That is “muscle memory”, the reason why you practice all those scales, chords, arpeggios, etc.
I can’t stress this one enough: metronome. Metronome, metronome, metronome. Get that internal clock right.
I think one of the best things you can do is get about three songs in the bag that you can play well, start to finish, on command. Then play them for people. For everybody! I know the “guy with an acoustic guitar at the party” thing is kind of a trope now, but just don’t be a douche about it. (Hell, I show up to parties with a goddamn ukulele, and I tend to get way more grief from people when I don’t bring it.)
I consider a song “mine” when I’ve played it for someone I don’t live with. Another option is making a video and posting it on FB or IG. Once you’ve got three ready to go, you can start building up from there.
Playing for people, even if it’s just a few people in a jam session, always inspires me to practice and learn more. That little dopamine rush that comes from people appreciating what I do, and the fact that I’ve made their days just a little bit better? That’s the reward that keeps me going.
Yep, and when someone asks “how do you play that” my answer is “I dunno.”
Just a break from the discussion. I just saw this video yesterday of Mark Knopfler playing with Chet Atkins and the Everly Brothers. There’s so much going on there with the guitars, I can’t even. . .
And of course, I can’t imbed it. Why can’t they fix this bullshit?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIiXoo6TSBs&ab_channel=jean-marieChaussadas
WOW! I love that song and have never heard that performance. Amazing and beautiful! Almost brought a tear to my eye.
Knopfler is such a smart performer. I’d love to have his “guitar brain”. He has an instinct for what and when to play, and what and when not to.
I had a few bass and violin lessons, but the majority of my learning has been self paced.
If you don’t know the degrees of a scale or how to construct chords, I’d really recommend at least a short stint with a teacher. I learned the first part from a teacher and the second part on my own. It’d probably have been a lot faster to ask the teacher about that before they got exasperated with me.
But yeah, I give another giant vote for playing with other people and simply finding an excuse to play as often as possible. I played for years in my early teens and didn’t get that much better, I could play a few songs through, but I wasn’t good enough that anyone would want to listen to me. A couple of years later, after I was in a couple of bands, I was almost in demand. If any of that was due to an increase in my skill, it was due to band practice a couple of times a week, and practicing most other days to learn and hone what I needed to know for practice.
I play the piano, but similarly, I’d say that a piece is “mine” when I’ve successfully played it once at a concert, or a couple of times in an impromptu session in front of appreciative strangers (airport, hotel, etc.)
So true.
The last time I played piano in public was in Palermo 2 weeks ago, as I was waiting to board my plane back home. I wasn’t happy with my performance as I made several noticeable mistakes and flubbed so badly right at the beginning of a piece that I briefly froze, then moved to another one. But the cheers and applause I got afterwards made me think that maybe it was all right after all. It certainly boosted my motivation to practice every day, to echo another essential bit of advice that has been mentioned several times above.
Agreed. I was thrilled to see him live in Portland in a non-arena setting.
I am not a musician, but I’ve been “messing around” with the bass guitar since I was 13 years old. (I am 56.)
I took a few lessons when I was a teen, but I was a terrible student. I never practiced what the teacher told me to do, and any music “theory” he tried to teach me left me bewildered.
So around 1980 (when I was 13) a family member was moving and he gave me about a dozen of his vinyl records. They were for bands I had never heard of, with names like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and The Doors.
I put on the album Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and wow… I was instantly hooked, and just loved the bass lines. I would play the songs over, and over, and over (to my mother’s annoyance), and I would try and “pick out” the notes that were played on the bass. I would repeat a short (two or three second) part of the song over and over, and then figure out the notes on my bass. I kept doing this until I figured out the whole song.
So that was my technique, and I still use the same technique today, except I am using CDs or MP3s: I repeat very short (two to three seconds) parts of the song over and over, and then pick out the notes on the bass. I keep doing this until I can play the whole song.
I still can’t read a single note of music.
I’m a pianist first, so I already knew how to read the dots. I decided I wanted to learn to play Steve Howe’s “Mood For A Day” after watching someone play it and seeing how easy it actually is although it sounds tough. I thought, if any song will teach me guitar that one will. So I bought the folio that had the guitar music (not tab!) and just worked on it phrase by phrase until I had it. The next song I conquered from the same folio was “Clap” and the song after that was “The Ancient.” Along the way the fretboard unlocked.
About three weeks later someone heard me starting to explore a few extended techniques Derek Bailey style, and said “The guitarist likes Fred Frith.” He was gobsmacked when I overheard him and I said I’m actually a pianist rather than a guitarist. He thought I’d been playing all my life, and told me at 3 weeks I was light-years ahead of the competition. I said maybe so, but what I want to play will have a very small audience.
Not quite a zombie thread, but if “self-taught” includes using some books, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Garrison Fewell’s Jazz Improvisation for Guitar: A Melodic Approach.
The basics of it are using triads, and triads alone, to organize one’s approach to the fretboard/fingerboard.
I’ve heard that’s similar to how Carol Kaye taught things, if that means anything, and I will say it’s been wearing out pencil after pencil and brain cell after brain cell to truly get the maximum out of each lesson or exercise.
You know, there’s what’s in the book (and while there is TAB for most things, there are mistakes in there) plus playing each exercise in every position one can think of. I think the late author of the book, who by all accounts was a sick mofo as player, as well as a nice guy, designed his method in that way: one is supposed to figure out all the different ways of playing his arpeggie beyond the way the nonce examples tabbed out in his book(s) indicate.
It’s, of course “jazz” oriented, but for me it’s a masterclass in how to truly navigate the fretboard.
And Pat Martino’s Linear Expressions: I truly do think learning the names of the notes on the fretboard is helpful, and this small but pithy book helps me in that regard. And the line “activities,” as Pat calls them are not just exercises, but pretty neat lines in themselves.
Do you know the title of that book by any chance?
Thank you very much for that. It sounds sort of like what I need.
You’re welcome.