A Good Way to Practice the Electric Guitar

One way to practice your guitar is to split up the day into various time slots devoted to singular topics, such as rhythm playing, chords, scales, finger exercises, etc. While that method can be extremely effective, there is also another method that I would use for months at a time that I think is equally worthwhile for learning the electric guitar. Before I explain the actual method involved, I would like to give you a little background information.

During the course of my guitar playing "career" I encountered a few wayward individuals who were not familiar with the best way(s) to practice. Instead, they would announce they were going to embark on a practice session and go into another room and play a few riffs, then run through a couple of old licks that had been part of their repertoire for years, jam their way through a couple of tired and weary chord progressions, then put their guitar in its rack and head out the door to a party.

You will not progress much as a guitar player if you do this.

One highly effective and entertaining way that I have found to practice is to learn songs you like with the aid of tablature from a magazine or from the internet (there is a lot of free tab on the net, although most of it isn't as accurate as magazine versions done by professionals with good sound equipment, which is used to slow down difficult guitar parts). Here is what I recommend:

1. Go to a store with a few guitar magazines and leaf through them until you chance upon a song that seems interesting enough to learn (one with a good guitar solo is better than one without, of course) - many quality guitar magazines have good transcriptions of new and classic songs.

2. Hopefully you already have the CD containing the song you want to learn so you won't have to go out and buy it.

3. Put your CD player in a room with your guitar, music stand, and amp; place the guitar tablature in front of you on the music stand.

4. Listen to the song at least two times completely through without touching your guitar. (When learning songs, I would frequently make the mistake of playing parts of the song without having LISTENED to the complete tune thoroughly first, which caused me in some cases to end up playing a different version of the song and skipping many necessary details and subtleties in the original).

5. Open your magazine and look at the tablature listing the main chord sections or riffs to the song. Play through them a few times holding the sound of the original song in your head, until you think you can play the riffs well enough to jam along with it on your CD player.

6. Once you have the main verse and chorus sections down, concentrate on the solo (you did pick one with a solo, didn't you?). Listen to the solo twice all the way through without picking up your guitar. Now slowly work your way through the tablature trying to play certain sections of the solo without the CD playing. When you feel you have quite a few of the main parts down, try to play along with the solo. If you don't hit every single note, it is all right, you can perfect it later. For now, just focus on getting through the main parts, then you can break down the difficult parts you need to work on and study how to play them. (Most professional musician's solos will be beyond your abilities during your first few years of learning the electric guitar.) Remember to refer back to the tablature as much as you need to for especially difficult sections and try not to get discouraged with techniques that are beyond your present level. On the other hand, after a lot of practice and many trips through the entire solo, if you feel you have it down perfectly, then practice trying to execute it even better than the lead guitarist in the original band! Or you can throw in extra techniques of your own to make the solo even more advanced.

7. Once you feel you have all parts of the song down well, play it through from beginning to end, attempting to really nail every note without making any mistakes.

With enough practice, gradually you will be able to play along with the song you have chosen just as if you are another guitar player in the band.

That's all there is to this second type of practicing. Do you know what you are doing if you practice rock and metal songs that appeal to you in this manner? Do you know what it ultimately means if you are learning a Guns-N-Roses song from Appetite for Destruction or a song from Master of Puppets by Metallica? It means you are practicing with some of the greatest bands in the history of music! What could be better for improving your playing? AC/DC, U2, Finger Eleven, The Rolling Stones, Megadeth, My Chemical Romance, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Rage Against the Machine, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Sex Pistols, Slayer, Fugazi, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Black Flag, Shakti, these are all excellent bands to be in the company of! Learn from them. Absorb their grooves. Soak up their phrasing and dynamics and the sick notes of their wicked solos. Get down and trip out with the big dogs cuz it's party time heavy metal and punk rock style.

I can't tell you how many times I put on Appetite for Destruction and played through every single song, over and over again without stopping, sometimes jamming through the whole album five times or more. I knew every rhythm part and every fill and every solo. I also played along with Satriani and Metallica albums in the same way, (although I think I skipped a few songs here and there on those albums).

Learning songs from your favorite CDs is one of the most enjoyable ways to practice the guitar and in my opinion you will be picking up almost the same level of real life band experience by jamming along with these top-notch musicians.

But of course I don't think you should use this method of practice exclusively. Devoting time to singular topics whereby you focus more on specific techniques is also greatly beneficial and in fact necessary for becoming a true guitar player from Hades.