Hey Friend,

Here's the problem most guitar players have - they try to approach each aspect of guitar playing as a single skill. For instance, they learn to play the pentatonic scale, or how to sweep pick. Or they approach learning a song as a single task. The mistake I see with this approach is, each skill you learn can be broken down into smaller sub-skills.

Hey, I'm as guilty of this as anyone.

What you have to do is learn how to deconstruct the "package" to smaller, more manageable parts and master those.

You've heard the one about eating an elephant, right? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time...

Well, guitar is a lot like that elephant. You can't play it like a pro until you master the fundamentals - in small bites. This requires you stepping back and identifying your strengths and weaknesses.

Let me explain...

We treat each guitar skill we learn as a closed box, but in reality, there are moving pieces inside that box. When you get all the pieces working together, it allows the skill to sound like a complete piece.

Look at it this way...

You have two hands. You need both hands doing separate things to master each skill. You have a hand that determines the pitch of each string, and you have a hand that controls the delivery of sound from the strings.

Two separate "tools" working together to produce a sound. Two separate parts necessary to make a whole piece.

For each hand, there are additional sub-skills you can work at improving to make the entire skill sound better.

I  want you to begin thinking about each hand as an individual unit. I want you to give each hand its own special attention. 

You can structure your practice time to focus attention on improving technique for each hand individually. 

Today I'm going to give you a set of exercises that will help you with your speed and accuracy. Exercise files

These exercises are deceptively simple. They're just simple C major scale patterns in the open position. I've created seven sets of exercises, each one increasing in tempo (speed) by 10 BPM (beats per minute).

These aren't designed to be practiced in one day. You can spread these out over a week, or seven weeks for that matter. 

For the first part of your practice, simply focus on the hand fretting the notes. Play it again and again until you have the scale memorized, not only in your head and ears, but in your fingers. You should be able to play the open C major scale in your sleep.

After you master the scale at one tempo, move up to the next faster tempo. Admittedly, the MP3 files will be more helpful than the PDFs...

As for the second part of your practice, you're going to work on your rhythm, timing and accuracy.

As you play each note, make sure you pluck the string exactly on the beat - not before, not after. You want each note to ring out clearly, but for this part of the exercise the main goal is to make sure your hand hits the string in time with the beat.

We'll worry about digging into the different nuances of fretting and picking later.

As you may have noticed from other lessons I've sent you, each file has the metronome click built into it. You can think of this as the "click track." A click track is basically a guide to keeping a consistent beat.

Click tracks are used on just about every recording to keep everyone on the same page rhythm-wise. You might not know this, but they're also used by drummers in live performances (and maybe the other musicians as well - not sure on that). That's why you might see a drummer with a set of headphones on while playing live. Otherwise they have an in-ear monitor. Gotta make sure the beat is solid and consistent!

don't be surprised if you find it hard to get the timing down at first. Playing slower tempos can be more difficult than fast tempos! This is because you have to be much more accurate when playing slowly. The faster you go, the easier it is to hide sloppiness in speed.

Okay, enough for now. Send me your questions...

If you find the tempos too fast, you can try Song Surgeon to slow the tempo down even more. Conversely, if you're already comfortable and want to work on faster tempos than what I've provided, Song Surgeon can speed them up. Check it out here.

Peace~

Dave