I’m getting too lazy old to type out lessons, so I figured I would start doing more videos! This one is about economy picking and how to build up the technique little by little, while focusing on keeping your picking motion nice and relaxed, tension-free and smooth. Go at your own pace and enjoy!
For more about playing guitar tension-free, check out this article:
I hear this question and see it posted online all the time. I don't think there has ever been a definitive answer, but the question intrigues me…so I decided to Google it.
That little suggestion dropdown shows Google’s frequent searches-which means 'Guitar' tops the chart over all other things to learn? Wow! Well, naturally I had to see how long it takes to get GOOD at guitar…
so I searched it:
Same thing – Guitar tops the charts again. Evidently a lot of people want to get good, and they want to know how long that takes! Looking at some of the results, I didn't really find a definitive answer to 'How Long ?'. After around 30 years of toiling away with the old 6-string, Here are some of my own thoughts.
The first thing everyone says about learning guitar (or any instrument) is that it takes discipline. While I do think practice and repetitive activity do require some degree of discipline, I think a passion to play is more important. If you sit down to practice and get lost for hours, truly enjoying it, you probably have that passion. If you sit down to play and 10 minutes later you are frustrated because you aren't learning fast enough, maybe you need some new inspiration! This syndrome is especially common with older players, who have less time to practice and more self-criticism to throw on themselves.
When you are learning to play, it is important to build up your rhythm skills and listening skills. One great way to do that is just to play along with some songs you are learning. Even if you can't play everything perfectly, just getting used to listening and following the music is a crucial thing to practice. Making mistakes and learning to compensate is something you use at all skill levels. Playing music should not be a rigid, flawless routine like painting by numbers. Little quirks and mistakes are what make it listenable and human – instead of cold and mechanical. Don't be afraid to screw up! Just play along and have some fun! I know – there are some readers right now thinking 'That is horrible advice! Never play something you can't play perfectly!' Well, I have to disagree here. One of the most common problems I saw when teaching students (especially older ones!) was when they could not get a part down just right, they would sit down, spend 10 minutes fumbling around with it, get frustrated, and either walk away completely or keep banging their head on the wall, getting nowhere and getting discouraged. I say move on and come back later, or figure out a way to play the part that works for you. Be clever…be inventive..guitar playing is not brain surgery. If you have the type of mindset and the time to relentlessly practice something until you nail it, go for it – but that approach doesn't work for everyone.
We have all seen the Youtube videos of freakishly good kids playing advanced stuff that most people couldn't dream of, so I guess the answer to 'How Long ?' CAN be just a few years. But that is not the norm. Most of us do not have 14 hours a day to practice. When I was a kid, I did practice that much – usually at the expense of sleep or other human comforts… but it is important to point out that the learning curve is not always a straight line up.
Learning an instrument is not all fun and happy times. There will be times when you feel like turning your axe into a pile of mulch…that is just life. If it was really easy, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Throughout the process you will have breakthroughs where you really feel like you progressed, and you will have stretches where you feel like you have hit a plateau. Pretty normal stuff. The secret is to stay motivated and enjoy what you are doing. Now let us dig deeper into those bursts of progress.
I remember having students who started with me from ground-zero…no prior guitar experience at all – often getting into it for no better reason than 'My mom wanted me to have a hobby'. I would teach them some basics, they would take 6 months or so of lessons and then move on to the next thing – football or whatever their surroundings pushed them into. At that point in their life, music was not the burning passion that it can be for some…not that there is anything wrong with that…but they are not focused on it enough to really progress. I sometimes saw those 'Sleeper' students come back a couple of years later (after changing schools or friends or whatever) and they were like a whole different person – totally immersed in playing, hanging with friends that played in bands, excited about guitar and music. Often in only a year or two they had completely changed their attitude and become driven to play, undoubtedly influenced by some outside force – the friends, the promise of fame and fortune (kidding!) or whatever.
The point here is that your ability and desire to learn has as much to do with your life situation as it does with your 'natural talent' or ability. the mind is a powerful tool when it is focused on a certain thing – and throughout your life you will find times when that focus is easy to sustain and times when it is not.
Every player I know that really got good at their instrument had a time in their life when they were fully immersed in playing – usually around 4 or 5 years of serious dedication to it. This is what I think of as the 'Raw Materials' phase. This is when you learn to pick, strum, memorize scales and chords, read music, whatever you can stuff in your brain. It usually happens once in a lifetime, and really separates the casual players from the extraordinary ones. The raw materials phase is important, but must be supplemented with real-world experience.
