By Nicholas Anderson
It doesn’t matter if you started playing guitar a week ago or 20 years ago. You are going to come across passages of music that are difficult to master. For beginners, this can be simply changing between chords or moving from one string to another with the picking hand. For advanced players, difficulty can come from a variety of sources. A new technique. A difficult chord series that requires quick movements. A long, fast solo like passage. Whatever the trouble is, there are smarter and better ways to practice. Trying harder doesn’t always work. In fact, sometimes trying harder is the problem. You fail to stop and think about the movements involved. You don’t think about the passage in parts, only as a whole. Here at some ways to break down a passage into manageable parts. This will help you master whatever you are working on much faster than just trying harder.
Principle #1 – Slow down
I’m sure you’ve thought of this before. You probably do it already. But you’re probably not slowing down enough, and you’re probably not slowing down long enough either. What I mean is, you’ve slowed down but you’re not going slow enough. You’ve slowed down, and you’ve practiced it, but you haven’t done that for a long enough time for it to make a difference in your playing. Here’s what to do.
Take out a metronome. You do have a metronome, right? Set your metronome to the lowest setting possible. Hopefully this is at least down around 50 bpm. Now look at the passage you’re working on. Each tick of the metronome is one note. Forget about rhythm. Now work through the passage at this speed several times. It will be boring, but you need to focus and work through it. Now increase the speed slightly and repeat. If at any point you make a mistake or feel rushed, stop and turn the speed of the metronome down. You should not play any passage at a speed that you cannot play it at perfectly.
Slowing down to a speed this slow forces you to think about each and every note and every movement. It forces you to stop relying on muscle memory, which may have been trained to play the passage wrong. Apply this patiently and you will see much better results.
Principle #2 – Isolate Each Hand
This is a good technique for faster passages that involve a lot of string changes, or for fast arpeggios; however, this has numerous applications, so it is a good principle to keep in mind. What you’re going to do is focus on either the right hand or the left hand and forget about the other. If you choose to focus on the left hand, you won’t strum or pick any notes. Play the passage slowly, as explained above, while fretting all the notes in the left hand. Relax as much as possible. Make sure you press every note perfectly. When that has become easy, perform that same passage with only the right hand. This will be harder because you’ll have to figure out when to skip strings without the advantage of the left hand leading you. It’s harder than it sounds, but it’s worth figuring out. You may want to write it out in notation (or TAB, if that’s what you read). Finally, put the two together. If you’ve worked on this properly, it should be much easier to play the two hands together.
There are also other techniques that will help you master difficult passages, but these two basic principles will give you a good start and help you conquer those pieces of music that seemed out of reach before. They will also save you hours of wasted trial and error practicing.
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