14 Habits Holding You Back (on guitar)

what's up everybody it's Mike here from the art of guitar here to show you 14 habits that might be holding you back on guitar the first thing that I noticed that seems to get a lot of people when they first start out is they learn how to play pretty well in the beginning but they're out of tune so even if they're playing perfect chords it might sound like this so I'm playing the right chords but it just something's wrong you know it sounds bad and the worst thing is when someone's actually playing well and the only thing holding them back is that one string is a little bit out and what I did was I took my third string the G and I just brought it down a little bit just to show you that that's all it takes to ruin your sound so if I were to bring the G back to where it's supposed to be I just turned it a little bit so one easy way to do it is to buy one of these clip-on tuners they're pretty cheap and they're easy to use and we do go over how to use them on the website but it's kind of self-explanatory once you get go and you just need to know the names of the strings and which way to turn the knobs another thing that I see the second habit is when people try to play lead guitar in the beginning they tend to want to bend the strings because they see all their guitar heroes doing that Jimi Hendrix Eric Clapton Stevie Ray Vaughn all those guys and they go to bend their strings and even if they're decent at the technique of bending if their ear isn't used to the sound of a correct Bend they may overshoot it or undershoot it I hear this all the time so the other day I had a student he was playing a solo and he was overshooting the band and it sounded like this [Music] it just something didn't sit right when he was playing it and I'll do that same example but I'll show you what it's like when you under bent I hear that a lot too so somebody's going for this epic solo and they're about to hit a nice Bend and all of a sudden it just comes up short real quick if you want to set up your tuner to one of the notes you're trying to bend to I'll just do a quick little mini lesson on this hit the note bend it and watch your tuner and see if you can get it to go right exactly where you want it to go so for example if I'm on the second string 15th fret and I want to bend it up a whole-step if you know your theory the d up a whole step will be e so if you watch your tuner as you're bending as soon as it gets to the center of the e you're in tune and then you can memorize how it feels to play the Bend correctly the third bad habit that I see people doing that hold people back all the time is they push way too hard when they play guitar so what they do is instead of just hitting this note for example which is d they'll hit it but they'll be pushing so hard they'll actually push the note a tiny bit sharp so that doesn't seem like a huge deal when you're by yourself like if you go see what says [Music] did you hear come up just a tiny bit and even that little bit can make things sound funny especially if you're playing with other people or if you're playing chords because you'll be pushing notes out and other notes won't be being pushed as hard and all of a sudden you have this clash and just don't sound correct and then you go check your tuning you'll think oh I must be habit one okay I better fix that and you'll come back and you'll still be bad you're probably pushing way too hard if you really think about all you have to do to make a note sound is touch the string on the middle fret you don't have to push it into the wood everybody thinks that if you've ever seen a scalloped guitar neck they actually take the wood that's back on the fret board and they scoop it out so that when they press down on the string you really are only hitting the metal you're not touching the wood the string isn't pushing into the wood that's all stuff that is adding too much energy to what you're doing you don't have to waste all that energy guitar should feel very effortless when you play you shouldn't get tired like after five minutes another big habit that I know some people do is they have zero vibrato and don't get me wrong some artists never use vibrato but sometimes I'd say nine out of ten times when I see a beginner not doing any vibrato it's usually because they haven't developed it quite yet or they feel comfortable using it so let me show you an example of using zero vibrato and I'll show you the difference when you add just a little bit how much of a how much of a big difference just a little can make so here's with a zero [Music] [Music] [Laughter] it's kind of flat sounding a little bit lifeless now if you just had a little bit of vibrato [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I love that song a bad habit that people seem to do a lot when they're not super confident yet with the guitar is they overthink as they're playing and what that does is that not only just kind of takes you away from playing and feeling music but it makes your playing just real rigid and sometimes I'm watching people play and their eyes are so intense they're looking at their guitar and you can tell they're thinking every single note they're doing every single time they're picking they're thinking okay I have to do this I have to do this and at least they're thinking about what they're playing they're not thinking of something they have to do tomorrow or whatever but even if you're being present in that way and you're thinking it's really hard to also consider that plane it just takes something away from your playing that translates to the listener so I'll show you an example of overthinking while you're playing and I'm gonna exaggerate a little bit because I mean I really want you to get the point but I have seen people do this sometimes up to this level so let's say we're playing paranoid or something oh by the way when you're overthinking you tend to play too hard too that happens as well [Music] totally exaggerating but you kind of get the point so in my head I was thinking 1214 hammer-on okay now I have to do this now we're doing the rhythm part II then D now you could shut that all off as soon as you get more comfortable and confident with the guitar and then what you do is you start to see it from a different perspective and it's mostly playing and watching yourself observing yourself playing and you're actually kind of just sitting back and going oh this is happening it's a different way to perceive guitar as you're playing it but you do have to get to a certain level to really click with this concept so now if I play it I played it