Having great technical skill on the guitar will certainly help your playing, but getting experience playing with other people and a variety of musical styles will truly bring your playing to the next level. The problem with toiling away in isolation is that you don't always focus on the things that make you a well-rounded player. Get out and play with real people – they will push you harder than you push yourself, and hopefully motivate you to learn new things. Some of the biggest bursts of progress happen when you play with others. This is how you get beyond the raw technical skill and actually develop musical skills, which make you a seasoned player. Improvising is one skill that elusive to many players, often because they don't get out and play with others. Learning to listen and react to the music is something you get from playing in dynamic real-life situations. Practicing scales and chords is only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
When you do play with others, leave your ego at home in the practice room. It is a bad habit to bring the mindset of 'I need to show these guys what I can do'. Don't let your self-consciousness get the best of you. Play for the song, focus on being a team player and playing what works in the song. If you are constantly worried about how you look to others, you are either going to be really stiff and uncomfortable playing, or you are going to be an annoying show-off that has to prove something every song. Just dig in and listen to what everyone is playing and try to fit in, while adding your own style and flavor to the mix.
Throughout your life you are going to have high and low points of interest with the guitar – unfortunately we can't all play guitar 24-7 – we have families and jobs and other responsibilities, so you have to let the passion ebb & flow. You can always come back to it and immerse yourself when you have the desire.
Hot off the press – I recently played on a CD with Adrian Duke titled ‘Lazy Bones’. It’s an interesting collection of tunes, all covers, some arranged in curious ways. We recorded everything at Red Amp Audio in Richmond.
There were a ton of great players on the session – Jody Boyd on drums, John Small Jr. on bass, Wade Short on bass, Skip Gailes on sax, John Winn on clarinet and sax, Kevin Harding on guitar, Rusty Farmer on bass, as well as myself and of course Adrian Duke on piano and vocals.
Jody Boyd did the studio magic and engineered everything.
If I had to pick a favorite tune it would be ‘Hallelujah’, the Leonard Cohen tune. Playing at such a slow tempo is always a challenge but it turned out great. We cut the rhythm section on that and most of the other tunes live in the studio.
‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ is another favorite cut, switching back and forth between a swinging old-school jazz feel and a funky back beat thing.
One thing that can’t be taught is real-world experience. You just have to get out and soak up what you can to become a versatile player. Becoming fluent in a given style requires a couple of things – immersing yourself in the style to learn it’s particular quirks, and then getting out in the ‘real world’ to put what you learned into action.
Get out and play with real musicians. Preferably ones better than you. Nothing is better for your progress than actual feedback and criticism from musicians you respect. A single gig where you leave thinking ‘I suck’ can do wonders to motivate you. Musicians have funny ways of giving feedback – some more direct than others. The point is, don’t sit in your room playing with yourself. Get out there and live it for real. (Or at least invite ‘em over…)
If you’re trying to learn a certain style of music, it usually pays to find out something about where that style came from. If it’s Blues, learn the different flavors of blues – country blues, delta blues, jump blues, Chicago, Piedmont, Memphis – on down the line. Most importantly, LISTEN to the styles and really try to discern how the musicians play each style. The more styles you understand, the better you can grasp the styles that evolved from them. almost all music is derivative to some extent – nothing new under the sun, as ‘they’ say!
When you learn a new lick or concept, the best way to make it stick is to figure out how to apply it right away. Don’t just learn licks that you don’t relate to some sort of musical context – figure out the essence of the lick and learn how to move it around to different keys, etc… so you can use it later. If you learn a phrase that works over a certain chord progression, take apart the phrase and progression to see how you can utilize the same concept in other tunes. A phrase learned and played out of context (without an underlying chord progression) is often meaningless – how it fits in a song gives it meaning and power. Inject your own style and flavor and boom! You learned something.
I can’t say how many times I hear players wailing away with seemingly no awareness that they are not locked in with the groove. Every style of music has rhythmic characteristics that you need to be familiar with if you want to really play the style. If you’re playing too ahead of the beat or too behind the beat, or even right straight on top of it, but the rest of the band is somewhere else, it won’t gel. Learn to hear it. And RELAX…tension sucks the groove right out of you.
One of the telling signs of the lesser-experienced player is lack of nuance. They learn a song or a lick but they are more concerned with just powering through it and getting through the part, not milking it and really making it musical. Plenty of young guns have the dexterity to blaze through stuff, but the lack of nuance makes it sound rushed, forced, stiff, and other terms you don’t want describing your playing.
Slow down and listen close…don’t glaze over the good stuff.
