Rhythm guitar (1)

To master rhythm guitar, it’s not that easy. Many effort need to be made to get it accomplished. However, don’t expect that you can play better after you read this entry. I just share my experience and hopefully you would find it inspiring.

Rhythm guitar is essential to any songs. To weigh them, it’s more important than guitar solos. It’s such a technique that every guitarist should possess. In a song, 90% of the time you are playing rhythm guitar while there’s not more than 10% of the time you play solos.

I had been buying many many books of guitar method in musical stores before. Among them, rhythm guitar books are a majority. I dig into every books and try to get the answer, however, I still cannot get into the door of mastering rhythm guitar.

Later, I realize that ‘guitar playing’, a kind of performing arts, cannot be taught entirely through books. What I need was a guitar tutor! It’s an important part to learn from a good tutor. He would correct you any mistake when he noticed while you are playing in front of him.

OK, so what did my tutor teach me rhythm guitar? The clock in my mind! Yes, everyone has a clock in one’s mind. We need to learn to notice that, feel that. I later find out that the main cause to my poor sense in my mind’s clock is: I didn’t use mentronome when practice. It’s a must to turn on it, or drum machine if your multi-effect have one built-in already. Start with a slow beat, say 60 bpm (beat per minute). Move on to the next level, say 70 bpm when you play pretty comfortable and steady with that bpm. He told me that every great guitarist had come across this moment. So, be patient! Keep practicing!

Guitar Method

In a city like Hong Kong, who can concentrate one’s work wholeheartedly? I mean, with so many temptation around us in our home and in our society. At home, we cannot keep our fingers in peace. We watch TV by keeping on pressing the remote control; we keep scrolling our mouse when go internet while blogging, MSN …..whatever. The same applies when we go outside: we keep use the “special pen” to “draw” on our mini game gadget “NDS”; keep tuning the right track of song in our IPOD with our finger; keep pointing on our PDA / Blackberry. What a world now we live in!

It’s not exaggerating to say that those fingers of such busy guys mentioned above, their loading are far more heavier than we guitarist did. Guitarists are with brains! So do they ? Right! To be more specific, we practice guitar with our brains used. We are not simply doing exercise. We are counting the beats, think of the chord progressions, think of the bassline, the tricks to be used, the sound of our effect. We simply put our physical action blend with our mind. It’s no easy task to achieve this. Despite this, guitarists are those who really really love guitar(s)!! They definitely won’t have only one guitar in their home. They have many!! When they have spare money, they would convince themselves to buy one more. Then next festival, convince themselves again ….. this cycle goes on and on and on ………

To illustrate we guitarists have brain is easy. We know when to stop, when to take a break!! Yeah, this is important! Since we all know one golden rule:

Practise one hour each day in a week is better than Practise seven hours a day in a week!!