Learning the Fretboard – Part Five

It’s been a while since I posted a lesson for this, but I feel this lesson will put Know Your Scales – Revisited in better perspective and pick up where Learning the Fretboard: Part Four left off.

First of all, for my next lesson to make sense, I need to highlight some things I’ve seen from famed instructor Steve Stein and Charlie from Guitar Mastery Method. When practicing your scales, ALWAYS use a metronome. I can’t express that enough. Not only will it help you keep a tempo, but it LITERALLY will help you with your speed. Both Steve and Charlie mention to “play them robotically”. Don’t try to get fancy right away, just GET THEM RIGHT! I was told once “you should only play something as fast as you can play it well.” If you are trying to keep up with Kirk Hammett from Metallica, you’re hindering your learning. Don’t feel bad if you have to set your metronome at 30 bpm. A helpful tip from Anders Mouridsen from Guitar Tricks in his lesson on Easy Open Chord Exercises is to start out slow, bump it up 2 (so if you start at 30 bpm, go up to 32), play, then take it down 1 (down to 31) and keep doing this as you get faster. If you’re patient enough to do this, you WILL see results.

This lesson works with the A minor pentatonic and the C major pentatonic. Both Steve and Charlie have slightly different ways of teaching how to put these two together, but I’ve found a different approach that, in a way, is the best of both of them. What you need to do is, not just learn your pentatonic boxes, but how to be able to put them together. Steve uses a method of practicing called “meandering”, where you take all your boxes and put them together, then, against a metronome, meander around in them without stopping. If you can’t think of where to go next, Steve suggests playing the same note until you think of something. A different way of meandering is taking two boxes at a time and playing both scales up and down while playing against a metronome. This way, you can get to know where each box matches up with the other before TRULY meandering between them.

Below is the A minor/C major pentatonics combined into one scale lesson. Practiced slowly against a metronome, you can start to get the feel of where your fingers should go when playing from one to the next. While this isn’t a set in stone way of how to navigate between boxes, it will help you develop confidence as to where to go next when you do truly meander.

Practice this for about 10 minutes each day using Anders method of increasing speed and you should see dramatic results in a week.

Test Your Skills – Perfecting Your Technique (Part 1)

In this multi-part series, we will look at techniques to help you play better.  This is not to say that everyone is not playing well, but, simply put, it’s to help you improve what skills you already have.  These are techniques that I, or others, have developed that have helped, not only myself, but also my students, play better than we did before.

This part will pick up where the previous Test Your Skills lesson, The Perfect Warmup, left off.  In that lesson, we were talking about using the Gym exercises and the Digi-Flex to warm up and build finger strength and coordination.  In my lessons I give to my students, one of my lessons is called “Flailing Fingers Are Failing Fingers”.  If anyone who is new to guitar, or has played for years, has had this problem, you’ll understand perfectly what I mean.  Flailing fingers are fingers that, as soon as they are lifted from the string, fly 3-4 inches into the air to where they are almost perpendicular to the fretboard.  This is fine if you plan to play songs no faster than 60 bpm.  If you have honed this talent and can play faster, more power to you.  It’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll never play Flight of the Bumblebee if you play like this.  As a rule of thumb, 1/2 an inch is the maximum you should lift your fingers from the strings.  This will give you better control over the speed and accuracy of your playing.

I noticed one of my students playing with flailing fingers.  Knowing I had done it myself in the past, and how much my playing has improved ever since I got out of that bad habit, I had to get him out of it as well.  At first, he was having the same trouble I was having…old habits are hard to break…especially the bad ones.  By the end of our hour lesson, after working with him on it for about 15 minutes, his finger control was much improved.  Not long after, he called me to reschedule a lesson as it was conflicting with a previous engagement and told me that he had been practicing this skill and was getting much better.  It especially helped with scale practice as he was able to more fluidly go through each scale.  He noted that, each scale he practiced, he could hear that scale in many of the songs he has heard.  Without perfecting this skill, he may not have heard this.

