Tuesday, September 8, 2009

small technical errors in my guitar playing that held me back...

...from playing cleaner/faster/in time.

been recently recording myself playing guitar and upping the ante when it comes to speed and technique and i've been struggling getting the feel right and keeping up the pace. fortunately due to being persistent and allowing myself to take in advice from anyone (even non-guitarist such as a singer) i've found these flaws in my playing that i hope help other guitarists solve some problems:

- because i have a fast downpick, i play slower strum riffs better in mostly downstrokes, or else the riff gets too messy and inconsistent time-wise.
- until TODAY sham points out that i hit my strings too hard and it's held me back from playing faster, cleaner and enduring downpicking easier.
- i hold my bends out of time so i've been doing licks involving bends along with a metronome or tapping my foot.
- this is ridiculous but i never used to tap my foot while i played without a beat. this is probably one of the most vital things about playing in time and playing any instrument in general and i totally ignored it for years.
- i spent too much time smothering my guitar in distortion instead of playing clean. i now only practice on an acoustic and my rhythm in particular is much cleaner.
- ditching my jackson for a gibson explorer regarding being anti-hi-gain. gibson's real tone comes from their heavy as shit bodies meaning there's more stress on playing the right notes, but fuck is it worth it!

keep rockin'.