Dan Mumm – Page 14

How to be a great guitarist – a simple secret

If all you do is copy other guitarists, you will eventually hit a ceiling and you won’t know why. If all you do is study guitar lessons and instructional products, you can become an incredibly proficient player but you’ll never be an innovator and you might never even develop your own style.

What sets apart the average expert players from the greats really comes down to a simple difference in approach. Everyone has their own tastes and their own reasons for pursuing the things they love, but it’s less often that they take the time to dig deep into what is unique about their own passions and perspectives.

It all comes down to the types of questions you ask yourself and when or how often you ask them.

When listening to music or studying a lesson, did you know that you can get over twice as much out of the same amount of time spent? Do you listen or follow along passively or do you impose your own brand of questions on anything that comes your way?

Let me give you an example from how I approach music and guitar. Whenever I hear a song or guitar part that makes me feel a certain way, I immediately want to know how and why. I’ll usually take a moment to dissect whatever it is, but just paying attention to it with those questions in mind is enough to make all the difference.

It’s a never ending process that happens automatically once you habituate it. Each of these little distinctions builds a vocabulary that will allow you to better express your own unique ideas through music and the guitar.

By the very nature of the fact that you are the one asking the questions based on your own interpretation of things, it will shape your approach to music and guitar in a way that exactly matches your own tastes and personality. Instead of simply following the instructions of someone else, this process will allow you to adapt anything you learn to fit with your own unique vision of things. By doing this, the processes of writing and innovating will become ones of pure enjoyment. When everything is synced up, it feels amazing.

While this may seem convoluted or even esoteric, the truth is that it’s absolutely fundamental. To a certain degree, you’re doing this already. This type of curiosity is hardwired into all of us and, because we each have a unique subjective experience in life, it’s different for every single person. However, it’s only when you become aware of it that you can take full advantage of the benefits it offers.

If you want to be an innovator on the guitar, this is critical. You can definitely try to go at innovation through sheer force but you will regularly find yourself pulling your hair out in frustration. Sitting there with the guitar in your hands, thinking to yourself “okay, do something nobody has ever done before” will nearly drive you insane. Most results you get from a session like that will feel trite or contrived.

If you really want to innovate and end up with the types of results that your favorite guitarists do, innovate by way of answering questions you ask or solving problems you pose. If a technique is created arbitrarily, it will usually seem pointless and frivolous. Anything you create on the guitar should have a purpose that means something to you.

Whatever your goals are, the next time you hear something that you love in a song, guitar solo, or even a guitar lesson, don’t just try to learn it. Ask yourself why it sounds the way it does. What about it do you specifically like? What is the simplest version of it that would create the same effect? Take the time to figure it out. It isn’t an accident that it has the effect it has on you. There is a recipe hidden in there that causes it to give you the feeling it does. You can learn those recipes and build up a massive vocabulary of expression for the guitar – and it will eventually become unique to you.

Ask the question, get an answer, and move on.

You don’t need to necessarily apply it to anything right away or spend a great deal of extra time on it. It’s enough to build the habit of asking and answering the questions. After awhile, you will see a whole other dimension to the guitar that wasn’t apparent to you before. Once you get there, innovation will happen on its own.

Dan Mumm

Ready for that next challenge? Check out my massive catalog of guitar related products, covering everything from Metal versions of Classical pieces, Neo-Classical Shred technique, Sweep Picking, and more! See what’s on sale today at the link below:

www.Sellfy.com/DanMumm

Practice is a subject that has just about a million different angles to discuss. Arguably the most important of all of them is in regards to the phrase “practice makes perfect” – or what I would change to “perfect practice makes perfect”

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you’ve no doubt heard me talk about this on several occasions. Chances are, you will hear it on several more. That’s no accident. This is the sort of information that is easy to understand, easy to apply and just as easy to forget.

Taking this advice on a few occasions isn’t enough to make any lasting impact on your practice and overall results. It’s necessary to hammer this philosophy into your mind through repetition and make it a standard part of your approach to practice. Any lapse on it and you can fall right back to the same problems that impeded your progress for so long.

It’s simple to understand and there’s nothing about it that requires special knowledge to believe it’s true. When you hear it, it seems like common sense.

It goes something like this:

Whatever you practice through repetition is how your muscle memory learns to play it. If you practice sloppy, your playing will always be sloppy. If you practice with perfect technique and articulation, your playing will always have perfect technique and articulation.

It’s as simple as that.

So how do you practice something new with perfect technique and articulation? It sounds impossible, right? I mean, you’re still learning it. There has to be some room for error..
.
It’s true that you have to know the basic elements of something before you can play it perfectly. If you’ve never learned how to alternate pick, then trying to learn an alternate picked shred run is a bad idea. You have to take things in the right order. But if all the fundamental pieces are in the right place, you can practice anything new with absolute perfection.

It’s all about memorizing a section of what you’re learning, as small as it needs to be, and then practicing it as slow as you need to in order to always play it perfectly.

Imagine that you are learning a shred pattern that ascends through all 6 strings on the guitar.

What are the things you need to be able to do in order to play it perfectly?

Well first of all, you need to have enough strength and dexterity in your fingers to be able to fret the notes properly. That’s pretty basic. The same thing is true for being able to alternate pick with string changes. You need to know or figure out the proper fingering and you might need to shift positions during the pattern. You definitely need to have the pattern memorized before you start seriously practicing it.

Each of those pieces can be practiced on their own, then combined together and so on and so forth.

You could start by practicing alternate picking by itself with the metronome at an extremely slow speed, so your timing is exact. Incrementally increase the tempo, and continue up until the basic alternate picking is comfortable.

Then practice repeating just the notes on the 6th string with the metronome, the same way you did with the alternate picking.

Add the next string and then combine it all together.

Then start on the 4th string and repeat the process. Combine those two sections together, and so on.

By the time you get to the end, you will have the pattern down with absolute precision. It will be perfect. Then you can practice the whole pattern with the metronome in order to slowly and steadily increase the speed to where it needs to be.

You should be doing this for everything that you learn. It might seem tedious or time consuming, but the process will get exponentially faster over time. If you do this absolutely consistently, then before you know it, you will be able to play most things on the guitar without having to practice very much at all.

I diligently worked with this method, and still do when it’s required. Now, when I write or take on a new song, I typically have the entire song perfected within two days. Sometimes, this includes new techniques and challenging sections. And that’s without having to spend much time on either of those days. Just enough to memorize the song and enough repetition so my subconscious practices it while I sleep. The next day, it’s pretty much ready to go.

You will eventually achieve the same results if you follow this method exactly. The trick is to never take shortcuts… ever.

Just remember this: it’s not “practice makes perfect” but “perfect practice makes perfect.”