These are 100 guitar tips, rattled off as fast as I could film them. Rather than list them all in order, I've grouped the most useful ones by topic so you can jump to whatever you're working on.
If you only take one thing away, make it the first one, because most of the others come back to it.
Practice: time on the fretboard comes first ▶ 0:04
Most of your progress comes from time on the fretboard and nothing else. Technique only matters if you put the hours into it, and it needs a physical base of coordination and muscle memory. Loads of great players got great in spite of their technique, because they stuck at it.
- Experiment. Spend at least 20% of your practice on new ideas. Try them at the extremes: strum really hard, then really gently.
- One topic per 30-minute block. Cram in more and you get diminishing returns.
- Remove friction. Leave the guitar out and plugged in. No motivation? Pick it up for one minute. You'll probably play for ten.
- Ditch all or nothing. Ten minutes is not nothing. And separate practice time from play time, so you get to enjoy both.
- Practise slow or practise fast. The middle speed is a dead zone: too fast to pay attention, too slow to push you.
- To get better at a song, play the song. Exercises are often an excuse to avoid the hard bit.
- Start ear training early. The intervals quiz on tonedear.com is a great start, or try my ear trainer.
Mindset ▶ 0:39
- Being a better guitarist won't make you happy. There's always another thing to chase. So "how long should I practise?" is the wrong question. Practise for as long as you want to.
- Play what you want to play. You don't have to learn whole songs, or rhythm, or anything you don't care about, unless you're going pro.
- A good player isn't always a good teacher. Plenty credit a technique when it was really repetition. That includes me.
- Don't let good players put you off. Most have a speciality. I think I'm quite a good songwriter, but ask me to play a jazz solo and it'll sound rubbish.
- There isn't always a magic fix. Sit down and play for a decent amount of time, and a lot of problems untangle themselves.
Fretting hand technique ▶ 7:17
- You're probably pressing too hard. Play a scale so gently the notes drop out, then add pressure until they ring. That's the minimum you need.
- Keep your fingers arched, with your palm close to the underside of the neck. If the palm comes away, the fingers straighten out.
- Let your thumb adapt: over the top for open chords, lower down for stretches.
- One finger per fret as often as you can, and keep your little finger close to the strings. It pulls the hand into position.
- Close your hand up for chords, fingers in line and touching, so the hand locks together.
Strumming and rhythm ▶ 9:07
- Most players pick too gently. Pick harder for way more tone. Nobody knows how confident you feel, only how you sound.
- Stop looking at your strumming hand. It can only be in one of six places. Watch the fretting hand.
- Mute with both hands: low strings with your picking hand's palm, high strings with the underside of your fretting first finger.
- Strum from the elbow with a relaxed wrist. Every strum should be a confident clunk.
- Practise patterns on muted strings so you can hear what your hand is really doing, and make rhythm by missing the strings, not stopping your hand. The Strum Trainer is good for this.
- Let go of the chord on the last upstroke before a change and lightly catch the open strings.
- Practise chord changes fast, and lead with your weakest finger (3, 2, 1 for a C chord, not 1, 2, 3).
- Practise barre chords with your thumb off the neck. Push your elbow back against the guitar and pull the first finger in.
- Drop the lowest two notes of barre chords. For A major, play 7 6 5 5 on the D, G, B and high e strings, and your little finger is free to add melody.
Picking, speed and metal ▶ 14:08
- Gallops tensing up? Go wider. It forces you through each string.
- Pinch harmonics: gain high, bridge pickup, D or G string, and move where you pick along the string. I think of casting a fishing line. Then it's hours of trying.
- Alternate pickers, look up pick slanting (Troy Grady started it). Economy pickers, push through the strings in one motion rather than chopping.
- Learn long passages in overlapping chunks. For a riff in groups of four, learn five notes, then the next four plus the first of the following group.
- Use one metronome click per note, so you hear where every subdivision falls.
- Hand synchronisation is a bit of a myth. Check each hand alone first, in time and at speed. Usually it's the picking hand. "Thunderstruck" is a tough test if it really is synchronisation.
Slides, bends and vibrato ▶ 17:59
- Look at the target note when you slide, not your hand.
- Angle your fingers slightly for bends, and drop the thumb lower for stretches.
- Bend faster than you think. A slow bend sounds like you're hunting for the pitch. Then control the release: mute it, bring it down in time, or let it down gradually.
- Bend from the wrist, with finger and thumb as a fulcrum either side of the neck.
- Vibrato is just a quick series of bends. The wider it is, the faster it needs to be. Uneven? Do it to a metronome. On a bend, start wide and over the top, then rein it in.
Improvising and soloing ▶ 20:33
- Leave real silence between phrases, and don't be afraid to repeat notes. Think of "Mr. Brightside".
- Call and response: answer a phrase by changing its last note or adding one.
- If you're boring in pentatonic box 1, you'll be boring everywhere. What makes you interesting is how you develop phrases, not where you play them.
- Learn chord shapes inside one scale box. I can play A minor, C, D minor, E, F and G within box 1 of the A minor pentatonic and weave licks between them.
- Dynamics are one of the biggest levers from intermediate to professional. Vary how hard you hit each note.
- Skip across the scale, especially at the start or end of a phrase, for example from the 5th fret on the low E to the 7th fret on the A.
- Get more from licks you know: move them, shift the rhythm, change a note, or play them 12 frets higher.
- Play a scale continuously at a challenging tempo to build fluency.
- Don't start every phrase on beat 1. Try beat 2, or an "and".
- Speed up or slow down through a lick, and build speed in short bursts of two notes before adding more.
Theory and the fretboard ▶ 27:02
- You could learn your scales in a day or two. There are five main shapes. Look up the C major scale and sit down for a few hours.
- Same for basic theory. I recommend Ben Levin's music theory course on YouTube. Applying it is the hard bit.
- Modes aren't a silver bullet unless you're a jazz player. Explore them, but use them all the time and you'll confuse whoever's listening.
- You only need the notes on the low E and A strings. The same note is two frets up and two strings over: low E to D string, A to G string. For the B string, go back two frets from the A string. The high e matches the low E.
You can practise this in the Fretboard Navigator.
Songwriting ▶ 28:58
- Use randomisation. List 10 techniques, roll 1 to 10 four times, and play them in that order.
- Use restriction. A motif comes from a limited set of ideas. Use every technique in every riff and they all sound the same.
- Write quickly and write lots. Weak ideas spark better ones, and the more you write, the more likely you are to strike gold.
Tone and gear ▶ 30:39
- Point your amp at your ears. On the floor it sounds duller than it really is.
- Louder feels better, so turn up if you're uninspired. Just be wary if you only ever play loud.
- Learn EQ at the extremes: turn one dial fully down, then fully up. Get the bass and treble right and the mids tend to sort themselves out.
- Keep the guitar's volume and tone on full and turn down at the amp.
- Restringing: pull the string tight through the peg, then back about one fret's distance, for an even wind.
Don't try to work on all of it. Pick one tip from the area you're working on, give it a 30-minute block this week, and have a go.