so many times that it just kind of plays itself and I can relax I don't have to think as I'm playing I just kind of watch and I observe [Music] and it comes off a little bit smoother I would say it is easier to listen to in my opinion and when you have a stage full of people that aren't overthinking as they're playing and they're actually just enjoying the music and themselves as they play it just comes off and feels much better I want to listen to those kind of bands I don't want to see five people on stage all overthinking and lead live which leads to over playing as well let's take that same riff and I want to show you another really bad habit and this one can completely sink your playing and that's just having a poor sense of timing not being able to keep a good rhythm and I see people trying they start tapping their foot they're not sure what to do it's a big part of our website by the way is rhythm because I do I did play drums longer than guitar so I started playing drums when I was 9 years old I believe I started banging on icecream buckets in that old story but when you play without rhythm it's really hard to feel a riff come to life so if I'm playing that paranoid riff and let's say I'm doing this I've heard people play it like that before some of that also might be overthinking by the way so this kind of goes along with that other bad habit of overthinking because the more you think the less you're focusing on the internal beat of the riff and it's easy to let it just get away from you so once you're comfortable a lot of this has to do with confidence over time by the way once you do establish confidence in your instrument all this stuff does naturally happen but you can also cut it off right away and start to fix things immediately if you already if you're aware of them that's the whole purpose of this video to make people aware that they might be doing some of these things so let's say I'm doing the rhythm now and I don't have to think about it and I could just kind of let the rhythm flow because I have a better sense of rhythm so that really brought it together just having that internal click another habit that I see a lot of people do it's not really I would say a habit but it's just a lack of awareness when it comes to your own tone and I fell victim to this for a long time it took me a lot of years before I actually thought how does my guitar sound coming out of my amp what I would do is I would focus so much on the playing part that I neglected hearing the sounds that were coming out so when I changed that awareness it really helped for example the other day we were doing a a dress rehearsal practice and one of my students was playing a lead guitar part and she had her tone knobs all the way down on her guitar and she was trying to do the solo a solo and it went like this you get the idea and she went through the entire solo and I stopped the band and I was like what's what do you think is wrong right now and she had no idea she's like I played it right everything seemed fine and then I asked her to play it again just herself and you could barely hear her guitar because there was no high end because all her tone after dialed back so then I said okay let's turn up the tone effluence now let's try it [Music] [Applause] especially this part really shined through once she turned up her tone knob and I thought about that I'm like that's so much like I used to be where I would not really even notice my playing I'd be like okay my amp is on my guitars plugged in I'm playing the right stuff it must be right and then you know later on you listen to a recording or something you like I had way too much distortion going on or I couldn't even hear myself because my tone was turned down or I was on the wrong pickup so start to listen to yourself record yourself do whatever you can the best thing is to hear it in the moment so while you're playing with your friends or in a band or even solo ask does this even sound good coming out of my amp and if it doesn't don't be afraid to mess with nobs experiment you'd be surprised how many people don't really know what to do to fix a sound if it doesn't sound right but that's a great lesson just by doing that you can always tell someone don't really know what they're doing yet on the guitar if they have really old strings on their guitar and when they play you can almost hear that weird chorus he sound because a string is rusting away or their actions super high or the bridge is all messed up there's a lot of things that can happen to your guitar over the course of time and if you don't know what you're doing and you're not replacing your strings you're not conditioning the neck right things can go bad really fast so that's a habit that a lot of people have right away that they eventually have to fix on a necessity because their strings start breaking their guitar keeps going out of tune because the strings are old you'd be surprised how many people play for like a year and I ask when's the last time you changed strings and they say I've never even put on a string and then I feel their guitar or I try to clean it off and there's black stuff all over the strings and it's a good indication that you're still at a certain level of the guitar so to get past that to move forward start to understand what it takes to maintain your guitar I know some people just like to bring their guitarists to luthiers and and have them fix everything but I really and I really think it's a good idea to have the basics down yourself as well be able to change your own strings know what gauge strings you use how to put them on how to condition the neck so it doesn't crack how not to leave your ATAR on the car when it's hot or cold out or if you don't want it to get stolen or whatever but there's a lot of things little things that you learn just by you know making mistakes or you know over time you just see other guitar players doing things and you start to ask questions hopefully one thing you'll notice if you have this bad habit is that nobody seems to want to play with you and that's because you do not play well with others this has a little bit to do with the awareness factor that I talked about earlier that if you get locked in and you zero in so much on your own playing that you don't even notice what's going on around you including your tone like I talked about to see these all kind of blend together other people aren't going to want to jam with you because if they're playing one thing and you're speeding ahead or you're even on the wrong section it's just never gonna work out especially with you know with one