Everyone has little weird habits that repeatedly surface in their playing, some good, some bad – usually they end up forming the basis of your style. Even if you are trying to play someone else’s lick, you’re going to slip in those little quirks – let em flow…embrace idiosyncrasies – one day they may set you apart (in a good way).
In the martial arts there is a concept called ‘Shuhari’ which translates loosely to Imitate, Assimilate, then Transcend…or Innovate. A beginner learns by first copying the teacher move-for-move. Just like learning licks from another player.
The next stage – assimilation – also thought of as Detachment, is where the student breaks from the patterns and rules and questions their place in the big picture. This is the self-discovery part – on guitar it’s where all the licks and techniques you copy start to (hopefully) make sense in the bigger picture – in other words – how to play musically, not just parroting others licks.
The final stage - Transcendence – is where the rules are irrelevant – what’s right is just ‘known’. The guiding light in this stage is Intuition – Instinct is honed from years of patient practice and observation, and now it all comes together in a natural, fluid way. Effortless action, ready to create.
If you’re just starting out, don’t avoid imitation, it’s an important stage. It gets you on the right track faster than just randomly hacking away on your own. You’ll find that most ‘child prodigies’ go through a really heavy imitation phase, where they emulate a certain hero so closely people wonder if they’ll ever break away. If they really have what it takes, and/or a good teacher, they eventually move into other phases and become great players.
If you want to become a more versatile player, open your ears and learn all you can. Expose yourself to all sorts of music – learn to recognize certain styles of playing even within other genres. You might hear jazz licks in a rock tune, just played more aggressively…or blues licks in a metal tune, etc… It’s all out there like a big hodge-podge now… bending the rules is the norm. Be as versatile and open as you can and you’ll get more gigs, more opportunities to play and have fun with it. Soak it up!
In my younger days I played a lot of fast noodly stuff, aggressive rock or classical playing where my muscles and tendons were tortured for hours on end. I had some issues with tendonitis, a ganglion cyst, which caused all sorts of pain when playing, so I started focusing on ways to help it. I looked for ways to reduce the tension in my hands and arms while I played, and by sheer necessity I greatly reduced the pain and vastly increased my endurance.
Something I’ve noticed in the last few years is that my technique has changed, mostly due to the type of music I play. I still play a little fast noodly stuff, but most of my gigs these days are rock & roll and country, where 90% of the time you’re playing rhythm guitar, and the solos are more listener-friendly, just solid ‘fit-the-song’ type stuff. All well and good, but that style of playing causes me to let my focus on technique slip, and bad habits develop.
I tried all sorts of things to help alleviate the pain when playing, from different hand positions, sitting positions, etc… I was told about Alexander Technique, which isn’t just for musicians, but many practice for it’s benefits to posture and proper alignment of the body. I am not a big disciplined routine kind of person, so I just had to plow my own way, taking bits and pieces and discovering my own way to fix my problem.
One thing I got from every relaxation approach was that tension doesn’t always necessarily originate in the place you think is the problem. For guitarists, that’s the hands and arms. But, the problem isn’t always directly related to how you wiggle your fingers…it could be starting in your head, your neck, back, shoulders, etc… It is amazing how your body can hold stress and tension while your mind is focusing on something (like playing guitar…) Whether it’s clenching your teeth, tensing your shoulders or arms, or simply holding the guitar wrong, just being aware of the origin and following the chain of tension can help fix bad habits.
Grab a metronome or drum machine, set it to a comfortable tempo, and practice playing something easy like a scale or lick, while paying strict attention to:
First – Your Breathing. Should be nice and even…Don’t hold it! Lots of people do this.
Second – Your Jaw muscles. (don’t clench!)
Third – Your Shoulders & Back. Relax them, don’t hold one shoulder higher than the other, etc…
Fourth – Your Elbows – They are a common place to hold tension when picking.
Fifth – Your Wrists/Hands.
Press only as hard as you need to fret the notes
Don’t strangle the neck with your thumb
Make sure you are not holding your wrist (on either hand) in an unnatural position/angle.
The purpose of all of this is to get you to think about the many places you could be creating counter-productive tension, and eliminating it. Bad habits can effect your tone, your timing, and your stamina. Not to mention you can create serious problems like tendonitus, carpal tunnel syndrome or worse. It is truly possible to play virtually tension-free, and with a little practice it comes pretty easy. But, if you’re like me and slip into bad habits easily, things can slide downhill pretty fast. Keep things loose and relaxed and you will play better, guaranteed!
I got my first ‘good’ guitar back before the price of ‘good’ guitars was through the roof. I still have this guitar, the only guitar I’ve kept through the years.
