Guitar Lessons and Theory

The Best Guitar Player in the Universe

There is not such a thing. People vote usually guitarists that revolutionize the guitar technique. Jimi Hendrix and Eddie van Halen occupied the poll position. What about Roy Buchanan who invented no less techniques than Jimi Hendrix? Maybe he lacked charisma and was never interested to become a pop star. What about Sylvain Luc and Tuck Andress nowadays?

Any decent student can learn any technique. What really matters is the music. You are not a good guitar player if you copy another guitarist's playing. Musicians are worth to be listened only if they are different, original. How can anyone compare things that are completely different? How can you tell which guitarist is better? Steve Vai or Stanley Jordan? Marty Friedman or Buckethead? Larry Carlton or David Gilmour? They are all individuals that make their own great music. No other great guitar player is interested to play like any other great guitar player. He/she will try to find a style that is proper to the music he/she wants to bring to people. Music is not a competition (against the impression that stupid ceremonies like the Grammy Awards and the MTV Awards make), it just expresses a person's feeling and it sounds sincere only when the musician doesn't care what others do.

I tried to make a list of the guitar players that I could remember that are worth listening. I'm sure that there are still several thousands that I didn't have the chance to listen to and are important enough to be included in any collection of this kind.

Daily Progress

Many musicians enjoy playing and that's it. They take their instrument and play again and again what they already know well enough. This will take them nowhere. They'll get bored fast and will play less every day. Yes, it's important to enjoy playing and it's fun to play again what you already acquired but this is not enough.

Spend at least 50% of the time you hold the instrument in your hands studying new things. If you are a guitar player, maybe you should try Guitar Solo. Have you done all the licks there? Jamming with Band in a Box is a great way to go to achieve a better level and to have fun at the same time. When you listen to radio or look to the TV, take your instrument and try to play along with music you hear for the first time.

Learning music must be fun. When you feel you're bored, go to the next exercise then go back to the boring part and remember: what you don't finish today, you'll have to finish tomorrow.

Playing in a Group

One of the most important things is playing in a group, letting people know that you exist and you are a musician. You can't do this right from the very beginning, you have to acquire a certain level first. The moment you feel you can play, gather your friends that study music and convince them to play together.

The members of the group will bring their own instruments. You already invested time and energy studying and practicing so you should also invest some money to make the group sound as well as possible.

Maybe you won't find a genius fellow musician that will agree to play with you in the beginning but it's necessary that at least one of the fellows in your group will be a decent musician. Any group, at any stage, must improve and the only one who can take it to the next level is a good musician.

Years passed by and you made a name for yourself. Now you can choose. Pick those musicians that play a music that intrigues your ears. Think what instruments and what voices will fit your project.

It's not enough for a group member to be a good musician. He/she must also share your vision, your ambitions and, most of all, be an agreeable person. You'll spend a lot of time with those mates and, if there's no understanding, life will be hell and the group will soon disassemble.

There will be also a member of the group who is not a musician: a promoter or a manager. Usually, he/she is the nicest person around. But what really matters: does he/she do his/her job as it should? Does he/she get enough gigs for you? Does he/she fight for you? Is he/she ambitious enough?

How to Listen

As books are not written for professional writers,as paintings are not painted for professional painters, so music is not made for professional musicians. Music is made for people. Its aim is to transmit a certain kind of feeling between the musician and the listener that can't be communicated on other channels.

Unfortunately, there are still musicians that make music for their fellows musicians only. There are classical composers that the only purpose of their works is to impress the scholars with their inventions. There is a lot of "fusion" that has only one quality: sophistication. Sophisticated harmony, sophisticated rhythms that impress the musicians in the audience but don't have any impact on the others. There are also guitar players that all they want is to show off.

The listener can be wrong too, even when the music is real music. There are students that are concentrating in guessing the chords, there are guitar players that get impressed with the performer's technique and don't pay attention to music. In other words: they don't feel it. There's a time for study and a time for listening. Knowledge and technique are useless when they don't serve a higher purpose: human emotion.