person but especially with a full band when you join a band you learn that you have to be aware of everybody else playing with you and the best players eventually forget really what they're doing like I said before they're just observing themselves playing but they watch the whole room and they listen so they're thinking am I too loud am i too quiet what's the bass player you're doing always okay I better switch with them whatever and if everyone in the band has an awareness you have a very cohesive unit and that's what a good band is it's when they all just kind of know every little movement there was a when I was in a band for a long time as a kid growing up my teenage band I could look at my drummer in just the way I saw the corner of his eye I could tell we're going to another part or my singer would like do something I just notice his mannerisms and I would be ready for the next thing so that's a blessing if you can have a tight-knit group and you guys can start to get to that level with reading each other but just on your own start off when you're playing to get so comfortable that you don't only have to zero in on your own instrument then when other people get introduced to the mix you won't be this person doing this stuff you know I'd be like oh cool you're doing that okay I'll do this and it's a much better way to get into the whole group playing scenario and I'll get you out of your basement and hopefully under the stage quicker one thing that I also see is people playing just fine they're doing everything correctly but they just don't know how to mute their strings and what happens let's say I just add more distortion to this thing you start to play with more distortion let's say and because then clean sound you don't always notice it as much and you're trying to do something kind of cool up here maybe you're just doing some lead stuff and before you know it your guitar watch this there's tapping the body and all that noise is happening well if you start playing over the top of that extra sound it kind of cool but you start playing over the top of it and you have this mess underneath everything you're playing and sometimes it can totally get out in the way of what you're trying to actually do so let's say you're playing some notes [Music] sounds like dun dun Handley but you have all this noise happening and you're playing you're accidentally hitting other strings [Music] it's really funny cuz once you're so used to muting your strings it's hard to not mute your strings I divorce that right now but it sounded like there was a constant ringing underneath everything I just played and that can be cool if you're doing a solo when you're doing that on purpose but if you're playing with other people those open notes start clashing with the notes that they're doing and before you know it you've got a big mess happening it's kind of like if you're trying to do a drawing and your poem keeps rubbing against the the paper and all the pencil stuff start smearing it's all those clean lines that you wanted to draw or all some smeared and like I said before that could be kind of cool but in a lot of situations you want cleaner sounds so let's say I'm just kind of messing around in that same area but I'm doing good muting by the way left hand and right hand muting [Music] see dead quiet in between everything so I'm able to control the level of muting that I do but a big thing I like to preach especially in the site we really focus on the left hand muting and you'd be surprised with one finger you can mute strings underneath above your finger while playing the note you're actually playing and then if you get your thumb and other fingers into the mix you can get pretty good at Matt you can get pretty good at mastering the art of muting with your left hand and then your right hand out some palm muting and before you know it you have total control over the sound and like I said before you can introduce some noise if you want to which can be very cool or you can totally make it clean if you really want extra sharp notes while you play so if I want to just a really clean note pretty clean for one a little bit of noise with it [Music] see that a lot of stuff happening with it versus totally clean great having that much controller with a noise factor because then you're in control of it it's not controlling you as you're playing this isn't gonna seem like a bad habit enough to actually mention it on the video but it's very important if you're if you want to start to hang out with other musicians and be part of the musician community one thing you don't want to do is talk yourself up too much as far as your skills and you'll notice that the better the player the less they do that the more amateur someone is the more they seem they have to compensate for not feeling as confident in their playing so you'll see a lot of not so good guitar players talking like they're Eddie Van Halen or something it's really interesting because I always thought you know you're gonna have to back it up someday you know so anyone who does that first of all nobody really likes to play with people that do that kind of thing anyway and second of all it usually means you should you know stop talking and go home and probably practice and get yourself up to that level I feel kind of like a jerk saying all this stuff but it's true to the level where you don't feel like you have to you know announce to the world that you're really good at guitar so keep that in mind even if you are a decent player you don't have to tell people just prove it with your playing it's a lesson I had to learn early on - I call it the four stages of Guitar Center playing and one of them is you're not that good but you turn the amp up really loud and it's almost like you're trying to compensate by turning up and then you play and it's one of those things where someone who's really good doesn't have to be loud and boastful about about being good and it's just kind of a funny thing because usually not always the better you get the less you really care for other people know that you're good usually just let your playing do the talking and that's all you really need you don't have to show off by you know telling everybody who you've played with or what kind of songs you can play or techniques you have so keep that in mind it might help you out as far as just getting along with other musicians and being in the red circles in the future a big indicator that somebody isn't quite where they should be as far as guitar skill is when they can play a lot of things and it sounds great but the second you're just jamming and