes…we actually skip two down strokes to complete the pattern.  Confused yet?  🙂

Even if you can’t quite play it yet, have a listen to the strum below:

You will probably recognize the Em chord, but may not know D 6/9, so I’m going to diagram it here:

This chord is easy to achieve from an Em if you use your first and second finger;  all you have to do is move the first finger up to the 2nd fret of the 6th string and the 2nd finger down to the 2nd fret of the 3rd string.  If you’re just trying the strum out on your own, however, I’d suggest you try it with ONLY the Em chord until you are proficient at it.  Then introduce the D 6/9 at the second measure.  You’ll be amazed how many people know what this song is by only hearing that strum! You can find out more about that strum and playing along to it in my video blog here.

And there are many other songs out there with distinctive strums…with some songs you can probably tell what the song is by hearing only the first few seconds of it!  For instance, the Oasis song “Wonderwall” has a two-measure long strum that also makes it quite recognizable.

The strum is most noticeable in the first part of the video.  The strum is very quick, employing 1/16th beats, so you might even think that it’s 4 measures long, but it is actually only two.  Listen to it a few times and see if you can figure out what the strum is!  I dare you 🙂

There are a lot of guitar players out there who don’t pay as much attention to strumming as they do the chords or notes and scales.  But the fact is that strumming is a crucial part of learning guitar, and learning it well.

I hope you’ve learned something out of this article.  If you have, please let me know by leaving a note below!

IJ