Slow Down Guitar Music

You are about to discover that learning how to play the guitar can change your life.  Not only will you be called upon to play at parties and gatherings, you will also have a hobby that you can use to pour out your soul when you are troubled or anxious.  It's simply a wonderful thing to know how to play the guitar.  But maybe you already know some standard chords and you are ready to progress into the world of learning how to play riffs and licks.  If this is the case, this article is for you.

Riffs and licks are based on chords and scales.

When you become thoroughly familiar with a variety of popular chords and keys, you're on your way to mastering those rock guitar licks.  Learning scales is the next step in your guitar tuition.  You can download a scale chart from the internet and print it out and then spend a few minutes each day learning the scale names and diagrams shown.

You will need to understand the variations on the chords, also known as "voicings."

When you study a book of guitar chords, you'll see that you don't have just one "G" chord, but a bunch of "G" chords, such as G7, and G9, and G major 7, and G minor 7. . . well, you get the picture.  Each variation has it's own special feel.  For instance, the major 7th chords have a misty, soft feel, whereas a series of minor 7th chords impels you to automatically think of the blues.  For playing modern guitar music, especially jazz, you will need to be familiar with these variations.  Many of the older songs don't include them as much, and if all you like to play is classic bluegrass or country, you may not need anything fancier than one or two minor chords.

Practice with your picking hand, also.

Often it seems like all the effort required in learning how to play riffs and licks depends on the chording hand.  But just as importantly, you need to be able to find the string you need with your right hand too.  (Left for you left handed people.)  The left hand has the riff all figured out, however if your pick lands on the wrong string, you're not going to get the sound you need.  Explore different ways of picking, too, to find what works best for you.  Some guitarists never pick up a pick, they would rather feel the strings with their fingers.  Others use several picks on various fingers.  Most use a standard flat pick, but why not experiment with some different methods and you might discover your own personal style for playing guitar licks and riffs.

Slow Down Music

One of the difficulties of learning licks and riffs, is the speed that they're often played at. If you're trying to learn to play by ear, by listening to a taped track, the notes go by so fast that you can't possibly remember them all or to get your fingers to the correct notes in time.

The answer to this problem is to slow down the recording of the riff or lick that you're trying to learn, and the way to accomplish this, without changing pitch or tempo, is to use one of the popular "slow down music" computer software programs that can be downloaded to your computer. A search on "Google" will present you with some good choices.