Phil Johnson

When you are a new guitar player learning how to read music, you might feel overwhelmed when trying to name each individual note and play it. You begin thinking "How can they read and play so quickly?" The key reason why experienced guitarists understand music notation faster is because they are NOT reading each note separately. They are reading the intervals, or the distance in between the notes. This is a straightforward shorthand system for reading intervals.

The most typical concern I get from inexperienced guitar players is how to switch among guitar chords faster so there's no more missed beats. While the only real magic bullet continues to be practice, each of these four simple steps will help you to jump around chords with little energy.

In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell mentioned it takes ten thousand hours of training to master an art form or area of interest. But yet with guitar (along with other skills) the amount of time you put in studying will only be a part of the puzzle. You also need to know WHAT and HOW to rehearse to help get the most from all of your guitar practice time. Let's outline the perfect guitar practice strategy.

Going it alone for a newbie guitar player can be tough because you do not get the road map through the musical adventure that a guitar tutor can provide. It is more difficult to educate yourself about intermediate and advanced guitar principles when you don't get the fundamentals down to begin with. I'm going to give you a check list of guitar techniques every single guitarist must understand, and the sequence it's best to learn about them in for most effective improvement.

Getting to know the beginner guitar notes for the open position is definitely very easy. In guitar jargon, the open position is the first three frets on each string. Applying my well-tried solution you can master all of them in 20 minutes. Let's get started!

Recording music is a totally different beast from playing live. And whether you're going into a big studio or doing it on your own with a laptop and a DAW, there's a few guitar-specific things you can do to make the whole process go faster and sound better.

Playing the guitar (and music in general) means learning to think in new ways and, sometimes, work against human nature. I'd like to give you some great mental tricks to help you learn guitar concepts and become a better guitarist.

One of the dangerous things about teaching yourself guitar without a teacher is that you'll miss some of the small fixes that can make a big difference in your playing. Here's three of the most common mistakes that you can fix quickly and easily.