Another technique I teach my students is to warm up with chromatic scales.  If you are 40 or over, like I am, and this is your first time playing, or if you’ve never played, it’s almost guaranteed your dexterity is going to be a lot more rigid than someone in their 20s.  That’s not to say that someone in their teens would have better dexterity, but chances are you’ve never really stretched your fingers anymore than you needed to.  One of my students had this issue.  He had damaged his fingers over the years from different accidents and his hands weren’t as flexible as they used to be.  I told him the key is to stretch prior to playing.  I had him hold out his left arm, wrap his right hand around all of his fingers, then gently pull down and towards his elbow.  This stretches your upper forearm.  I then had him individually pull each finger back as far as he could go, then do the same with his thumb.  These stretches can be found at Musician’s Health.com with complete descriptions on how to do the stretches,  as well diagrams on how to do these and other stretches.  There are also many interesting articles and other things to help inspire the musician in you.  I also had my student use his right thumb and pinky fingers to spread the webbing between each finger of his left hand.  This is especially helpful if you are playing in the upper 5 frets as it can be difficult to reach a span of 5 frets at any given time.

After stretching, my student was playing chromatic scales better, but was still having issues with muted strings, buzzing strings, and making the total stretch.  My next piece of advice for him was to pretend he accidentally got super glue on his hands before playing.  With his first finger (index finger) on the first fret, I told him to lock it in that position and play the next note on the second fret with his second finger (middle).  As he did so, I noticed that both notes were ringing clear, but he was rocking his hand to prepare for the next fret.  I warned him to not rock his hand, but to hold it steady, lock in the first two fingers, then reach for the third fret with his third finger (ring).  This he did, and successfully made the note ring.  Finally, I told him to lock the first three fingers in and reach for the fourth fret with his fourth finger (pinky).  Then I had him hold that position for as long as he could.  We then went through the stretching exercises again.  By the end of our hour lesson, he was playing the chromatic scales more fluidly and every note rang clearly.

Next time you practice, pull up these Test Your Skills series and use them as part of your warm up and practice time.  I’m sure you’ll notice a definite difference in your playing.

Increase Your Playing Speed

One obstacle that people face when learning how to play the guitar is how to play songs that require you to play fast.  I had the same issue. No matter how much I practiced, it seemed like I could never get to the speed I needed to be at. Then, I happened upon a few sites that said similar things that made sense.

Most of these sites suggested getting a metronome. This is a great idea. I own a small, digital metronome/tuner that I use to keep time and increase my speed while learning new music. It has several settings for different note types, such as quarter, eighth, eighth triplets, and sixteenth. It also has a range of 30 beats per minute (bpm) to 230 bpm. When I’m learning anything new, depending on the complexity, I start between 30 and 60 bpm. After every successful run through the riff with the proper picking technique, no buzzing notes, and no missed notes or mistakes, I then increase the timing by 5 bpm.

Some of you may have tried this and failed because you get to a certain point and then all you do is make mistakes. This is fine because you’re still learning. Two tips you may want to try is to keep pushing up 5 bpm more to about 10-15 bpm higher than the rate you were messing up on. Still messing up? That’s okay…go back down to the setting you messed up on. You should be able to play at that rate. If not, no worries, here’s another great tip: take the piece you’re working on and break it down into 2, 3, or 4 not chunks and play those without the metronome until you master each one. Next, put two pieces together and play them until mastered. Do the same with the rest of the pieces, then, put them all together. Does the piece you’re trying to learn seem easier? It should because you just trained your eyes, ears, and hands to play the piece in smaller pieces. Now, turn on the metronome. I’ve experienced gains of 30 bpm just by doing this same technique.

If  you’re still struggling to reach a certain rate or get passed a rate you’re stuck on, take a break and let your mind and hands rest. Coming back to it after a break usually helps.

My advice…take all these tips and use them well. If you use these tips to practice new music, you’ll notice yourself picking up speed in no time. Another thing you’ll notice is what I call the “Matrix Affect”, named after the movie The Matrix because you’ll notice that no matter how fast you increase the beats per minute, it never seems to get any faster. That’s because you are tuning your mind, ears, and hands to perform the piece where your mind stretches the beats out so that it appears you have plenty of time to play each note when in actuality you truly are playing faster.