How Can I Progress My Guitar Skills?

The guitar is a popular instrument for its versatility and ease of transportation. As a result, there are very many guitarists, making it hard to stand out from the crowd.

So how can I progress my guitar skills? By taking lessons, practising exercises, adding in some dynamics and experimenting with alternative pedals, you can take your playing prowess to the next level.

Click here if you are looking to book a Guitar Lesson in Southampton near you and/or read on, to find out what you can do to improve.

How can I progress my guitar skills?

The number one best way to improve is to take guitar lessons in your local area. This is the fastest and most effective route to success. But also bear in mind that an audience doesn’t necessarily support the most talented performers, but rather the most interesting and enthusiastic ones.

In addition to your playing skills, you may want to learn how to use a loop pedal. This will enable you to add additional parts to a solo performance, layer songs and add your own backing.

What is the best way to improve on guitar?

Whether you have the talent or not, one of the best ways to engage your audience is to play with enthusiasm. Extra points if you have both though!

Enthusiasm doesn’t have to be loud. A sincere love of what you’re playing is enough and it’s contagious. Be one of these performers.

Using silences and rests in your melody is a shortcut to creating an emotive performance, as it brings more emphasis to specific areas of your song. They can be used to emphasise a lyric, or even just to build anticipation for the next section.

How to be a better guitar player

Changing between picking and strumming when playing the guitar can be the easiest way to work on some variance. The benefits of picking the guitar are that you get a more mellow sound from the instrument, whereas when you’re strumming it can help to build up a livelier section of the song. You can consider striking a balance between both intensities using guitar dynamics.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of playing the same riff over and over. The problem with this is that your fans are unlikely to stay interacted with your music if it all sounds the same. A popular technique is to contrast between hard-driving sections to a softer section as it allows the song to breathe.

Dynamics in music

You don’t have to be an expert guitar player to add dynamics to your performance. Start with what you know and experiment with guitar dynamics from there.

Using varying musical dynamics is essential when playing the guitar. It helps to spice up your performance, and your songwriting. Dynamics can help you to make your performance stand out from the crowd. They are also a simple way to add emotion and expression to a song when playing the guitar. And the techniques involved are all fairly simple.

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Exercises to improve guitar playing

Exercise 1: Volume range and picking

Choose a single note and start picking it in straight 8th notes. As you pick the note, focus on picking it softly. It should be barely audible, to begin with.

While still picking a single note, try to increase the intensity of your picking hand, and slowly start playing the same note louder and louder. Bring it up, in terms of volume. To do this, you need to pick quite intensely.

The goal of this exercise is to become aware of the volume range in which you pick notes on the fretboard. This range depends on your picking hand technique and the force that you apply.

Exercise 2: Accenting notes

In this exercise, take a scale, such as C major or G major, and play it by going up and down the scale for one octave. Next, try to accent every other note by playing it louder than the notes in-between.

Once you’re able to do this, try playing two notes aggressively followed by two notes softly. The goal of this exercise is to practice control over dynamics. Often we concentrate too hard on which notes are being played, disregarding all the possibilities of how we can express each of those notes.

How to make guitar playing more interesting

Muting your guitar with your hand changes the tone, adding variations to sections of a song. Here are the steps we recommend to take if you’re learning how to perform this technique.

Rest the outside of your strumming hand (the area at the edge of the palm, on the same side as your little finger) across the strings to be played. This is just next to the bridge, the area where the bottom of your strings attaches. You only need to rest this hand gently on the strings – if you do this too heavily, you’ll deaden them too much, plus, you still need to be able to play the strings with this hand. The closer your palm is to the bridge, the more sustain the notes will have. The closer it’s positioned to the neck, the ‘deader’ the sound will be.
Now play the muted strings, making sure to leave your strumming hand in place, muting the strings. If you don’t get it right at first, try moving your muting hand closer to the bridge. This is probably the most common mistake, and as guitar bridges differ, so does the ideal position to place your hand.

As mentioned, you can use this technique in all sorts of musical situations. Try using it to subdue a strummed chord pattern on an acoustic for added dynamics and drama.

How to use guitar pedals

Volume pedals can be used to vary the volume of performance and create wild guitar dynamics. They’re popular as they are easier to use than the guitar’s volume control. This is because they can be operated hands-free, making it easier to pull off more complex tricks.

Using a volume pedal can help to regulate the volume of the instrument and ensure solo and rhythm sections are all played at the same level.

Whatever you do, keep it simple; there is no substitute for a good song and performance. These guitar dynamics should aid that, so don’t get too carried away.

Overdrive pedals can sometimes be confused with distortion pedals, but an overdrive pedal has a different sound to other pedals. These can drive your valves to the point of distortion, or at the very least mimic what that would sound like if you have a solid-state amplifier.

The purpose of an overdrive pedal is to mimic the sound of you turning up your valve amp as loud as it can go, except this is a far safer option. It’s the closest you can get to pure amplifier distortion without blowing out your windows!

Play softly and you’ll hardly notice the gain, but play full chords and you’ll notice a huge difference.

Distortion pedals are quite different to overdrive pedals. A distortion pedal is a little more aggressive than an overdrive pedal, as it takes your tone and completely changes it to create something entirely new. Where an overdrive drives your amp or mimics a full, loud sound, a distortion will create a grittier tone.

With most distortion pedals, it doesn’t matter how hard or softly you play – you’ll usually get the same effect. A distortion pedal is a hard-clipping device that has one purpose – to distort your sound.

Fuzz pedals heavily saturate your tone, covering it in a woolly, “fuzzy” feel. This type of pedal offers a huge amount of sustain by processing your signal and creating a more artificial tone than the previously mentioned pedals. Fuzz pedals clip so much that playing anything other than lead lines or single-string riffs (such as full chords) sounds very messy. The amount of energy behind a power chord, however, is astonishing.

Jimi Hendrix was perhaps the most famous fuzz pedal player of all time, championing the likes of the “Fuzz Face”. Couple it with a Wah pedal and you’ll instantly recognise this blend that was used in the late ’60s.

How to get better at acoustic guitar

Another way to bring guitar dynamics to your performance is to change up the tempo of the song to spark the attention of the listener. The tempo of the song is the speed at which the underlying beat goes, and altering this can be an interesting way to bring guitar dynamics to a song.

A slower tempo will help give a mellow feel to the song, whereas a faster tempo gives can give a more upbeat impression. Changing up the tempo can help to bring more of an effect to the song and helps the guitar player to emphasise certain sections of a song accordingly.

Slow songs can still be loud and expressive though. Take “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith. It’s very slow, but throughout that song, the band incorporates quiet sections followed by expressive passages to keep their listeners interested.

Don’t forget when performing or recording, your guitar needs to be in tune. Your strap needs to be the correct height, and your batteries (if applicable) should be new. Remember to carry backup equipment like spare batteries, cables, and picks. Buy yourself a pair of strap locks to protect your prized possession. It happens too often that a guitar strap doesn’t fit correctly or is weak and breaks midway.