Although playing guitar fast is not every guitarist’s most significant goal, those who do want to improve their guitar speed desire this skill very much and are often frustrated with being unable to develop this part of their guitar playing.

If this describes you, I want to share with you several important insights about building guitar speed that will greatly help you to develop this skill.

Good news and bad news:

The good news is that virtually anyone can learn to play guitar fast. In addition, you can directly control the practicing process to make it more effective and achieve your guitar speed goals in a lot less time than it takes an average guitar player.

The bad news is that most guitar players (those who can’t yet play guitar fast) are totally on the wrong track in their approach to increasing guitar speed.

I see this all the time when working with new guitar students who come to me wanting to improve their guitar playing.

The typical path to increasing ones guitar speed is usually limited to starting to practice slowly with a metronome and gradually increasing speed in small increments.

Such a tactic can be effective early on in the process of learning new guitar exercises, but if you rely on it exclusively to develop your maximum guitar speed it will lead to plateaus and frustration.

Here are a few reasons why:

Great guitar players who can play guitar fast were able to successfully master all of the above mentioned elements of guitar speed whether they consciously realized it or not.  You need to do the same in order to increase your guitar speed to your maximum speed potential.

To help you expand and improve upon the conventional approach for building guitar speed, here are several guidelines to follow

Get specific about what problems you are having with trying to increase your guitar speed.

Simply saying “I can’t play guitar fast” is NOT specific enough. Being unable to play guitar fast is only a symptom of a more complex problem that usually has several causes. As you have seen above, the root of your guitar speed limitations can exist in any or all of the specific technical elements that make up the multidimensional skill of “playing guitar fast”.

Knowing exactly what is causing your problem is the first step to solving it.  When you learn exactly what is holding you back, you can focus your guitar practice sessions on the specific problems that needs to be overcome.

Having your guitar playing analyzed by an expert guitar teacher is the fastest way to get this required level of clarity.

Use a variety of practice strategies for increasing your guitar speed.

As your guitar playing skill level evolves, so will your specific guitar technique challenges. Therefore, the practice techniques you use at each stage of your guitar playing must evolve as well in order to be effective.

There is no such thing as ‘one’ ultimate guitar practice routine for increasing your guitar speed. Of course there are approaches to practicing guitar that are far more effective than others, but the way you organize your guitar speed training routines should be unique to your specific guitar technique and guitar speed challenges at any given time.

Practice integrating your guitar techniques together to avoid sounding like a guitar speed robot.

Over the years of teaching hundreds of guitar players to improve their guitar technique (as well as other musical skills), I have found that most guitarists spend very little time applying and integrating their musical skills and guitar techniques in particular.

This results in lack of musical freedom to express yourself completely and fully in any musical context.

When it comes to increasing your guitar speed, most guitarists typically focus on becoming faster with only one technique at a time.

For example, you may practice your sweep picking for 15 minutes, then move on to 15 minutes of legato, followed by 15 minutes of 2 hand tapping.

Although this approach will help you to improve at these techniques in isolation, you also need to specifically practice using all of these techniques ‘together’ in the same way that you will find these techniques used in real guitar solos.

Neglecting to do this will make your guitar playing sound unnatural and rather ‘robotic’ as you will struggle to play consistently well with using a variety of guitar techniques at once.

Although ‘guitar speed’ is clearly only one out of many musical areas that must be mastered in order to become a truly expressive and creative musician, it is a highly desired skill that most guitar players do not have.

You can see many examples of effective guitar speed building strategies that I use with my students by studying this free mini course on how to build guitar speed.

Applying the suggestions above during your guitar practice sessions and following the guidelines from this free guitar speed training mini course will help you greatly to build as much guitar speed as you desire for your specific guitar playing goals.

Article Source: ArticleSnatch.com

And there are a lot of guitar players who just shrug off the learning of chord inversions just because they think that it is difficult to learn and that they will be able to become really successful guitar players without even learning these inversions.

What you might not know is that the chord inversions could be something that you really need to learn for you to be able to get the exact chord that would fit the song.

Chord inversions are chords made in the same bass chord. The lowest note of the chord is the tonic. When you execute the chord, you will maintain that lowest chord. Every time you execute a chord in the root or the tonic, this means the chord is an inversion.

In the case of a C chord for example, any chord executed with C as the bass is an inversion of the C chord.

Most of the time, chords are played with about three or four notes fingered on the guitar. This means that you might be fingering two or three notes on the bass position.

In a C chord for example, you need to finger C, E and G. On a Cmaj7, you have a C, E, G, B.

There are three types of chord inversions. They are respectively and aptly called first, second and third inversions. The first inversion calls for the 3rd of the chord on the bass note. This gives the term for it.

The first inversion of the chord requires the 3rd of the chord be the first note after the root. The second inversion, now, has the 5th of the chord on a bass position.

The terminology is derived from the idea of the 5th of the chord being the second tone after the tonic or the bass. And as you may have realized by now, the third inversion requires having its 7th as the bass. You get the drift, don’t you?

