DEAF GUITAR PLAYER? SOLUTION....

You probably take it for granted that you know how to “listen” to your guitar playing while practicing. However, the truth is that most guitarists only “hear” themselves play - they never (or only rarely) truly LISTEN. Want proof? Have you ever struggled to improve your guitar playing with some exercise, playing it over and over without any idea what was causing your mistakes? If you answered “yes”, then your guitar listening skills must improve.

Why Is “Not Listening” Such A MASSIVE Obstacle For Improving Your Guitar Playing?

Very simply: you will make little or no progress in your guitar playing if you don’t know how to accurately evaluate your playing by listening. When you aren’t able to identify WHAT causes your specific guitar playing mistakes, it becomes next to impossible to actually “fix” them. As a result, you continue to wonder why your guitar playing isn’t improving until you either learn how to listen correctly or get a guitar teacher to point out the causes of your problems to you.

How Can You Test Your Ability To Listen To Your Own Guitar Playing?
To help you test yourself, I will ask you several questions about a variety of general guitar playing skills. You will need to answer either “Yes” or “No” to each question (for yourself). Warning: if you can’t answer with a definite “YES!” to a question, then your listening skills are poor in this area. Below each set of questions I will list several action steps for you to take to refine your listening and improve your guitar playing with each skill.

Take the test below:

How Efficient Are You At Improving Your Guitar Playing (Technique) Problems?
When you struggle to play something cleanly on guitar, can you usually identify (by listening only) WHICH notes aren’t clean?
When you make mistakes at faster speeds, can you tell if the problems occur because of poor 2 hand synchronization, picking articulation, strings bleeding (ringing) together, noise from other strings or combination of the above?
If your hands get out of sync while playing guitar, can you tell EXACTLY which note of the phrase this happens on?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all of these questions, you need to improve your listening skills in this area.

Solution: Hearing some of your guitar technique flaws becomes easier at slower speeds (this is one of the reasons why you hear the common advice to “practice guitar slowly”). In addition, exaggerating your guitar playing problems to make them even MORE difficult will often make the cause of the problem easier to hear/see. This is especially true of problems that can only be detected “in real time” at faster tempos.

How Effective Are You At Improving Your Guitar Vibrato Technique?
Can you tell (by ear) the difference between vibrato done in quarter notes, eighth notes or triplets?
Do you know for sure if your vibrato locks in rhythmically with the background music you are playing over?
Can you tell for sure if your vibrato is totally in tune when you play?

All great guitarists who have vibrato mastered can hear these nuances and know right away when any of them are not right. This is what enables them to self-correct their mistakes and continuously improve on guitar.

Solution: If you cannot answer “yes” to all the questions above (without hesitation), then your vibrato REALLY needs a lot of work and your ears need to become more refined to allow you to use this technique creatively in your guitar solos.

How Good Are You At Listening To Your Own Improvising?
Can you hear which (specific) notes of your phrases sound good over the music you play and which ones don’t?
Do you hear (in real time) if the current phrase you are playing fits together well with the phrase that came before?

If you said “No” to at least one of the questions above, here is what to do:

Solution: There is no single solution to the above problems relating to improvising on guitar, since these issues can occur for a variety of reasons. However, in most cases you can improve your guitar playing in this area by slowing down and “focusing” mentally on the sound of each note over the chord (to determine if the note fits that particular chord or not). In addition, you will have a much easier time listening to yourself while improvising after you learn to play scales all over the guitar, and master the skill of fretboard visualization.

How Good Are You At Improving Your Rhythm Guitar Playing?
Can you hear if your guitar playing is locking in perfectly with the beat (and when it is slightly off)?
Can you tell at what points your rhythm guitar palm muting is becoming unintentionally lighter or harder as you play?
Do you notice when your picking articulation is becoming unintentionally softer on some notes that are harder to play?

Did you fail at least one question above? If so, then read below:

Solution: You can develop your listening skills relating to timing by first clapping your hands along to a steady metronome click. Your task is to create the illusion of the click “disappearing” (by clapping EXACTLY on top of the click). This will also develop your listening awareness for playing guitar in time. In addition, refining your picking hand articulation will make it much easier to improve your guitar playing in this area.

Now that you have gotten an honest evaluation of your ability to listen to your guitar playing, you will have a much clearer understanding of how to improve your guitar skills. Of course your guitar playing challenges will change and evolve over time, but if you consistently refine your ability to listen for and detect flaws in your playing, you will always know what must be done to improve your guitar playing to the next level.

4 GUITAR EXERCISES YOU SHOULD STOP PRACTICING

Want to make faster progress in your guitar playing? Then stop wasting your precious practice time working on things that do NOT improve your guitar skills. Here are the top 4 items too many guitar players waste time on but get no benefit from:

1. Finger Independence Exercises

Lack of finger independence in the fretting hand is a common problem for guitarists, but most exercises prescribed for this are useless in helping you develop this skill. FAR too many guitarists practice all the exercises that are supposed to help their finger independence, but still have terrible fretting hand technique. Worst of all, many guitarists assume that their lack of progress with finger independence is caused by not having found the ‘right’ exercises yet. So without understanding why their fretting hand independence is not getting better, they go further off track searching for more exercises, not realizing that the entire premise of having ‘general’ finger independence exercises is flawed.

