In my years of teaching, I've found that certain principles hold true from beginner right through to advanced. This is one of my favourites. I think it's important enough that if you never watched another guitar lesson again, you could still succeed on the instrument with it in mind.
I'm quick to point out that the biggest factor in your progress is simply putting time in on the fretboard. The next level of that is what you do with that time. You want an efficient routine, of course, but within it you need to leave space to play around and figure things out. That's what this is about.
What "exploring the extremes" means ▶ 0:49
I don't mean exploring the Arctic Circle or the Sahara Desert. You can do that, you might learn something. What I mean is taking any principle, technique or idea you're working on and really exploring the outer limits of it.
Most people, when they're learning a new technique, have some idea of their direction of travel and what the perfect version looks like. Maybe it's sweep picking, or something you've seen someone else do, and you try to imitate it.
The problem is that while you're learning, you don't always know what you're shooting for. There's a bit of the Dunning-Kruger effect here. By trying to do something perfectly from the start, you can miss some quite important lessons that a more playful, creative, exploratory approach would have taught you.
Aiming off: know which way you're wrong ▶ 1:48
My dad told me about something he learned about map navigation in the army, called aiming off. You've got a target, and obviously you just want to get there. But if you aim straight for it and miss, you don't know whether you're too far north, south, east or west.
If you aim slightly off the target on purpose, say a few hundred metres to the west, then when you get there you know your target is over to the east.
I think this applies to a lot of guitar playing. If you don't explore the extremes, you'll know a technique isn't right, but you won't know why, or in which direction you're going wrong.
Example: thumb position on barre chords ▶ 2:39
Say you're working on your first barre chord. Everyone struggles with them at first, and there are loads of things you could play around with to get the positioning right.
Take thumb position. Try the thumb right down near the bottom of the neck, then near the top, then in the middle. As you move it, your grip changes and the way force goes through your fingers changes.
If you just assume your thumb has to be in one particular spot, you might not be wrong, but you're not learning what each change does. You might not realise that bringing the thumb down lets your fingers get around the chord a bit more, while bringing it back up lets you put more pressure through the base of your first finger. Somewhere between those two is your ideal spot, but you wouldn't know that without exploring.
Yes, you could bang your head against the wall and keep holding the chord until it works. That works as a method too, I suppose. But without exploring, you never find out what the different levers are and how to pull them.
Example: pick attack and dynamics ▶ 3:36
Most people don't realise just how hard, or just how gently, they can hit the strings.
- If you're playing a heavy metal riff, don't just hit the strings a bit harder. Hit them really hard and see what happens.
- If you're playing a blues solo, try playing so gently that you can barely hear more than the plastic of the pick against the string. Then really whack the strings and hear how that sounds.
You'll find a much wider range of dynamics than you were using before.
Example: bend vibrato ▶ 4:00
When I talked about vibrato on string bends, I said to go really wide with it. Most people are too shy. They only try to be really careful, so they never explore the wide end and never really get the feel of how the string moves.
It works for writing too ▶ 4:19
This works for almost anything you do, whether it's creative, technical or anything in between. If you're writing a heavy riff, make it really heavy. Or make it really melodic. You don't know what you might uncover.
So think about what you're practising at the moment and ask yourself what the extremes of it are. Push the thumb, the pick attack, the width, the heaviness, to both ends, then work your way back to the middle. Have a go with whatever's on your practice list this week.
