Guitarist

While you’re busy mastering any musical instrument, inevitably, a relationship is also busy developing between your instrument and your body. For any musician, the art lies in moving the body as efficiently as possible to guard off any possible aches, pains and even injuries. The Alexander Technique (AT for short) has already helped countless musicians, and here, we lay out the basics so you can start playing better and playing healthy.

Most guitarists want to up their game by playing faster. The secret? The right approach and plenty of practice. Forget ‘talent’ and experiment with these seven tips and train yourself to speed up your playing.

We could easily come up with at least a thousand-and-one fascinating things to say about the electric guitar but who has time for that? Instead, we’ve somehow managed to narrow it down to just five!

If you’ve just started to learn to play the guitar and feel like you’re not making any progress, then you’re not alone. In this blog, Dean van der Knaap lists the five biggest reasons why beginner guitarists stop playing, and explains why not one of them is a good reason.

Whether they’re paid pros or passionate dabblers, every musician wants to make the most of their skill and talent, which involves getting rid of limitations and problems. Makes sense, but there’s no point in any of it if you’re not doing it correctly, so let’s look at what it takes to be a good musician.

Guitars and keys are a great combo but can also be a real challenge when it comes to making them work together in a band. Read on and learn how you can make the guitarist and keyboardist in your band best friends — musically that is.

Ibanez is proving that having a guitar with just one soundhole might be a thing of the past. Sure, it’s nice that the assembled masses are able to enjoy every note you play, but it might also be just as nice if you were able to enjoy the beauty of your guitar skills in all their glory too. I mean, as a musician, actually being able to hear yourself is essential, right?

Effects are a great way to make the most of an electric guitar, which is why a lot of guitarists kit themselves out with a pedalboard and furnish it with can’t-go-wrong effects like overdrive/distortion, modulation and reverb/delay. However, there’s a host of stompboxes that you won’t find on most pedalboards that are no less inspiring than the aforementioned fan-favourites. Pitch-shifters and harmonizers are a great example and will be the focus of this first article in a series on special guitar effects. Also, if you don’t have a pedalboard yet and you’re not sure where to start, it’s probably a good idea to look at our Pedalboard Buyer’s Guide first!

When building their first pedalboard, most fresh-faced guitarists will go for the same type of pedals: an overdrive pedal for souped-up rock sounds, a reverb or delay pedal for fuller tone, and possibly a modulation pedal for warping the sound to taste. In reality, there are many more flavours to choose from, including effects that you don’t come across all the time but are actually a lot of fun to play with and can easily get your creative juices flowing. Last time, we looked at pitch shifters and harmonizers. Today, we’re checking out organ simulators!

If you’ve got a valve guitar amp, you’re no doubt well aware that the specific valves inside it largely determine your sound. You might also know that there are roughly 25 different valves used for guitar amplifiers, four of which you’ll bump into all the time. What you might not know, however, is that there’s a very specific valve that kick-started what we now call ‘vintage’ sound way back when: the rectifier valve. And guess what? It’s regaining popularity again!

Made it through our previous article on the CAGED system and want to learn more? Great! By the end of this one, you’ll have five major and five minor chord shapes at your disposal that you can move up and down the fretboard of your guitar.

In our other blog about modulation effects, three mod-based taste-makers were conspicuously missing and, even despite their instantly recognisable sound, these effects are used more often than you might think. If you want to take your guitar sound a little further than your more standard modulation effects can, then why not consider throwing a little tremolo, a bit of vibrato or a rotary effect into the mix?