Chords for How To Practice Guitar Efficiently

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_ I'm Nate Savage from GuitarLessons.com and today I'm going to teach you how to practice
efficiently.
Now there are two things you need to remember before you even touch your
guitar and the first one is to relax.
_ You want to have your left hand relaxed, your
right hand relaxed and make sure through your neck, shoulders and back, make sure that's
all relaxed as well.
That's a good place to start when you're practicing.
The second thing you want to do is _ make sure that you have good posture and you're not
slouched in your seat like this with your guitar hanging down kind of like that.
You
want to make sure that you're sitting up straight and your guitar is pulled in close to your
body so you can be in a good position to practice some stuff.
_ Okay, let's talk about metronomes.
When you're practicing it's really good to use a metronome
or a drum machine or something like that so your notes and your playing will be consistent.
Right here I have a metronome.
It's a more expensive metronome but you can pick one up
at your local music store from anywhere from $15 to $200.
_ _ Probably if you're a beginner
you want to get one that's at least $30 or $40.
It's a nice one that will do the job
nicely for you.
So what I'm going to do is I have this metronome set to 80 beats per minute _ and I'm going to
play a G major scale up and back down with quarter notes starting up and then we'll go
from there.
We're going to do quarter notes then move on to eighth notes then triplets
and then sixteenths.
So let me start this and then I'll play the G major scale right
along with it. _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [A] _ [B] _ _
[C] _ _ _ [E] _ _ [F#] _ _ [G] _
_ _ [C] _ _ [Dm] _ _ [E] _ [F#] _
_ _ _ _ [Em] _ _ _ [C] _
_ _ [A] _ [G] _ _ [F#] _ [E] _ _
[D] _ _ [C] _ _ [A] _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ [D#] _ _ _ Now you'll notice that when I was playing the scale I was taking my time and making sure
that every note was clear, _ deliberate and _ I wasn't speeding up trying to play real fast
before I could get it clean.
So now that I've got that clean at 80 beats per minute using
quarter notes I'm going to change it to playing eighth notes a little bit faster.
So I'll
show you what I mean by that.
I'm going to play the exact same thing just using eighth
notes now.
So we'll start the metronome and go from there. _ _ _
_ _ [G] _ _ _ [D] _ [E] _ _
[A] _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [G] _ _ _ [D] _ [B] _ _
[G] _ _ _ [N] _ _ _ So I've got that clean with the eighth notes.
Let's bump it up to using triplets at 80 beats
per minute and see how that sounds.
So start the metronome and we're going to do triplets
on the same G major scale. _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[A] _ _ [F#] _ [A] _ _ [E] _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ _ [B] _ _ [G] _ _
_ _ [N] _ _ _ _ Okay that's still pretty good.
You'll notice my right hand is
using alternate picking always down up down up down up down up.
My left hand is always
relaxed or as relaxed as I can be.
So let's move on to some sixteenth notes and see how
that sounds.
Sixteenth notes on a G scale at 80 beats per minute.
So _ _ _ _ _ [G] _ [E] _ _
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_ _ [G] _ _ [N] _ _ _
that's how you practice your subdivisions on a guitar starting with quarter notes all
the way up to sixteenth notes.
And you don't have to do it that way.
You can start on 80
beats per minute.
Practice your scale or your passage or whatever you're practicing.
Then
turn the metronome up by 10 beats a minute to 90 beats a minute.
And that's another way
you can go about doing that.
Now I'm going to teach you how to practice
chords.
How to _ use your time efficiently to practice chords.
What you want to do when
you practice a new chord, [B] say you're learning a B minor bar chord right here.
This is your
B minor bar chord.
Say you're having a tough time with it.
[Dm] All the [D#] strings don't quite
sound right.
They're not ringing out.
What you want to do is put your chord on, _ _ _ _ then
take it off, _ put it on again, leave it there for a few seconds, _ take it all the way off.
If you do this over and over again, your muscle [Bm] memory will kick in and you'll be able to
go right to that chord.
_ That's how [N] it should.
So that's one way that you can practice your
chords efficiently.
You can also apply your metronome to your chords once you get them
under your fingers.
So you can practice quarter notes, eighth notes, eighth note triplets,
and sixteenth notes just like we did with the scales.
You can apply that to your chords
as well.
_ Another technique that I like to use when I'm practicing is I'll just pick
one of my favorite CDs or pull up my iTunes, hit random on there, let it play, and the
first song that comes up I'll practice my scales to or I'll practice my chords to it
because it's always going to be a steady beat the whole time.
And every song that you're
going to hear is probably going to be in a different key.
So if you're practicing for
30 minutes with just your songs on shuffle, you could practice in, shoot, probably six
or seven different keys in just a matter of a half an hour.
So take these principles,
the metronome, holding your chords, taking them off, and playing along with tunes, take
that and incorporate that into your practice sessions and you should notice some really
good improvements in your playing. _ _
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