Guitar Tricks Blog

Practicing 6 hours a day means nothing if you don’t know what you're doing. Overdoing it can even hinder your progress. Here's exactly how much you need to practice, and what you need to practice to get good.

As guitarists we spend 90% of our time working on our chops and improvisation skills and 10% of our time working on our rhythm playing. Yet a regular gig or a session guitarist will spend 10% of the time soloing and about 90% of the time playing rhythm. Aside from this eye-opening fact, here are 10 more reasons you might be a little lacking in the rhythm department.

Knowing what a tetrachord is gives you structure for building lead patterns, solos, and other single-note sequences that sit over top of a bass line or underlying chord progression.

To give you some new ideas about how to practice scales, I suggest patterns. And here's what I mean by that: A pattern is a particular melodic or rhythmic figure played repeatedly.

It happens to every guitarist at some point or another. Some call it guitar fatigue; others say practice boredom. The bottom line is that you’ve lost your motivation, your passion for playing guitar. What can you do to motivate yourself to keep practicing?

Fact is everyone encounters challenges with their fingers in the early days of playing guitar. It's all part of the process. The trick is that we have to adapt the hands we were born with to the demands of the fretboard.

Muscle memory is built through repetition over time. It is an acquired skill that has been practiced so long it seems innate, like riding a bicycle or tying your shoelaces. If you struggle to hit the right notes whenever you take your eyes off your hands, give the following eight tips a try to help beef up your muscle memory.

I'm always looking around for new music sites here. It's fun to see what other people are up to!

Last week I came across a site called Singing Success. It's basically like Guitar Tricks but for learning how to sing. Pretty cool idea, right?

If you have been playing guitar for a little while, you've probably heard of natural harmonics, those shimmery, ethereal chiming notes that add contrast to a rhythm part, accent notes to a heavy riff, and create screaming divebombs.

Many iconic guitarists own many different instruments over the course of their career, and many—like Stevie Ray Vaughan, who called his most cherished six-string his "First Wife"—develop a deep love for that one special guitar. Whether it's a well-aged acoustic or a banged-up electric or an axe assembled from bits of this and pieces of that, some guitars just have that certain je ne sais quoi that makes them as famous as their owners.