Cherry Sunburst Les Paul
I never met him, but Les Paul seemed like such a cool cat. So full of energy and always living life to the fullest. I may have never known him, but his name has certainly been a standard (unintended pun) around my house.
This has got to be the coolest commercial ever. We’ll all miss Les Paul.
Well, ever might be a bit exaggerated, but really, this little exercise can really help to focus your technique and get some specific things happening with your picking. The lick itself is short, so learning it and remembering it is easy.
Here’s a short clip of the lick, played pretty slow – play along or just listen.
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The repeated downstrokes are swing 8ths with the last note missing… The alternate picked notes are 8th note triplets (all 3 notes).
Start at a tempo that is completely comfortable for you to play through it with total control. Don’t let the simplicity of this fool you! Here are some things to keep in mind:
The whole point of the exercise is to gain control over picking, so don’t take shortcuts. You must ALTERNATE PICK every note. Make sure you are not economy picking the notes (repeated up or down-strokes. This lick is very easy to play w/ econo picking, so there’s really no point to that. We are after super-tight alternate picking here.
Keep your hands relaxed. Even when you speed it up. The muscles you use to pick fast work much better when they are not clinched up tight. Chill out…breathe…
Don’t speed up until you can play through the notes over and over with NO mistakes or fumbly notes. Accuracy and clarity are key.
Playing in open position messes with some people’s heads for some reason – if so for you, try it in a closed position. Here’s the same idea at the 5th fret:
One more variation, this time on the low strings. Your hand will be in a slightly different position, so keep relaxed, loose, don’t move any more than necessary to pick each note.
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Results from this exercise will come in time. Just loop it until you can repeat the notes without any mistakes, and you really feel ‘in control’ of the up and down strokes. Once you feel this, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Your up-strokes will be just as strong and even as your down-strokes, and you will not be scrambling to get each note. I use it as a warm-up exercise or just to tune up my picking when I get slack.
Technical problems usually have technical solutions…I always post technical things because they can be addressed and/or aided by technical means – like if you want to get better at chords…Practice Chords! or if you need to improve your bending or vibrato…Practice bends and vibrato! It’s easy to give suggestions and examples of technical stuff, and most of the time progress can be made.
One question I don’t think anyone EVER asked me when I was teaching guitar lessons was… “How can I be more musical?” Hmmm…after all, the guitar is just a medium, right? a means to an end…a blank canvas, waiting for input. John Lennon once said, “I’m an artist, and if you give me a tuba I’ll bring you something out of it.”
So once you have the bag of tricks, transcending the technical and making music is not so easy. In fact, there is no answer to that one. No solution, no way to pinpoint it. Sure, you can emulate emotion, play with more dynamics, feign some sort of tortured soul act, jump up and down, roll around on the ground…whatever passes for passion. But really, how direct is the conduit from your heart to your hands? Do you stop by the head on the way to the hands? Does is take years of heartache to forge a ‘real’ musician or can the neophites play too?
See, none of these questions really have answers…I sure don’t know. I do know that for me, the only way to feel like I’m feeling the music is to STOP thinking about music and just think about LIFE. Whatever that might entail. Thinking about music or guitars or amps or some new chord shape or scale or tricky lick does nothing but feed my technical side…it’s not going to help me dig in to a song and really add anything to it. That’s the goal I think – adding something by giving a part of yourself, imparting something to the music that could only come from you. That’s why the really great players have a strong signature sound – they are putting their whole being into it, transcending the details of technique and gear, making music that could only be theirs.
So I guess the place to start when trying to be more musical is right in your own life experience, your ‘wheelhouse’…figure out what means something to you beyond fingers and frets and speakers…how does what you’re playing relate to YOU? Where does the sound you are making cross paths with the human that you’ve become?
One thing I did learn from teaching guitar is that not everyone is a deep, poetic, artsy-fartsy mysterious musical madman that parties like a rock star, dates supermodels and sacrifices something for their art. The fact is, most people are far from that, and that’s just fine. Most people just want to play an instrument for fun, or the technical challenge, or just to hear themselves play the opening riff to every rock song they grew up listening to. It’s funny how mentioning that you play guitar immediately conjures up (in other people’s minds) the image of some crazy musician type with no responsibilities, no worries…just SEX DRUGS AND ROCK & ROLL, BABY!!!
Ok, sorry if this rant took a strange turn, but I thought it would be a good way to inject a little reality into the topic, which is my whole point – your reality is what is going to shape the way you play. Embrace it – anger, happiness, frustration, loss, fun, jealousy, rage, love, hope, fear…all are necessary to make the world go ’round. Let them all be your motivation, throw ‘em all in the pot and stir!