10 THINGS I wish I knew as a beginner guitarist

when it comes to learning guitar we all have our own paths our own victories our own struggles and looking back at my time as a beginner guitarist take that away please although seeing that picture there's quite a few things i missed from that time being so excited to learn even the easiest things hearing the thing you heard on the record coming out of your own guitar i mean that's a magical feeling i probably won't ever relive but that same intensity that makes me a bit nostalgic the good old days right and i had the realization that there were quite a few things i would have wanted to tell my younger self when he was starting out just as a mentor sensei paul as a voice in the back of your head i'm sure he would have liked that if he would know how much helps are today i don't think so i asked the same question over at my instagram what advice would you have wanted to give yourself when you were a beginner and the resemblances were striking it's funny we all realize the importance of certain things in a later stage in life but it's never too late to stop doing the bad stuff and start doing it right so let's get going the absolute number one thing is rhythm timing groove and you might think rhythm isn't sexy and if i do that sweet picking everyone praises me but if i play in time well that doesn't impress my friends first find new friends second let me illustrate the importance of it timing is like the foundation of a building even if you try to build the simplest things on it if the foundation fails everything falls apart with great time playing even the simplest things will sound so good and with bad time even the most complex things will sound terrible there you have it right i would tell myself not to practice anything different really because i did practice a lot of scales and songs back in the day and i enjoyed it a lot which is very important too but at least play them with a metronome for maybe 15 minutes for every practice session and i would tell myself to practice solos and improvisation with a click playing along with the song is not the same as doing it by yourself the metronome really reveals the flaws in your time so you can fix it recalibrate your rhythm and your internal timing that was really an eye-opener for me and it would have saved me a lot of time fixing it later number two i'm seeing so many people regarding not taking the time to learn the notes on the neck earlier and funny enough you only have to do it once and from there on out everything will make so much more sense playing the same lick in different positions [Music] so if your plan is to learn it eventually better do it today so you can profit from it every minute going forward and i see not knowing the notes on the neck a bit like walking in the big city clueless and trying to find the hot spots sometimes you might bump into a cool thing but it took you forever to find and it happened mostly by chance until someone hands you the map with all the sweet spots clearly marked this makes navigating it so much more easier right you will be way faster at the destination so learn them and from there on out it will open your eyes and give you so much more insight in the guitar and the workings of the fretboard if you're absolutely new to this and interested in it you can always check out my music theory series here on youtube or of course check out my beginner course learn practice play if you really want to dive all in where we take a look at all these things in one package and how notes on the neck relate to chords skills etc etc anyway let's move on okay for number three there is something that i have to tell myself over and over again even to this date and that is to sing with the guitar as you're playing the notes especially when improvising or noodling one commenter on instagram said it brilliantly spending time connecting the sound of the notes with your voice and added the following sing everything you play and while you do that the rhythm is more important than note pitch and yes 100 this also helps me or those that are a little bit more insecure about their voice it's not about making the voice sound nice it's about really being in touch with the notes you play and they come out from the heart instead of from the hand or something you remember that doesn't mean anything like this [Music] ah i'm really insecure about this and i don't know if i will keep this in the final video so this way you don't go down the road of mindless meaningless noodling and i'm sure we've all been there the guitar is your voice and you're using your own voice to connect it to your mind really so i really should be doing this more and i take an example out of my dear friend mary spender who did it so beautifully in the guitar loop and collab we did check it out all right here's number four and i remember this so well i was having my first guitar lesson and my teacher said let's do an improv in a minor and he started playing some cool chords and i started soloing and it sounded so beautiful probably not okay so my best guess i was probably playing the pentatonic scale but what did he play how he was just playing some chords out of the blue and it sounded so nice together well he probably knew how to harmonize the scale this means you turn a skill into a set of chords that works so well together using just the notes from the scale so for c major that gives us the chords c d minor e minor f major g major a minor b diminished and c major and the same chords go for a minor since that's the relative key so all these chords will sound good together and you will be able to just use the a minor skill to solo over these chord changes just pick any of these chords play them together and there you have a backing track of your own of course when you see this you realize that you often see the same combination of course over and over again like the four magical chords played together next up you're hanging with your friends by the campfire you pick up the guitar and you start playing people recognize the tune awesome they start to sing along and the crowd is gathering you're happy they're happy they love you the tune builds to the chorus and everyone takes a good deep breath and starts but singing everyone stops and they stare at you you look up awkwardly oops you played the wrong chord you actually only learned the verse and everyone laughs it off but strangely enough this was the last time you were ever invited to a party you give up on guitar and became an assistant to the manager for a small paper company in pennsylvania but at night you dream of a different life you could be leading because maybe maybe if you took the time to also figure out the chorus you would have toured the world with a mildly successful pop rock band who knows so sad next up i'm going to say a word and i'm actually scared to say it no joke caged well there we are so the simplest explanation of caged is this the f major chord is just the e major chord with the capo on fret one is your mind blown well it should be and not only that you can do it for every of the five open chord shapes for the c the a the g the e and the d spelling out the magical word caged so the b chord is just the a chord with the capo one fret two the e flat chord is just a capo alpha 3 playing the c shape [Music] you see so