Guitar

5 Steps to Playing Guitar with Precision

Dec 30, 2015 by Seth Riley

    

Beyond talent, showmanship and melodic sense, the thing that often separates a good player from the great is his or her ability to play with precision. The truth is, many of us play either hesitantly or hurriedly. The hesitant player, afraid to play the wrong thing, tarries; the overly-aggressive player often proceeds the beat. Both are sloppy and are symptoms that your guitarwork could use a bit of adjusting.

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or still just beginning, you owe it to yourself to look for ways in which you can beef up your accuracy and your confidence. Below are five tips to get you started:

1. Simplify

To practice precision, it often helps to whittle your gear back for a while. Turn off the effects. Unplug your acoustic. Plug your electric guitar straight into your amp and try to think of the setup as an acoustic instrument. Some players may even find that temporarily forgoing a pick helps reorient the fingers’ relationship with the strings.

Trust me, it will sound dry and uninspiring at first. Give it time. You will soon find that you have focused on new things: your vibrato will bloom; your interaction with the strings will intensify; your trips up and down the neck will become more assertive. Overtones and harmonics will ring where the distortion and echoes used to be. In short, your guitar playing will become more interesting and more confident than it ever was while swimming below a lather of effects. As you reintroduce your effects, you will be pleasantly surprised by how much you have improved.

One effect that actually can help you learn to play with precision is a very gated and velcro-y fuzz. With the aperture for sustain squeezed to almost nothing, badly-landed lead notes irrecoverably squelch and die, forcing you to land each note the same way you play ring-the-bottle. A fuzz like the Basic Audio Zippy or the ZVex Fuzz Factory, with the comp and gate turned up, are tremendously helpful lead-teachers.

2. Play Slower

Make sure that you transition on the right beats, and that you finger and strum cleanly. Use a metronome or a drum track. Examine how much string-scratching noise you make. Does your fretting hand feel comfortable and confident? Why or why not? Do you need to practice the basics? There is no shame in revisiting skills you have already developed.

3. Silence

Composer Claude Debussy famously said, “music is the space between the notes.” The sloppy guitarist is always tempted to overplay, but the precise and controlled guitarist knows that silence can be everything. Look for ways to not play. Let your notes serve as peaks and valleys instead of marching ants. For good examples, listen to jazz and classical music as well as bands like Low and Bedhead.

4. Learn the Notes and the Scales

When it comes time to play a lead or a fill, many guitarists simply feel their way around, often in front of an audience. Certainly, improvisation is a great and inspiring tactic but winging it is often something less than improvisation.

If your fretboard mystifies you, the internet is full of chord, scale and note charts. Instantly knowing, for example, where F# falls on the B string will greatly improve your confidence. Yes, memorization might be boring, but mastering your fretboard will provide pathways into your melodic sense and into the habit of playing precisely.

5. Learn to Transition Smoothly

We all have chords that worry us. In the heat of battle, our hands are just slightly less adept at forming some shapes. That’s normal. Unfortunately, many of us tend to arrive at those chords late. Perhaps after a long commute up or down the neck, the transition lags and our timing falls behind.

Forcing yourself to repeatedly fight your way through those troublesome transitions and chord shapes is key to your success. Transitions between two frets and ten frets can be made in the same amount of time if you take the time to practice them. So, face those problematic chords and find ways to make the transition cleanly and on time.

Just as a public speaker must learn to enunciate, the guitarist needs to play precisely to avoid slurred, unsure or hurried guitarwork. Proper enunciation doesn’t lag or hurry; it doesn’t slop or gloss over. Rather, it anticipates the pitches, bends, spaces and rushes of music to ensure that all angles and dynamics are hit head on. With a little practice and some thoughtful consideration of areas needing improvement, you will see great advances in your ability to play precisely.