2. Finger Strength Exercises

Most guitarists approach the topic of ‘strength’ training for guitar in a completely backwards way. Yes, strength IS important for guitar playing, BUT your ‘fretting’ hand strength is the last thing you should be focusing on. Here is why:

1. It doesn't take all that much fretting hand strength to play notes or chords on guitar (with one exception being applying wide vibrato on bent notes or double stops). Even techniques such as legato or trills take a lot LESS effort than most guitarists (who haven't mastered these skills) try to use when playing them. This leads me to my next point:

2. The reason why most people feel like they need to ‘get stronger’ in their fretting hand is because they use way too much tension in their hand to begin with - causing their arm to become fatigued from playing a lot faster than it should. Instead of using ‘more strength’ (which will only make the problem worse), the solution is to learn to optimize the amount of effort you use in the fretting hand so that excessive tension doesn't accumulate in your hands (and the rest of the body) as you play. It is the lack of control over excessive tension that causes most guitarists to become tired while playing - NOT ‘lack of strength’ (or endurance).

3. It is actually the ‘picking’ hand that needs to develop the most strength and power in order to play with a wide dynamic range and perfect articulation in any context. As you play guitar, the amount of strength needed to fret notes stays essentially the same (very low), while the amount of force/power used by your picking hand to strike the strings can change many times (from very soft to very aggressive/loud).

Unfortunately, the vast majority of strength exercises for guitar players are directed only at training the fretting hand, hurting your guitar playing in 2 ways: by never addressing the root cause of why your fretting hand gets tired in the first place and taking your focus away from the hand that actually NEEDS to become stronger!

What Should You Do Instead?

1. Stop practicing strength exercises for your fretting hand and use that extra time to learn how to optimize the amount of effort you use to play guitar so that you do not get tired quicker than you should.

2. Practice to improve your picking hand articulation to actually develop strength where it NEEDS to be developed in your technique. A simple way to practice this skill is to play your guitar unplugged for a portion of your practice time (focusing on picking as loudly as possible). Doing this will force your picking hand to become stronger.

3. Guitar Speed Exercises

Similar to fretting hand finger independence, your speed is NOT developed by any specific ‘exercise’ (or a set of exercises). Speed on guitar comes from developing many elements of your playing simultaneously, such as: improving your general technique in each hand individually, improving your hands’ ability to work together (2 hand synchronization), learning to play with optimal tension, mastering the nuances of picking articulation, using the most efficient picking hand technique, learning to think at higher speeds, plus other factors.  These components of speed are trained by focusing your mind on refining the technical motions that make speed possible. Because of this, it really doesn't matter what exercises you practice - you can build speed with literally ‘any’ exercise, as long as your mind is focused on the right things while practicing it.

On the other hand, the problem with ‘speed exercises’ in particular is that they attempt to reduce the multi-dimensional process of building speed down to a one-dimensional set of repetitive motions with your mind often totally disengaged from the process. They also fill you with false expectations that a certain set of finger motions repeated progressively faster is what is needed to ‘build’ speed.

Realize that if you do not take the time to develop the technical elements that make speed possible, then mindless practicing of speed exercises will often do more harm than good to your guitar playing (by ingraining your bad technique even deeper into your muscle memory and putting you at a higher risk of injury).

What Should You Do Instead?

Instead of searching for more exercises that will get practiced in the same ineffective way, take any musical fragment that you find hard to play and focus your mind on improving a different aspect of your guitar playing each time you practice it. Practicing a single exercise with the focus on developing multiple elements of your technique will give you far more results than practicing 100 different exercises by mindlessly trying to ‘move your fingers faster’.

4. Exercises That Don't Help You To Reach A ‘Specific’ Goal

Too many guitarists spread themselves too thin, practicing every new exercise that comes along, but never really thinking about how or why a certain item helps them to achieve a specific result in their playing.

From now on, every time you are tempted to practice a certain item or an exercise, put it through the “Why” test. Simply ask yourself: “Why should I practice this?” “What ‘specific’ benefit will this item/exercise help me to achieve?” If you cannot answer this question in a way that sounds convincing and compelling to yourself, then what you are about to practice is likely to be a big waste of your guitar practice time.

Note: Some practice items may be very effective ‘in general’, but will be a waste of time ‘for you’ if you do not understand exactly how and WHY an exercise will help you improve your guitar playing. As explained above, no exercise will make you a better guitarist if you simply go through the motions of moving your fingers on the guitar mindlessly. Unless you are aware of the most important things to focus on when practicing an exercise (in order to reach the objective it’s supposed to develop), then you will be better off not practicing it at all until you are clear on exactly what to focus on while working on it.

Now that you have more clarity about what things waste your guitar practice time and hurt your progress, go through your practice schedule and critically analyze every item in it. Replace the materials that waste your time with more effective ones (or improve your effectiveness at practicing the items that already are in your schedule) and you will start making much faster progress every time you practice guitar.