If you are reading this, then it is safe to assume that you are looking to improve your guitar playing. You want to make progress. You want to better. You probably have expectations with how you should be progressing… and frustrations with how you actually progress.

In a perfect world, we would sit down and practice for our practice time each day, and make some progress.

And while that sometimes does happen… more often that not it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, we quickly feel frustrated with ourselves.

We’ve all been there. We sit down to practice… and it doesn’t work. Our brain can’t think properly, our fingers are like spaghetti and the music is not sounding like music. There is nothing more frustrating than a bad practice session.

Ideally, we would like all our practice sessions to go nice and smoothly, and to consistently make a bit of progress, every time we sit down to practice guitar.

When I was thinking about writing this, I wondered, “does the internet really need another another article about sweep picking?”

Then I saw a video advert on YouTube for a sweep picking course… and the in the video the demonstrator was teaching sweep picking… wrong.

So I thought yes, the internet could do with another sweep picking article.

The Problem With Sweep Picking Resources

A lot of guitar players really struggle to learn sweep picking.

The Art of Practice

This first post is a quick explainer behind the blog series that I am calling “The Art of Practice”. When it comes to practising on guitar, there is a lot more to it than just playing a few notes… at least, if you want to reach a higher level with your playing, it is going to take a lot more than playing a few notes.

You have to have dedication, self discipline, motivation, drive, mindset, focus…. whatever word you use - you need it. And the greater the level you want to achieve, the more it you are going to need.

Learning the guitar is awesome. After learning the instrument for over 15 years, I continually learn new things and new ways to apply things I have previously learned. One of the greatest things about being human is continuously growing and improving, and the guitar is a great pathway to that experience.

You can separate guitar players into roughly three categories:

1. People learning guitar (including learning songs)
2. People teaching guitar
3. People writing their own music

Most guitar players fall into more than one category. Some guitar players move between categories as they develop.

Pedal points are a great way to get that neoclassical style sound into your improvising and soloing.

I’ve previously covered one way of writing pedal points, how to write a pedal point that ascends (or descends) through a scale.

Another way we can use pedal points is, instead of having a single note that we pedal, we use a short phrase. I refer to this as the “Pedal Phrase” or PP for short. I don’t know if this is the technical name, but it works.

Writing your first song on guitar can be quite challenging. If you have never written a song before, you’re probably not sure how to get started.

I know that was the case when I started writing.

I found writing my first few songs quite difficult. Then I started wondering, “How can I make song writing easier for my guitar students?”, and after thinking on that question for a few days, I came up with a solution.

When you start looking more into music theory, such as how chords are made, and starting wanting to learn more about how to write your own songs, or how to improvise on guitar; everything comes back to basic major and minor scales.

You can think of these scales as the ruler by which other scales are measured.

What Defines a Scale?

A scale is defined by it’s intervals. The name that we give a scale denotes the intervals within that scale (this will make more sense later).

Triads are the basic building blocks of Western Music.

Triads form the basic chords that are extensively used in the music that you and I listen to.

A triad is formed from three notes. If you are not too familiar with intervals, you may want brush up on them.

When forming any triad, we start with a root note, which we label as 1.

Major Triads

The major triad has a root (1),  major third (3) and a perfect fifth (5).

A fundamental concept of music theory is the idea of intervals.

An interval is the musical distance (or difference) between two notes.

On guitar, you can think of it as how many frets there are between two notes.

Think About Musical Intervals on Guitar

When it comes to beginners thinking about intervals, the guitar gives us a problem:

We have a lot of strings

This can make it difficult to visualise intervals, especially when working them out across strings.