Muting Unwanted String Noise Have you ever heard someone playing a guitar and something just didn’t sound right? Maybe it sounded muddy or amateur and you were unsure why? Many times this situation is unintended string noise. Because of the amplifier, this problem is exaggerated on electric guitar more so than an acoustic. Difference between an average and pro guitar player One of the most important things that will set a great player apart from an average player is having awareness of unwanted string noise. First things first, you need to actually be able to hear if your playing is clean or ..read more

How To Practise Scales Effectively for Intermediate Guitar Players Scale practice is one of the fundamental things for any musician, especially guitar players. Due to the layout of the guitar strings, and different tuning options, practicing scales becomes easier for guitarists, as compared to other musicians. But this is one of the reasons why many guitarists fail to reach the level of musical excellence that musicians playing other instruments reach. In short, practicing scales up and down using scale shapes and fretboard diagrams all the time, makes you a lazy musician and does not bring ..read more

How to Connect Your Ideas To Create For Songwriting Easily Connecting ideas into full songs smoothly is one of the biggest challenges of songwriting. In this series of articles, Less is More Songwriting we’re going to discuss several ways you can easily connect ideas that you’ve been working on.             This will help you get more out of your songwriting ideas and help your song ideas sound more smoothly woven together. Remember the most important thing about song craft skills, is that they are invisible. You don’t want the listener to be able to pick out the song craft that went into the ..read more

What Are Scales And Why Do We Need To Learn Them?When we start to learn guitar we hear that we need to learn scales and that is certainly true. But why do we actually need to learn them, what will we use them for and how many scales do we actually need to learn? What is a scale? A scale can be defined as a group of notes that progress one after the other and have a certain structure. You are probably aware that each fret on the guitar equals a half-step (or semi-tone) and that two frets equal the distance of a whole step (or whole tone). A half-step is the smallest distance we can travel on th ..read more

How To Stop Playing The Same Things On Guitar All The TimeIf you have been playing guitar for any amount of time past a month or 2 you will start to get tired of playing the same things all the time. Everybody goes through this and we will look at how to overcome this dreaded feeling and break on through to the other side. Why does this happen? First let us examine why we get stuck playing the same old things over and over. We start off playing something because we like it and enjoy how it sounds. Or maybe you liked the challenge of learning something you knew you couldn't yet do. Then once yo ..read more