Let’s take for example a Cmaj7. The chord is played with a C, E, G and B. On the first inversion, you will be getting an E, G, B and C. Of course that would be too difficult to perform in the exact order.

So you would have to rearrange the notes in such a ways that your fingers will be able to accommodate the notes. This process is known as the drop-two voicing. The new arrangement will be E, B, C and G.

When you actually think about it, it’s not really that difficult. Here is a list of the steps you need to take in order to create the inversions:

1. Take note of all the notes used in the chord according to the root positions.

2. Take the first note and place it in the last position or at the back of the line of chords.

3. The second note follows suit, taking the last place.

4. Finger the new chord out on the fret board.

5. Repeat the steps this time using the notes from the first inversion.

It’s not too difficult after all, isn’t it?

About The Author: Harvey Mosley started developing his passion for music at age of 10. He learned to play guitar songs at age of 13 and pursued his love of music since then. He owns now a music studio and inspires many students to learn to play guitar songs. Visit BandJammer.com for more guitar song lessons.

Article Source: Chord Inversions

The blues has influenced almost every genre of music. All the great guitar players of our time have been influenced to some degree by the blues. The music theory involved in playing the blues is rather simple, but the feeling that can be applied to playing the blues is what makes it so popular.

The 12 bar blues progression:

If you want to learn how to play blues, you need to know the 12 bar blues progression. Just as its’ name implies, it is made up of 12 bars (measures) of music. the 12 bars just keep repeating. The most common chord progression would be the I, IV, and V chords of the key that you want to play in.

The progression looks like this:

I / I / I / I / IV / IV / I / I / V / IV / I / I

So if you wanted to play in the key of E, the progression would be:

E / E / E / E / A / A / E / E / B7 / A / E / E

This is the basic 12 bar blues progression, but there are variations that can be used. One common variation would be to substitute the last chord with the V chord. So in the example above the last E chord would be replaced with a B7.

This is what the progression would look like in the keys of A and D:

Key of A: A / A / A / A / D / D / A / A / E / D / A / A

Key of D: D / D / D / D / G / G / D / D / A / G / D / D

The simplicity of this progression and the fact that it just keeps repeating itself is what makes the blues popular with musicians. As long as everyone is in the same key, you are able to jam together without actually knowing a specific song.

What really makes the blues though is the feeling that is put into the playing. This is another reason the blues are so enjoyable to play. You can really put your soul into it. Practice the 12 bar progression in different keys and using different rhythms.

Just use your own feeling and you will be surprised with what you come up with.

The Blues Scale:

Knowing the blues scale is the other half to playing the blues.

The blues scale is really the pentatonic scale with the flatted 3rd note added.

Pentatonic scale

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

-X–|—-|-X–|—-

-X–|—-|-X–|—-

-X–|—-|-X–|—-

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

Blues Scale

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

-X–|—-|-X–|-O–

-X–|—-|-X–|—-

-X–|-O–|-X–|—-

-X–|—-|—-|-X–

The first diagram shows one of the patterns for the pentatonic guitar scale. The second diagram shows the flatted 3rd added, indicated by the O’s. These added notes are also sometimes referred to as the blue notes.

Practice this scale forward and backward. Try using some bends and slides. Remember, the key to playing the blues is the feeling you put into it.

Ed Haas is a guitar player of thirty years and is the webmaster of learnitguitar.com.  Visit his website for more information on how to play the blues – Article Source: ArticleRich.com

Learning to play guitar can get difficult, especially if you don’t know the best program available. In order to find a complete program that contains Videos, DVDs, and books to learn guitar, you must search the internet.

Its a fast moving world today, and people find it hard to dedicate a couple of hours to learning the skill of playing guitar. A number of books to learn guitar can also be found from the music, or book stores and you can even order them online. These books provide a good source of learning guitar, with minimum efforts involved.

Some people learn best from a printed source, rather than a traditional approach. For this reason, books to learn guitar can be found in abundance.

You can even go to the local library and find books to learn guitar and be amazed by the amount of information available. The internet can also used to find books that cater to your guitar learning needs.

You can find reviews by different users with the same objective as yours. The reviews really help you in verifying a book’s effectiveness in making you an expert in playing guitar.

You will find numerous books to learn guitar, but not all of them may be perfect for you. Thus, makes sense that you ensure the source which you plan to use is authentic and resourceful. 

The right approach to learning guitar is taking it in a step-by-step process, so that the learner can get appropriate time to practice and master each new skill. Expert guitar players can also benefit by skipping directly to the section that meets their needs and level of experience.

Before you decide to invest your hard earned money, make sure that the source you are buying from is trustworthy and offers you exactly what you need.

In order to find books to learn guitar, you should use reviews as your starting point, as it really helps you in establishing the relevance and effectiveness the source has to offer. Furthermore, you also ensure that your money is invested in something that will actually benefit you.

Learn and master guitar is one of the most famous guitar learning programs; which contains DVD’s, Jam along CD’s, and Books To Learn Guitar.