5 Tips for guitarist

written by Marcella Adisurya

The guitar is such a versatile instrument and the best instrument in my opinion (not biassed at all!). Like any instrument, you have to put in consistent practice time to see results - but the results you can achieve are endless and rewarding.

I have been playing the guitar since 2011 and there are still so many things I have yet to learn and master. 

If you have chosen to pursue the guitar, first I must say great choice. Second, it can be frustrating at times but don’t worry about it too much and trust the process (as long as you practice!). 

Here are 5 tips for all you killer guitarists out there

1. Practice, practice, practice

This really applies to anything. If you want to see results, you need to put in time. 

Try to make practice fun for you. Start with a song you love to jam to. That will put you into a musical headspace and get the ball rolling. 

For people who get easily distracted like me, what I do to practice is I will do something else while I am playing my guitar. I would watch something while I’m sitting in my chair practicing scales or dexterity exercises.

Check out Moses’ 3 tips to improve your practice routine!

2. Tune your guitar

It is such an important skill to know how to tune your guitar. 

You’re strumming away at your guitar having a great time but you know deep down something doesn’t feel right. In most cases, this is because your guitar is out of tune. It is not good when you’re developing your musical ear when playing on an out of tune guitar. Especially at gigs you want to make sure your guitar is tuned!

There are a lot of free tuning apps and you can buy tuners at the EMA office through our partnership with the NZ Rockshop. Make sure you ask your teacher to show you how to tune your guitar, if you don’t know how.

3. Play with music

We can often get caught up in perfecting techniques and memorising scales that we forget to actually play with music.

I am definitely guilty of this. I have spent a lot of my time trying to craft different techniques, learning a bunch of chord inversions, and learning new scales that I forget the reason I learn guitar is to play music. 

When I learn a new song, I get too caught up on the theory side. I always get distracted and think of what scale I could play over a certain set of chord changes or unnecessarily analysing why someone would use this chord over this melody and yadda yadda yadda. I end up not actually learning the song for what it is and playing to the music. 

While I’m not saying you should avoid theory (never avoid theory!), you should have a balance. 

Don’t forget to be musical!

4. Protect your ears

It is vital that you don’t play too loud. 

Our hearing is one of the most important senses as musicians. So please don’t crank up your amp volume all the way up to 10. Keep it at a reasonable volume. Especially at band rehearsals, it is so easy to keep turning up your volume not realising that everyone is playing dangerously loud. Be mindful of everyone in the room.

Your neighbours and your future ears will thank me for this tip.

5. Be prepared

Have spare strings, spare picks, spare leads, spare everything!

Imagine you’re playing at a gig and one of your strings snaps. All good you can finish your set. You don’t have any solos the first half, but the second half of the set you got all the solos. It would be pretty nice at that moment to have some spare strings to quickly put on before the second set. 

Even if you’re not gigging, it’s always good to have spares of everything. This will also help your guitar maintenance.

Good luck to all you guitarists out there.
Have fun and enjoy playing possibly the greatest instrument to ever exist.

Learn from one of EMAs amazing guitar guru’s today!