That awkward moment when ..

[Rakib]

I've been playing for about 4-5 years now and I have never really had a guitar teacher. I mainly learned guitar through internet, playing by myself, Guitar Pro tabs(yes I know that hateful look. I looked at tabs I confess) and nagging my friends who already knew how to play guitar to show me a few stuffs(and I am forever grateful to them). The problem at this point is I cannot perfect anything I pickup. I always keep on messing up a note or making a buzz or something silly. I picked up For The Love of God recently but it's far from being perfect. I'm not talking about note to note perfection, I'm talking about the perfection that makes your playing look solid and not clutzy. Is it because I have never learned the guitar properly technique-wise or is it because I lack the practice and it's just normal? Is it a common phase every guitarist goes through that suddenly over come through hard work and practice ?

PS: I will admit that I can't practice the guitar the way I used specially because of study pressure coming from the engineering courses I'm majoring on but I do play the guitar for atleast an hour almost everyday.

[SausageofPower]

I'd throw a metronome into your practice routine. Play at a tempo where you can play everything comfortably and correct, then bump the speed up gradually until you reach your target speed. It sounds like you've just been sloppy and need to refine your skills a bit, IMHO.

[Rakib]

Yeah the metronome is helping me quite a bit. I think I am too impatient and rush too fast before perfecting a certain section. I'll keep practicing with the metronome and see what comes up.

[ginsambo]

It helps if you break down the part into phrases and listen to which note the accents are on. Unfortunately, you really have to be ten times better than just being able to play the part to pull it off fluidly, so its just practice, practice, practice. Pick style may also have an effect on the sound, if you aren't competant in your own style yet, really you need a teacher for that, you might be uppicking when changing strings when its more of a rake style etc. Left hand finger strength, you should be able to play the part loudly without picking a note.

There is no substitute though for experience and playing as much stuff as you can. It will help you recognise augmented licks and get inside the head of the player that wrote the piece to see what he/she is trying to do. That way you'll be able to feel it better.

In my day we didn't have tab software and free tab players online. We were lucky if we could afford a tab book and used to slow down records or wear cassette tapes out trying to learn parts, as often the tabs still leaves you clueless. My first efforts with tab must have been shocking, play everything up to speed and in time but the phrasing was so off it would sound like another guitarist rather than the artists part, so I know where you are coming from, I still can't do half the stuff I want to do.

Get some classical lessons, it'll stretch out you fingers and you can practice arpegios and scales and with different accents you can make the phrasing sound completely different. Right now I'm really into Randy Rhoads phrasing licks again and looking up his bluesier solos online. I love the way he kind of see saws up and down scales. Its totally not my style as I'm more badly executed ascending and descending legato with a bunch of blues riffs and a few weird notes thrown in, like most lazy and badly disciplined crap arse guitar players The way he pulls it off, its so clean, equal note volume and its so raunchy through the MXR and Marshall, he makes it sound so fluid and easy, when actually simple sounding stuff like that is really difficult to do and if you miss a note or a beat you are thrown completely off, there is no room to hide with a bend or a legato pull off etc as you would normally.. In fact faster Paul Gilbert string skipping hammer on pull off style stuff can be a lot easier. You can tell he was well self disciplined back in the day and he is still good to learn from, apart from his repeated solo performance, which he even did prior to Ozzy....which was a bit lazy and a bit crap to be honest.

Yeah if you can learn to see saw scales in ascending or descending groups of notes at fixed intervals, rather than just ascending or descending runs with a few token legato-esque pull off or hammer on trills thrown in, you'll play well and learn some discipline.

[KevinDguitar]

