We’ve all been there. You get excited to learn a new song and dive right in. As time goes by – maybe a lot of time – you get frustrated and give up before the tune is really presentable. Getting a song “just right” takes work. A lot of work. Learning songs perfectly requires time…… Continue reading 5 Steps to learn a song perfectly. (Or at least almost perfectly.)
Occasionally I talk about what I call “offloading the moment.” The idea here is that there are decisions that one should make while practicing music and there are decisions that one should make while playing music. For instance, what finger to use to play a particular note in a song is a decision that should…… Continue reading Offloading the moment
For today’s post, I want to offer a bit of “learn from my mistakes” advice, specifically related to jazz improvising. I started working on jazz soloing about 30 years ago. I’d only been playing a year or two at that point and, frankly, I didn’t know what jazz was. I just knew that playing jazz…… Continue reading Don’t learn jazz soloing the way I learned jazz soloing
Fingerpicking is nice way to add a different flavor to your playing. This article explores some steps to getting the basics down. We’ll look at three fingerpicking patterns, one for chords with a root note on the 5th string (like C), one for chords with a root note on the 6th string (like G) and…… Continue reading An Introduction to Fingerpicking
I talked, not long ago, about the process of strumming chords on a guitar. That post focused on what the right hand does while playing the instrument (presuming the player is right handed.) Let’s consider the what the left hand does while fretting different chord shapes. We’ll focus on what are called open chords. Open…… Continue reading Learning chord shapes on the guitar
I’m pretty impressed with the web site fingerstofrets.com which generates visual diagrams for fretting most of the essential open chords. It shows both the notes to fret and fingers that should be used to fret those notes. I’ve been using it to create charts I print out for students. I’d love to see them add more…… Continue reading Handy online chord chart generator
Whenever we attempt to learn something—an instrument, a language, a piece of software, skateboarding, whatever—it’s easy to get overwhelmed. You see what the greats of the discipline do and think, “How can I ever get to be that good?” You pick up a book on the topic and it’s 400 pages long, written in some…… Continue reading The secret to learning
Having to quickly learn a bunch of tunes is a challenge that often pops up in the life of a musician. It has, once again, for me and I thought I would write out a post on the topic (partly to clarify my own process.) Truthfully, I’ve got a fairly light task right now; I…… Continue reading How to learn a lot of songs fast
Wil Forbis Music 