Hey I'm Nate Savage, and in this lesson I'm going to share with you seven mistakes
that I see guitar players make. And this is both newer guitar players and people who've
been at it for a while. If you're just starting out on the guitar these tips are going to
help you not develop bad practice habits, and they are going to help your practice times
be more productive too. If you've been playing for a while, these tips are going to help
you get some bad habits out of your practice routine and help you see a lot more productive
practice too. So out of these seven mistakes, some of them are conceptual and some of them
are actual physical things on the guitar. We will cover both.
The number one mistake that I see guitar players make is not setting goals. I get emails from
people all the time telling me "Nate, I just don't know what to practice next, I'm
not getting any better. What am I doing wrong?" When I get an email like that I reply back.
The first thing I ask them is, have you set goals for your guitar playing? And most of
the time, the majority of the time, the answer that they give me is no.
Now if you don't set goals, you are not going to be able to break those goals down
into practice points that you fill your practice time with. And you goal shouldn't be something
like "I want to be a great guitar player." That's way too general. There's no way
that you can really break that down. Your goal should be something like "I want to
be able to play this particular song" or " I want to be able to play blues leads
over a twelve bar blues progression."
When you set realistic goals like that, what's going to happen is you are going to be able
to break them down into small practice steps to fill up your practice time. Let's take
that last one that I said. If you want to play, be able to play blues leads over a twelve
bar blues progression, you can break that goal down into learning the blues scale, working
on your left and right hand technique, learning blues licks, learning blues theory, and playing
along with blues jam tracks too.
Look at these goals you make like a big steak dinner. You are not going to stick the fork
in the entire steak and shove it in your mouth. You are never going to get it down and it's
not going to be good. You are going to cut that steak up into bite size pieces, or a
practice routine, and it's going to be really good that way. It's going to be really effective.
Now, failing to set goals for your guitar playing leads us to the second mistake that
guitar players make and that's noodling away your valuable practice time. Now, we
all do this. I'm guilty of it, you're guilty of it. We all do it no matter if you
have twenty minutes to practice or if you have two hours. How many times have you sat
down and just gone over stuff that you already know or that you are already good at. And
you know, that's fun, it's very therapeutic. That's one thing that's awesome about
the guitar, but you can't let that get in the way of your time you've designated to
reach your goals on the guitar.
So, one way around this is to actually schedule time just to noodle and have fun on the guitar.
Take how ever many minutes you want per practice session or how ever many hours per week and
set out a time just to noodle and have fun on the guitar. When you do that, you are going
to keep that noodling time separate from your actual designated practice time that you use
to reach your goals on the guitar.
Alright, let's get into some physical, some actual physical mistakes that guitar players
make when playing the guitar. The first one that I see a lot, especially in newer guitar
players, is they tend to lock their wrist and just play from their elbow and only use
downstrokes. Kind of like this. Or if you're doing it with power chords.
That's bad for a couple of reasons. The first reason is after a while that can kind
of open the gateway to some injuries and some fatigue with your elbow, and that's never
good. The second reason it's bad is because it's extremely inefficient and it makes
you work a lot harder when you are picking or strumming. So, what you want to do is kind
of free up your elbow a little bit and free up your wrist. And what you are going to do
is use your actual wrist to make the motions. It's a lot small motion, it's a lot more
efficient. And what you want to start doing as well is start using upstrokes too if you
are not already. Work on your upstrokes. A lot of newer guitar players completely ignore
that for a long time. Once you get your upstrokes going, put your down and your upstrokes together
and make sure to use small motions and use your wrist.
Number four is poor muting. That's one of the biggest things that can make your playing
sound unprofessional, and it's a little bit easier for me to show you what this is
than it is to explain it. So, I'm going to play through an A minor scale, and I'm
not going to mute any of the strings. I'm just going to focus on the notes that are
happening, and watch how the strings kind of bleed over one another and it doesn't
really sound good.
