10 Tips For Guitar Players In Under 5 Minutes!

1. Dropped a plectrum in your acoustic? Shake until you can see it under the strings and remove with blutac on the end of a pencil. 2. Ask any guitar player and they will be able to play most chords and a few pieces with eyes closed. So don`t tilt your guitar so you can see the fingerboard, use the dots on the top of your neck, it will make your guitar easier to play. 3. Don`t pick up a plectrum like loose change, have the plectrum stick out at a 90 degree angle to your thumb and curl your finger underneath so only the very end of the plectrum pokes out. It wont fly across the room then. 4. Whether strumming or picking, alternate every downstroke of a plectrum with a downstroke. 5. Use a scale as a warm up and warm down and learn the sound and the name of the notes not just the shape. 6. Use your ears! Aural awareness is so important to guitar players, using books or tab is great but learning songs by ear is a great exercise. 7. Keep your thumb in the middle of the neck as a general rule and not over the top of the neck and dont grip the neck of the guitar too tightly, it will slow you down. 8. Most scales come in 4 fret boxes for a reason, you have 4 fingers on your fretting hand. Dont let your little finger be lazy 9. Place your first finger on the fifth fret of your lowest string, now your second finger on 6th without removing your first finger, now repeat for the other two fingers. Now move your first finger to the a string without removing the other fingers and repeat for each finger on 6th, 7th, 8th and repeat on each string. This is a great exercise for getting fingers working independently. 10. Keep your guitar in tune and clean with fresh strings at all times. Never tune a sharp string down to pitch, tune down lower then tune up, the tuning will hold more accurately.