now just remove the cable from the equation throw it out use your fingers as a capo and there you have it cage is a way to visualize the fretboard where we can find our chords all over the neck our target notes for solos and skills it helps out massively with voice leading inversions you name it it does it i made two full length videos going deeper into cage since it's one of my biggest road maps for understanding the neck so check it out over here so at number seven here is one filter from over 1250 comments on instagram thank you so much for that by the way so many comments were about music theory anything from basic understanding of music theory to struggles to learn about what makes a chord a seventh chord and from figuring out how triads work to not learning just the song but understanding the theory behind it and applying it to your own playing and it's funny because the folks that really have an aversion towards learning theory are often the ones that never learned it so i mean i'm down with people not learning theory sure if it's not your thing it's not your thing but don't hate people that just love doing it so let's quickly try to answer some of these questions in one minute so every major minor sus2 sus4 diminished augmented chord is called a triad and they are made out of three unique notes even when you play a c major chord using five strings it's just three unique notes the c the e and the g these are the first the third and the fifth notes from the major scale and if you use different notes the one the four and the five we get a sus4 chord a one a two and a five we get a sus two chord and so on and so on now for seventh chords we don't use the one three and the five but we add the seventh note from the major scale for example that will be the b we add that to the triad and we get a seventh chord c major seventh if we add a different note to flat seven we get the c seventh now i'm also omitting the fifth from the chord because we don't really need a fifth to make the chord sound like a c7 chord so that's the first one to go we have only six strings sometimes we've got to pick the right ones if we want to make stranger combinations like c sus4 and a flat 7 we get a c 7 sus4 or what about a c major 7 sus2 sus 2 chord and at the b major seventh anyway now we just have to learn all the formulas for every chord and it's not that hard because there's a great deal of logic to it mostly anyway that's it super exciting it's so much fun let's continue oh yeah this is nice next up number eight so this is a comment that sums it up nicely the instrument doesn't make a great player and wow this is home really hard if you get a better guitar you won't be a better guitar player i always linked getting new gear to a phase of learning i was in so when i got my first fender strat i was heavily into playing stuff like john mayer stevie ray and hendrix i did that on my last ball for a long time and getting that strat it really ignited that road even further it was like an accelerator but i see it happen the other way around way more often so i want to play like stevie ray vaughan let's buy a strat no don't do that because if you really wanted you would have been playing cv ray all along on whatever guitar you were lying around i have seen people play the song skull button you know that crazy fast blues or if i made a whole video i'll check it out over here anyway i heard people just rip that song on the acoustic guitar because that's the only guitar they had gear is good gear is fun good gear is always better than bad gear but in my experience it only works as an accelerator and never as an igniter all right next lucky number nine sticking to the box and one commenter on instagram said mixing major and minor pentatonic and this was such an eye-opener for me too it's funny when i started out learning guitar i had no rules nothing was holding me back from playing weird-ass stuff and this resulted into a lot of remarkable things i probably don't want anyone to ever hear but also in a careless and unique approach to note chord relations then i started learning skills and boxes and patterns and of course they provided me lots and lots of valuable information guidelines but also there lies a danger of taking these too strictly these are the no choices we've got and that's it no it's not it's never there are no wrong notes say it with me there are no notes oh hey ben oh hey paul wait could you help me demonstrate this [Music] okay so ben was playing all 12 notes jamming over an a dorian vibe and it sounded amazing and did you realize he did not play one single wrong note there are no wrong notes thank you ben that was awesome okay here at number 10 and this might sound weird but it's learned to play kids songs or birthday songs or old classic folk songs or something along those lines it's the tunes we all know happy birthday twinkle twinkle little star old macdonald had a farm and what have you and not just the chords well sure play the chords but also try playing the melody and the chords together like [Music] or even better why not try playing a fair style version of it [Music] man this is so nice it's seriously a lot of fun to play but i get it when you're just starting out you want to play the things that made you pick up the guitar in the first place and sure you better try them out because they're a lot of fun too and taking that deep dive is just the way to go but all these tunes are the perfect starting point to get in that kind of playing like fingerstyle like chords like playing the chords and the melodies together because the melodies and chords are so nicely intertwined and they often are very classic sounding progressions and resolutions that we see very often even in today's music talking about that i've been cooking up an acoustic guitar course for the past months and is almost ready to launch march 24th doors will open it takes you from being that campfire guitar player who forgot about the chorus to a well-rounded acoustic guitar player that can play anything from fingerstyle to cool strumming to flat picking in styles like the blues country and pop and rock and more and we're covering all things that in my experience make a great acoustic guitar player check it out at acousticadventure.com where you can already see a sneak peek of what's coming up and be the first one to be notified when the course opens up and i'm really excited for that before we go i'd love to hear from you what your tips would be either for yourself or for other beginners did you have some aha moments where things just started to click all of a sudden things you wish you knew sooner i'd love to check them out so leave them in the comments below have a lovely day and remember it's never too late to stop doing the bad things and start doing it right cheers

Channel: Paul Davids

Views: 756,640

Rating: 4.9611597 out of 5

Keywords: paul davids, 10 things, everyone should know, beginner, beginner guitarist, lesson, easy, basic, guitar basics, 10 I wish I knew, lessons, rhythm, caged, davids, metronome, video, beginner guitar songs, beginner riffs, easy riffs, basic guitar chords, easy chords, how to learn guitar, guitar lesson, easy guitar lesson, basics, beginner tips, tricks, 10 tips, acoustic guitar, beginner lesson

Id: SZ6H1diAtxQ

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021