you say take a solo if they blank they blank out and they kind of you know they get the deer in the headlights and they're not sure what to do so maybe they'll go to some solo that they know it sounds good and they'll just play that what that prove is is that the person isn't flexible enough to be able to improvise and go with some changes you'll learn right away if you play in a band that things don't always go according to plan and sometimes you never know you might start a song in a different key and something crazy might happen or the other guitar player is a capo on the wrong fret and all the sudden the song is a half step higher or lower and when that happens and you don't know how to change with that it kind of shows that you have a little bit of inadequacy in that area and so what you want to do is you want to improve your improvising and this also ties into knowing your theory which we're going to talk about a little while and another habit but being in a being able to improvise doesn't just mean being able to make stuff up in certain keys it also means being able to improvise by changing with whatever's happening so somebody's playing like a blues thing or let's say this is a real generic example it's the end of the night you're gonna play some old blues-rock thing and someone's like take a solo and you don't know what to do that's a great sign that you need to once again go home hit the woodshed and start to learn about improvising and how scales work with you know chords and what to do in certain situations and there's a lot that goes into it by the way we try to go in depth with that on the website but if you even know one scale really well and you're able to play it in different situations that that's a really good way to get started just start small and then increase as you get better and on a very high level you'll be able to play what you hear and that's a huge topic we're gonna cover in the future working on a whole section on the website right now because in the end isn't that what you want to do you want to be able to hear something and just play it instantly so that's gonna be a really high level area that we're gonna reach pretty soon but for right now just start to put on some backing tracks on YouTube let's say and just play along and see if you can get halfway decent improvising at this point so that in the future you're not caught off guard some people might argue with this one but I think it's a bad habit to not be able to stand up and play and so if you bought a strap or you got one for free or not for free usually but if you got a strap with your guitar or when you bought it and you've never used it you're really missing out it's easy to sit in practice right I don't know many people had stand up and practice scales all day but don't neglect the fact that someday you're probably going to be standing up on stage and moving around and you want to be able to handle that aspect of playing and you're gonna notice that the guitar looks very different from up here when you're looking down from standing I'm not standing right now obviously but I'm kind of pretending and all of a sudden it's really hard to tip your guitar and look at your fretboard the way sometimes people do when they sit so when you're standing all you see is the side of your guitar and the six strings become one string because you're looking at it from the side this perspectives bizarre so you're gonna get nervous you're not gonna be able to find the strings like you used to be able to and a lot of things happen you'll want to do this in the comfort of your own basement right now or practice room wherever that is not on stage you don't want to wait a day before you're about to play a show go to band practice throw on a strap for the first time and all of a sudden oh my gosh I can't play anything it's such a terrible feeling like we mentioned before I wanted to give it its own habit because it's such a big deal and it's a big reason why I even started the website and that is a lot of people can play but when you say oh can you do this F minor chord or you ask them to do a certain scale or mode they freeze and they're not sure what you're talking about and to me it's not always the you know the end of the world if you don't know a lot of theory there's a lot of great guitar players and a lot of people especially in the comments let's say that person don't knows nothing about theory and look at how great they are and I would argue that you know they probably know more than you think they do I don't think and guess young pick up the guitar and goes I have no idea what these strings are called but Wow watch this you know so in my opinion it's really important to know your basics as far as open chord names the Barre chords when you move them around being able to find the chords that you're looking for major minor seven all that stuff and then being able to attach scales to it so if you're communicating with other musicians let's say there's a piano player over there you know like hey can you do a C major whatever you know just throw out some scales and if you're able to say things back and forth like that at that level say hey we're gonna play a one six four five progression that kind of thing you start to see that you understand each other on a different level and I've found myself being able to play in many situations because I know my theory and so if somebody throws me a curveball like have also and we're in the key of G minor instead of B minor I'm able to shift things over and just keep rolling with it and it's a great feeling to be able to do that okay so that I believe that was 14 habits that are probably holding you back and even if just a couple of them can be fixed let's say you've just had one or two of those habits if you could tighten those up and you know start working on those you'd be amazed at how fast you could jump up the levels as far as your confidence when you play notice I mentioned confidence all the time like I said earlier the more confident you get the more a lot of these seem to start to fix themselves but I think you can give yourself a boost of confidence if you're aware that you even do these things so see if any of those can help you out and let me know in the comments if they have and we'll talk to you soon

Channel: The-Art-of-Guitar

Views: 1,844,779

Keywords: ultimate black belt guitar, guitar, pitchfever, pitch fever, lessons, theory, mike geronsin, beginners, advance, lesson, electric, acoustic, 14 habits, holding you back, the art of guitar

Id: RPQ1LQGZf3A

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2017