Do You Want to Be a Detective?

Do you want to be a detective? Not for solving crimes, but improving your guitar playing!

 

Do you want to figure out how to be your own guitar detective so that you can improve your guitar playing faster and take off years off the process?

 

Just like any great detection, Sherlock Holmes or Pikachu. You need to find clues, and figure out the cause and effect and what’s happened, study the though patterns of the criminals and villains and perhaps you may even catch them in the act!

 

Let’s help you develop the skills to help you become a great guitar detective for your own guitar playing.

 

1.     Studying your opponent

 

Often detectives really admire the mind of the villain and you have to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

 

For you – this is going to be your favourite guitar players.

 

Listen to their guitar playing over and over again, and on top of that watch them too. How they play, their posture, imagine yourself playing like them. Imagine yourself in their shoes.

 

You can even make playlists of music, songs, videos of these guitar players as well.

 

2.     Doing the detective work

 

When you are listening and watching your favourite guitar players, I want you to be thinking about their guitar playing.

 

Go beyond the surface level and analyse it.

 

What kind of chords are they playing? Is it more complex chords or open chords? Are they doing any muting or percussion techniques?

 

Do they do solos in their guitar playing? How do their solos sounds? Are they bluesey, or maybe more emotive or fast and speedy?

 

What kind of sound do their guitars make? Are they using any special guitars or different pedals to create the sound?

 

If you want to go even further, you can even think of the music theory behind their guitar playing as well.

 

Start Small

 

When you first start, this may seem very overwhelming. You may be at the stage where you can only tell that they play songs that are in 4 4 or that they are using open chords and barre chords. Or they like soloing using notes from the pentatonic scale.

 

Slowly and surely, you will get more clarity of how they think.

 

This is part of detecting, you won’t be able to work out the answer on day one! You need to gather clues over time, and even test out your theories.

 

3.     Testing out theories

 

This is the other part of your detecting work.

 

You need to both analyse other guitar players, but you also need to test out the theories.

 

Just like in any great murder mystery – how did the criminal escape? Was there a trapdoor? Would it have worked?

 

You also need to test out the little pieces you have found out.

 

From there, you will improve at analyzing your own guitar playing. And be able to marry the two together – getting the two closer to each other every time.

 

The more you pay attention to both your guitar playing and other musician’s guitar playing, you will start to notice that their guitar playing styles will creep into your own.

 

And you will start to be able to play music the you have imagined!

 

Hopefully you can see that by solving challenges and problems you have on the guitar, you can improve much quicker than previously.

 

Hope this article has helped you to be able to develop your guitar playing further.

 

About Author:

By the wonderful guitar teachers at Guitar Tuition East London, they are a team full of passionate guitar players who want to help students develop their own passion and achieve more in their guitar playing. They teacher both Acoustic and electric guitar lessons in London England. And help both children and adults to improve their own guitar playing in a holistic manner that creates confident and happy musicians.