Whether you’re just picking up a guitar for the first time, or you’ve been playing for years, there’s a good chance that at some point you’ll find yourself tormented by a particularly challenging riff or lick or tune. Maybe you’re hitting your first barre chord, or you’re learning some J.S. Bach, or maybe you’re preparing to astound the world with your own version of Little Wing. Wherever we all are on the road to guitar stardom, the struggle is the same; sometimes our fingers just won’t do what we tell them to.
Fortunately, regardless of how complicated that musical bit is, there’s an often overlooked but fairly simple process we can use to greatly accelerate our time-to-mastery. The only equipment we need is our guitar and a metronome. (If you don’t have a metronome, go get one. It is all too common for us guitar players to want to do things up to full speed right away, before our hands are ready for it. Having a metronome will help force us to play at a consistent tempo, and help rein in our shredding tendencies.) For the sake of this article, we’ll refer to whatever bit of music we’re trying to learn as The Music. So, grab your guitar, and let’s get started.
The first thing we want to do is play through The Music as best as we can, as close to full-speed as possible, right?
NOOOOOOOO! That may be what we want to do, but it’s not what we should do. What we actually want is:
Step 1: Fret-hand Visualization That’s the left hand for righties, and the right hand for lefties.
People often underestimate the power of mental rehearsal. After all, what fun is having a guitar if we’re not actually playing it? Well, there’s a good reason that Olympic and professional athletes use visualization to help achieve high levels of performance; to be scientific about it, it works! I know it’s awfully tempting to play the guitar right now, but we’re going to delay that musical gratification for a moment in pursuit of higher reward.
First, we’re going to take in just a snippet of The Music, however much we can comfortably remember all at once. For some this may be one chord, or two notes, for others it may be whole measures or melody lines. The point here is not to challenge ourselves to see how much we can learn at once, but rather to focus on learning a small portion excellently. Three perfectly toned notes are better than twenty sloppy ones.
Now, we visualize our fret hand playing that bit of The Music. Don’t try to finger the notes on the fretboard yet! If it helps, we can close our eyes, and picture what we’re trying to do. We’ll rehearse this section mentally three to five times, or more, until we have a clear picture of what we want to play. (Tip: If you find yourself having to think about what-comes-next from note to note, or chord to chord, you’re probably trying to learn too much at once. Take a smaller bite.) Once we’ve got the mental image, we proceed to:
Step 2: Fret-hand String Practice
We’re going to ignore the frets for a moment. Time to break out that metronome. Set the metronome to one-half tempo … so if the song you want to learn is 120 beats per minute, you’ll set your metronome to 60 bpm. If you need to take it slower, that’s fine! But don’t try to go any faster yet, even if you can. Now, we pick a spot on the neck where our hand is comfortable, and lightly rest our fingers on the strings. Visualize your Bit of The Music. This time, finger the appropriate strings at the appropriate time. Again, don’t worry about fret position yet, we’ll get there in a second. We’ll only need to do this step once or twice, but you can do it until you feel comfortable. Think of it as limbering up. On to:
Step 3: Fret-hand Complete Practice
Step 3 is a lot like step 2, except this time, you guessed it, we’re going to add in proper fretting. (No, not worrying! I mean on the fretboard! Ha ha! Get it? Puns are always better when you explain them!) Okay, so we’ll set our metronomes back on half-speed again, and this time, we’re going to play through our snippet of The Music with the fret-hand only. That means proper strings, proper frets, with real-life just-like-we’re-playing-for-real finger pressure. We’ll do that a few times, until we feel comfortable again. And by that point, we’re halfway there! (More or less.)
Step 4: Pick-hand Visualization That’s the other hand, whether you’re holding a pick or not.
This is a lot like where we started, except this time, we’re going to visualize the strings we want to strum and/or pick. If we’re learning a rhythm or a lead line, the process is the same. We’re going to visualize the rhythm of the strum, or the strings we need to pick, or pluck, or whatever we’re doing to them. Again, take your time, make sure you picture exactly what you want that hand to do, and keep at it until it’s not a struggle to hold in your mind. Three to five times, or more, and we’re off to:
Step 5: Pick-hand Practice
Just like Step 3, we’re going to run through the snippet of The Music at half-speed as if we’re really playing, but using only our pick hand. (Meanwhile, our fret-hand is free to encourage and otherwise cheer our pick-hand on!) Once again, we’re going to take it slowly, and we’re going to get it right. If we mess up, we’re going to take a breath, relax, and try it again, until we get it, and until we’re comfortable. When we’re there, holy cow, we’re going to:
Step 6: Put It All Together (Sloooowly)
Finally! This is what we’ve been waiting for! Except, we’re going to let Mr. Metronome (or Ms., as the case may be) keep our speedy tendencies in check. We’re going to play through our entire snippet, both hands together, at the same time, at one-half tempo. You’re so close now, don’t skip ahead and try to play at full speed! Concentrate on getting good, clean tone and full notes. (Once you’ve got that, it’s easy to add speed. But once you’re up to full speed, it can be very difficult to go back and fix sloppy string work.) When we’ve done that satisfactorily, we can:
Step 7: Amaze Your Friends and Family And make all your enemies insanely jealous
We’re just going to repeat this process for each snippet of The Music until we’ve got The Music down in its entirety. From that point on, we’ll bump our metronome up a few beats per minute at a time, and the next thing we know, we’ll be up to full speed and having to sign autographs and hire security to keep our fans from tearing the shirts from our backs. Classical guitar fans are notorious for such behavior.
That’s it! Except for two notes.
Note 1: The more you use this method, the quicker you’ll get through it. It looks like a lot on paper, but in practice, it’s a pretty smooth and natural process. You’ll grow to love it! Or at least, you’ll grow to love the results you get with it.
Note 2: This might not sound like earth-shattering stuff. It’s not. That’s the point. Playing the guitar isn’t really all that complicated … it’s just taking a few simple skills, and putting them all to use at the same time. Breaking things down into their component parts can make it a lot easier to absorb for many people, especially me.
