A short essay on musical education
To learn or not to learn… Around the time when I first decided to study music, I was introduced to an aspiring guitarist by a friend. We started chatting about who inspired us, and who we were listening to at that time. We shared similar tastes in music and it was a nice conversation – […]
Academic versus intuitive approaches to music
In this article we’ll look at what I call an ‘academic’ approach to music versus an intuitive approach to music. By this I mean the difference between performing music with or without a lot of intellectual involvement as you play. Acquiring musical knowledge A basic level of musical education is essential to good improvising or composing. The […]
Why learn music theory?
“Why learn music theory? I don’t want to be restricted…” To the uninitiated, music theory is often thought of as being a set of rules that must be obeyed. This is not what music theory is about Music theory is a well-organised system of naming and describing music and how it works. Learning music theory brings meaning to […]
Learning the guitar fretboard
How well do you really know the guitar fretboard? With the exception of classical guitarists, most guitarists start by learning open chords. These are learned as shapes with fairly meaningless names such as C, Am, G7, etc (see ‘Why learn music theory?‘ for more on this). There is no immediate reason to set about fully learning […]
Do guitarists need to learn to read music?
A common quote about reading music “…and do you know, [insert name] can’t even read music? Isn’t that amazing?” We’ve all heard this line or something very similar to it. To someone that dabbled in learning classical piano or violin back when they were at school, it might seem that the ability to read music is […]
There is nothing natural about playing guitar!
My tennis years Why does an article called ‘There is nothing natural about playing guitar’ start with tennis? Bear with me… When I was in my teens, my friends and I joined the local tennis club. It was a small place with no coaching so none of us knew what good tennis technique was. We […]
Is it ever too late to learn guitar?
“Is it ever too late to learn guitar?” is something that a lot of people ask themselves when they’re considering taking up the instrument. Many regret not having learned an instrument at school, or not having stuck it out. Some worry that they will now find it too difficult. The implication here is that learning to play an […]
Guitar practice and spreading yourself too thinly
Time, our most valuable resource Music is a vast subject with many different styles and areas of study. Time is a limited resource that very few of us feel we ever have enough of. How can we make the best use of the time we have with regard to guitar practice? Having a well-structured guitar […]