How To Improve Your Guitar Playing

How To Improve Your Guitar Playing by Converging Technique - sample lesson from the Secret Guitar Teacher site: secretguitartea...
In this short lesson Nick demonstrates a simple generalised approach to improving your guitar playing by making your lead guitar technique more like your rhythm technique and vice versa - it kinda makes sense when you watch the video!
Here is the abridged transcript:
When you first start learning guitar there seems to be a very clear difference between the technique you use to play lead guitar
…and the technique you use to play rhythm.
In a nutshell, lead means picking individual notes… …and rhythm means strumming chords.
But one of the interesting things that naturally occurs as you progress on the instrument is that your lead picking becomes ever more rhythmic…and your rhythm playing tends to thin out and become more like your lead playing .
We could say that there is a natural convergence of technique and in many cases we wind up in a place where we tend to differentiate less and less between what is rhythm guitar technique and what is lead guitar technique.
To help accelerate your progress, I believe in deliberately working to bring this convergence about.
Here are a couple of concrete examples for you.
For working on making your lead playing more rhythmic take a tune like Deep Purple’s Black Night.
When you first learn this, you will naturally first focus on playing the right notes in the right order. And you’ll be sounding something like this…But once you know you have the right sequence of notes, then home in on playing it with the right rhythm. And the secret to this is to work out the underlying rhythm of the tune by strumming along to it with a muted guitar like this…Then try to pick the lead part with the same basic hand action as you use to strum the underlying rhythm like this…
Be prepared for this to sound a little messier than you might like at first…But, developmentally, this is actually a better result that picking it cleanly, but without the rhythmic momentum we are looking for . And with practice, you will find your accuracy will improve without any impairment to your rhythmic momentum and your picking will magically clean itself up over time.
Meanwhile you can also be working in the other direction - taking a song you might normally strum the chords to and working on thinning out your strumming action so that it sounds more like picking
Here are the chords I play to Bob Dylan’s Simple Twist of Fate. When I first learned the song, I played it simply by strumming through the sequence. But, over time I have allowed the strumming to thin out… I’ve added a few embellishments But again, what I want you to notice is that this is all done with minimal interruption of the underlying strumming pattern...
You have to resist the tendency to try to add more than you can easily integrate into the rhythmic flow of the song. Otherwise it begins to sound a bit stop and start like this.
So that’s my broad general tip of the month - converge your technique - work at making your lead playing more like your rhythm and your rhythm playing more like your lead.
See you again soon!

[@oscararanda8585]

Thank you so much for these videos, just found them. The way you break down these levels of ignorance and the transitions of improvement looks very insightful, like when you said the picking cleans itself up while not losing rhythm.

[@andydejong]

I wish I could give this more than 1 thumbs up.

[@SecretGuitarTeacher]

Thanks, that's is a kind thing to say and much appreciated 🙂

[@shelbrindahl6633]

You’re a generous teacher and these lessons are really helpful. Thank you for taking time for it. :-)

[@duketristian9463]

sorry to be off topic but does anybody know of a way to get back into an Instagram account?
I stupidly lost the account password. I would appreciate any tips you can offer me!

[@xavierfinn8075]

@Duke Tristian instablaster :)

[@ronlight7013]

I miss not seeing your videos come up more frequently in my feed. Here's hoping you resume posting lessons more regularly. Thank you!

[@SecretGuitarTeacher]

I'm back to twice weekly posting now :-) Thanks for your patience!

[@bradhullin8358]

Excellent explanation of the exact process I find myself going through! Keep the rhythm going “clean” will come.
Thanks, I get a lot out of your tutorials.

[@sudkreuz7570]

Thank you a lot... you are really The secret teacher and help me a lot understanding better the real music momentum.

[@thongamchan775]

Hi it's me again from Maldives. I really like your UA-cam program here. I find it very applicable as I wanna play like that. But it sounds a Blueisy tone. I am just working on Blues scales for the last 20 days. July first week will be one year completion of playing my acoustic guitar. I also continue to play every day " Sunny Backtract " everyday when I wake up in Gminor scale as you did. I really learnt a lot from your style of play with melodies. You are great teacher.

[@onlyguitars]

This is pure gold!

[@RealSamski]

Damn, so good and so interesting. Thank you for the video.

[@ak2010utube]

Great lesson. Rhythm is king.

[@doughall632]

Majorcool !!! Fun all the way 😃

[@keithgeorgeskelton121]

Thanks for tip great tip

[@winfreds]

thx ~~

[@embreesmith7613]

you need to work on that vibrato