Speed Again

In order to be able to play real fast you need a lot of practicing. There's a certain barrier that you surpass without being aware of it and, from that point on, nothing can slow you down.

Almost anything can be played fast if you practice correctly: begin slowly, then increase the speed gradually.

But there is also another little secret: the efficiency of your moves. Press the strings with your left hand with the minimum power that gets the right sound. You can even practice this technique. Let's take two simple chromatic runs:

Play these two runs without pressing with your left hand's fingers (a kind of "left hand mute") until you are able to play them fast enough. Then increase the pressure until you reach a clean sound but don't press more than that. The purpose is to be aware of the minimal pressure that's needed.

Now, for the right hand: play tremolo picking on a certain note. Play at all the intensity spectrum: from soft to loud. Be aware of the right hand move. Make it as efficient as you can. Play tremolo picking on all the strings, the angle of the pick is very important.

You need only 5 minutes a day to practice these exercises and you may give them up when your moves will become real efficient.

Get Ready!

A reliable musician must be ready to play in any situation. Including jams where the musician was not told the tonality or the chord sequence, not even the tonality. Can you do this?

Try Band in a Box: the program has some amazing features for music students: you can learn to play chords or melody along with a band, you can improve your musical hearing, you can learn guitar chord soloing. But what is relevant for our issue is the "Melodist" feature. You can click on the "Juke Songs Now" button and the program will generate random songs. You should mute the melody and the soloist and improvise along with the computer.

There are two ways to do it: looking at the chords while improvising or turning off the screen and soloing by hearing and intuition. Both ways are not only great teaching tools but also great fun.      

Profession vs. Art

Any normal human being can be a professional. There are a lot of schools and a lot of tutorials to learn from all over the place. Who are the professional musicians? The sidemen we see in pop bands playing for Enrique Iglesias or Gloria Esteban, the instrumentalists playing for the Chicago Philharmonic, the jazz musicians playing for Las Vegas-style crooners. A professional is taught to satisfy the demands of his/hers employer and is easy to be replaced by machines. A professional musician is taught to satisfy the demands of the record company and is easy to be replaced by computers. Professionals will never create, they will only execute. They become less and less necessary.

Like professionals, artists worked a lot to acquire high skills. But, when times come to perform, artists forget everything they ever learned. Professionals just put into practice what they already know.

Artists are those strange people who can't live without creating. Literally. Creative musicians won't hear in their heads the last Bon Jovi hit or the smashing Petrucci solo on the last Dream Theater record. They will hear instead melodies never heard before, surprising harmonies, complex rhythms. They will invent instrumental techniques to fit their vision.

Is creativity some kind of illness? Maybe. Most of the artists have a lot of social and financial problems because of their obsession. But they are the ones that make us step forward. Music can do well enough without professionals, it will be a bore without artists.

The Tone

The first thing we hear when we listen to music is not the melody, not the rhythm, not the harmony – but the sound.

Great guitarists are great because they are innovators. They invent new music and new ways of guitar playing. But every one of them has his own sound.

The pioneers in the 1950s and 1960s fought against severe technique limitations. Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and Ritchie Blackmore broke those limitations. A less famous player – Roy Buchanan – came with an amazing tone and decisive technical innovations.

The 1970s and 1980s brought us Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eddie van Halen, Steve Vai, Larry Carlton, Pat Metheny and a long list of great players. Each one of them found his own tone, the tone that fits his vision about music.

Nowadays there is no technical problem to get the tone you wish. Variax guitars, a great deal of multi-effects, soft effects are affordable. The only problem is to have a vision and to look for the sound that is the most appropriate for it. Keep this in mind next time you go shopping.

Anyone can learn to play like anyone else. You won’t count unless you make your own original music with your own original tone. Look for it!