I recently checked out a bunch of guitar instruction books from the library. This book, by Renard D. Hoover, was one of them. I’m not a jazz guitarist, but this book is really for any and all guitarist devoted to develop their lead playing. Make that seriously devoted. This is a thin book but densely…
One of many things that stuck out of Drive by Daniel Pink (a great book about business and motivation) was the bit about One Sentence. In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. “A great man,” she told him,…
So, since the goal of mastering the guitar is to express yourself, generally speaking, the more expressions you have under your command, the more expressive you can be. It’s like learning a language. If you can call up a wider variety of words, the more articulate you can be. The word “can” is the key,…
I’m sure I’m not the only one. I constantly play by looking down at my fretboard — a bad, bad habit. Closing my eyes or looking elsewhere work to some extent, but today I discovered another trick that really mess it up for me, in a good way. Play half-step down. Plenty of recordings are…
It’s an easy thing to do, particularly when you’re starting out. You stop the music, you drop out of the rhythm, to figure out where your fingers need to go next. It’s understandable, but this is a habit you want to get rid of ASAP. If you’re practicing strumming, learn to find your next chord…
Is to be able to express oneself through your playing. Now, if you are a true master, then perhaps the ideal is to be able to play anything and everything you hear in your head. Wow! Can you imagine the freedom you’d feel, if you actually had such a capacity? Most of us don’t even…
All right, here is a rant, more than anything: Vibrato is the most important technique for all soloing guitarists, except classical. (Well, it’s important in classical, too, though perhaps not the most important) By that, I mean finger vibrato, not the kind you do with your tremolo. Why? It’s because vibrato is the single…
I’ve always been interested in legato playing, because its smooth tone. Perhaps because I play single-coils (not compressed like high-output humbuckers), when I try to pick every note, the pick attack just come through too strongly and the resulting sound has a jagged impression. But it didn’t all make sense to me until the last…
One of the early mistakes I made was that I didn’t enjoy practicing. Eh, let me rephrase that. I didn’t practice what I enjoyed. This is especially important when you’re first starting out on the instrument. Because when you’re learning the most basic things, the number of things you can do are limited. It can…