What you can do to fix that is learn how to mute the strings you are not playing with
both your fretting hand and your picking hand. So you know, let's start with our fretting
hand and I'll show you how to mute some strings with your fretting hand. I'm going
to play the three lowest notes of that scale again. And look at my index finger. When it
comes and frets that first note, it's kind of hanging over and muting this A string.
That way if I accidentally brush up against that A string while I'm playing the lower
notes of this scale, it won't ring out. So that's how you can use your fretting
hand to mute the neighboring strings when you are playing the guitar.
Now, your picking hand can also help mute the strings too. The first way is my second
third and fourth fingers are kind of hanging out on the high strings up here and keeping
those guys quiet while I'm playing the lower strings. Now as I go up the scale, my thumb
right here and the palm of my hand right here, start to mute the lower strings. Just watch
that as I go up the scale. By the time I got up to the top, my whole hand was laying on
the strings that weren't being played.
Mistake number five that I see a lot of guitar players make is not using the very tips of
their fingers to come down and make their chords. And I get emails all the time from
people saying "Nate my chords just sound buzzy and not clear, what am I doing wrong?".
Most of the time, they are not coming right down on the very tips of their fingers. And
one way you can tell if you are doing this or not is to just make a regular C major chord.
Watch wat happens when I just barely relax my fingers and don't come down right down
on the tips of them. This is what happens to a lot of people. Most of the notes in that
chord just disappeared just from this little tiny motion of not coming down right on the
tips of your fingers. So keep an eye out for that and remember to implement that when you
are learning chords and that will help a lot of the buzz get out of your chords.
Mistake number six that I see a lot of guitar players make is not learning how to tune your
guitar by ear really well. We live in a time where there are tuners all around us more
than ever before. Like traditional tuners or tuners on your smartphone or ipad or whatever.
And we can kind of become a little over dependant on that because you can be in situations where
you are not going to have a tuner or where it's too noisy for you to use a tuner, right?
So, practicing, actually practicing, tuning your guitar and checking yourself against a tuner
is a great way to kind of hone in your skills for that.
If you don't know the fifth fret method for tuning your guitar it's out there. There
are tons of places that have this information, but I'll just go ahead and show you how
to use it using, just to tune the A string. Let's just go to the fifth fret of the low
E string right here, and play that note. That's an A, and the next string over is an open
A, right? So if you play those two notes, they should sound the same. I'm going to
throw this E out a little bit. And this is a good exercise. Just throw your guitar out
of tune here and there, try to get it back in tune, and then double check yourself with
a tuner. It may take a while for you to get your ears trained, but it's really good
practice and you'll thank yourself later.
Mistake number seven that I see guitar players make is not applying what you've been practicing
or learning. And by that I mean not applying what you've been learning to actual real
music. I can play a G major scale all day, and I can play a G major chord all day. But
if I don't apply it to real music then what good is it? I'm kind of just learning those
shapes for the sake of learning them. So, if you are working on a G major scale, pull
up a jam track that's in the key of G major and try to solo with it. Just try to improvise.
If you are learning some chords, find a song that uses those chords, and apply those chords
to some actual music.
Now, one reason I think people don't do this a lot is because it can be really intimidating.
You are not going to sound like Joe Satriani the first time you pull up a jam track and
try to jam with your G major scale right. It's just not going to happen, but actually
sitting down and doing it is the first step to really taking a step toward some real progress.
And every time you do it you'll get better and better at it.
So that does it for the seven mistakes guitar players make. One bonus one that I wanted
to throw at you was get your guitar set up by a professional. I get emails from people
all the time asking me "Nate I don't know what's going on, my guitar is hard to play
and my chords still sound terrible." And most of the time the action on their guitar
is really high, which makes their practice un-enjoyable and pretty un-fruitful too. So,
get your guitar set up. It only takes about twenty or thirty bucks, and it's going to
play so much easier, and you are going to enjoy practicing so much more.
I hope these tips really hit home with you. I know at least a couple of them apply to
pretty much every guitar player on earth. Next time you're practicing, think about
these things, and apply them in your practice time, and that way they will help you.
I just launched a new guitar lesson series that you can get right now for free. Just
go to guitarsystem.com/free-series and I'll see you there.