If you are looking for a way to improve your guitar playing, try recording yourself. It’s amazing the amount of insight you will gain!
As musicians, we tend to be both our best and worst critics at times. So, it helps to find an impersonal, unbiased opinion in order to measure our progress. Recording will improve your guitar playing by revealing how good your timing really is. It will also reveal whether your notes and chords are coming through clearly. If you’re a singer, it will reveal if you are on pitch, or tending to go sharp or flat. This may be something you were completely unaware of previously.
Another cool thing you can do with recording is to create your own rhythm section. Say that you want to practice improvising with the A minor pentatonic scales on your electric guitar. It sounds okay when you jam by yourself, but wouldn’t it be much better if you had a rhythm guitar player strumming the chords for you? Well, simply record yourself strumming a I, IV, V chord progression in the key of A major or A minor at a moderate tempo. Then play the recording back and improvise over the chords by creating riffs from the A minor pentatonic scales. I have used this method for practicing and for creating lead guitar parts or other accompaniments for my original songs. It can be a lot of fun! It will help improve your guitar playing while generating some creative ideas too.
If you don’t have a way of recording yourself, then I highly recommend Guitar-Backing-Tracks. It’s like playing with your own virtual band behind you. All tracks are recorded individually, at the same tempo, so you can mix and match any track combination you like. Select ANY drum beat – ANY bass riff – or ANY synth track. Then select a comfortable speed from the following options…
Section 1– very slow
Section 2 — slow
Section 3 — medium
Section 4 — fast
Section 5 — very fast
Use Guitar Backing Tracks to improve your guitar playing or create your own songs. You can polish your lead guitar riffs with over 125,000 different combinations of beats, riffs and synth tracks behind you! I’ve used it myself and it allows you to create your own private jam session. You can make mistakes and not feel embarrassed, develop your speed, and improve your playing- all in the privacy of your own home. Then, after you get your chops down, you can go out and amaze all your friends with what you’ve learned. :0)
Until next time…
Keep practicing!
guitarcoach