You can get by on 20-30 minutes a day if you organize your practice and stay goal focused. Every player needs both long and short term goals.. short term: conquering a lick or passage or piece and having it up to speed in say 6 weeks.. long term: where do you want to be in say a year/what is my overall goal for being proficient?, etc..
Let's say in a perfect world, you have an hour.. not counting 10 minutes or so to warm up (more on warming up in a sec)..
divide that hour into 4 "15 minute blocks".. and inside each block, give yourself 4 areas to cover:
1: Legato
2: alternated picking
3: chord vocabulary or rhythm
4: work on something you want to learn to be able to perform
*these are merely examples/suggestion of 4 areas you could possibly cover..
now you're on the road to staying well rounded.. as opposed to spending your entire practice time on just one singular thing and ignoring the other areas/facets of your playing.. it also prevents burnout by keeping things moving and challenging (this is great for folks too with short attention spans)..
In regards to warming up.. its called warming up... take it slow.. let the muscles and tissue warm up and get the blood flowing before doing anything too technically/physically demanding.. its your practice time.. there's nobody to impress. And even with regard to speed (which I personally think players put WAY too much emphasis on)..speed is the by product of accuracy.. and that really only comes from SLOW.. RELAXED.. methodical practice.
When you work through things slow.. you can see bad habits before they form. You can take a physical and mental self inventory.. "am I keeping my arms, hands, neck, shoulders, jaw, etc relaxed and loose?".. "am I staying relaxed in my breathing?".."am I keeping my hands/fingers close to the strings and only making the minimal movement to perform the task at hand/no wasted movement/economy of motion?".. am I being consistent in my picking?" and so forth..
Muscles will perform the way they are trained.. if you're tense when practicing, your muscles will be tense when trying to perform.. now let's say you're going to play a gig.. EVERYONE deals with some form of nerves, stage fright, anticipation.. call it what you will.. this cause muscle tension.. if your muscles are already tense.. then you add the tension from the anxiety of performing.. you'll lock up and the muscle will either fatigue quickly or they'll just be so locked up that you wont really be able to play comfortably at all.. hence why is so important to stay relaxed and at ease during all practice..
and know when to quit.. the moment you are to the point of absolute frustration.. STOP! take a break.. you're not getting anything done, but making it worse.. remember too that its okay to take time off.. return to it when its fresh.

[RacerX]

Great advice, Kevin! Although I got a chuckle from:

"am I keeping my...jaw relaxed and loose?"

I thought about all those pics of JCFers on stage.

Also, if my jaw gets too relaxed, I'll drool - and I ain't no drummer!

[KevinDguitar]

lol!

[Musician78]

There is nothing wrong with using tabs IMO as lons as you can figure stuff out without tabs as well. It is just another learning tool...

EDIT: The suggestion to use a metronome is an AWESOME one. I never jammed to a metronome and as a result, if I don't have something keeping time behind me, I am all over the map.

[BenoA]

Great advice Kevin! Nice thread BTW.

I'm a bit nervous these days. I had a bad fall doing some snowboarding some weeks ago and my left hand thumb is still hurting a lot and not helping with my playing. We have a gig on the 31st. And on top of this, I'm back into my "I suck phase"...

[KevinDguitar]

Take it easy with that hand injury.. ice for 15 minutes every other hour if possible.. some kind of OTC anti-imflammatory (Aleve, ibuprofen, etc).. when you can or when you rest elevate that hand above the level of your heart while reclining or laying.. this'll help keep the swelling down as well.
In regards to a metronome.. great device for working on getting a passage up to a desired speed.. but.. remember.. a metronome can help with building speed.. it can help with nailing the timing/phrasing of a passage or rhythm part when you want to slow it down and make sure you're reading the rhythm notation right.. it WILL NOT help teach you how to groove.. only jamming with others.. especially if you have access to a drummer with a great pocket who doesn't lurch the tempos up and down and can stay solid and steady. I don't use metronomes very much these days.. only when I really need to slow something down.. nail the phrasing and then start working it back up to speed.

[Rakib]

Sorry for the late reply guys. Study pressure and Chics had my mood swinging to the moon and back. Thank you everyone for the advices and feed backs. Special thanks to Kevin and Gisambo for putting up long posts to help me out. Those advices will surely help me out. Sometimes I feel as if I try to take on things which are yet above my skill level and at times I get confused on whether I should work on my fingerings and get faster or should I try things relating to theory and melody. Dividing and keeping a sincere record of practice timely will surely help as I never do it. Also classical stuffs have some nasty sweeps and licks (Steve vai - Cross roads anyone or maybe Jason Becker -Altitudes ?). Now it's only a matter of time that I find enough juice in me to actually practice sincerely and not just doodle around and play randomly which I do most of the times.

[BenoA]

Now it's only a matter of time that I find enough juice in me to actually practice sincerely and not just doodle around and play randomly which I do most of the times.

Could not have said it better.

Been like that since I started playing...

[Rakib]

Yeah at the end of the day it solely depends on how much passion and enthusiasm you can gather after a long tiring day.

[Maiden89]

I think you need to just focus on your practice routine and what you want to get out of it. I've been focusing on speed and precision so much that my timing sucks! I can sweep pick and speed pick with great precision, but I can't keep my timing!

[TKEblue]

Someone mentioned how far you lift your fingers off the strings. This was and still is a huge thing for me. My pinkey finger likes to lift way off sometimes and screws up my accuracy and speed and makes it sound really sloppy, so i'll work on keeping it down, works for a while, then i notice im doing it again. Happens every time im learning something new