by Steve Bain

Created on: February 16, 2009   Last Updated: February 22, 2009

Learning to play guitar can be a long and frustrating process. There's nothing more irritating to a budding young guitarist than not being able to play your favourite songs. Sometimes even when you manage to play them, they never seem to sound like they were supposed to. So what can you do to about it?

You can practice correctly. I'm sure you've all been told that practice makes perfect. Well when it comes to guitar, practice makes permanent. If you play a song badly over and over, you'll never get it right. You have to play it correctly over and over if you want to make any progress. So how can you make sure you play a song perfectly? Simple. Play it slow. When you're practicing, you don't have to play every beat at the speed of light. If you force your hand to play fast, you'll make mistakes, and these will only get more prominent with practice. Instead, slow it right down and concentrate on playing every note perfectly. Even if you take ten minutes to play a three minute song, it's better than playing it badly in three minutes. This way, you're hand learns the patterns correctly from the start. And once you've learned the song and can play it fluently, begin to speed it up gradually. Eventually you'll be able to play it at full speed, and it will sound a heck of a lot better than it would have if you'd forced yourself to play it fast to begin with.

But what if you still just can't get it fast enough? Well it's important to remember that the rock gods you see on tv blasting out guitar solos with a million notes per second have been practicing for many years. But it's still frustrating when you practice for months and don't seem to be able to play any faster. There is one thing that you can try - and it doesn't work for everyone - chromatic exercises. These are less like songs, and more like a collection of notes that follow a pattern on the fret board. They are not meant to sound pleasing, and instead they are designed to improve your playing in some way. They range from insultingly easy step exercises to downright impossible sweep exercises. There are plenty of these available freely on the internet, so I'm not going to pick one for you, it's up to you to choose the ones you want for yourself. The basic principle behind these is simple. You choose one that you find difficult to play, perhaps an awkward shape for your hand to make. You play it very slowly and with painstaking accuracy. You then begin to play it faster and faster, but always remembering that accuracy is more important than speed. The result? You have learned to play something with ease that you previously found very difficult. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but if you're serious about improving you're guitar skills, they can be very useful.

So there you have it. Begin slow, concentrate on accuracy instead of speed, and gradually build up to the tempo you desire. If you practice this way, you should find that the finished product sounds more like you intended it to. And when you're stuck, try some chromatics. They're always good to increase your skill level, even if they are mind numbingly boring. Just give it a try, eh? And remember, you won't become an expert overnight. If you want to be as good as you're heroes, you're going to need two things correct practice, and time.

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