Today, I want to stress the importance of recording yourself in order to speed-up your guitar progress.

Guys, I can not stress enough how important it is to record yourself on video (or, even audio) and what listening back to yourself does to your playing.

The thing is that no-one has to pin point many of the mistakes, since you know yourself what can be improved. This constant checking-in with your playing really accelerates your progress.

I always say it is like leaving the house without looking into the mirror, brushing your hair in the dark & picking your clothes blindly. After you see yourself in the mirror – you go wow! Little improvement might be needed. And, I can only say this because I’ve been there, too often as I matter of fact.

One thing I believe that helped me get better quick is that I was making music demos from very early on. I did not wait til I felt good enough. I just did it. They were demos to show my songs and with each one, I got better because I learned. Even with musicians, you can see the progress from their debut album on. It works like that with the guitar.

Whie we play the guitar it is very hard to judge your progress from day to day. But, when you look back at a video from 3 months ago, you can really see if you have improved or not. This is very helpful. I would say it’s essential. You see where you are yourself. Have you improved? No? When you see improvement – it’s super encouraging to keep going. Great plus.

Eventually, you come to the place when you realize that it is hard to master the guitar while mastering how to record it, so it sounds good. You get to know your instrument so well when recording it for real.

Also, my last point. To master something does not necesarrily mean to become the ultimate jedi master of it. It means to be able to recall something quick. Even when you master something and think you are the jedi master; there are always another levels to getting something down even better.

So, think about it and hope it helps.

What is aggressive patience?

Let’s apply this to getting better on your instrument. In short, this unofficial term means staying focused while chipping away at the stone and not expecting the returns on your work to happen overnight.

Let’s face it, as humans, we are pretty impatient. We want everything today. But, this is not a way to approach getting better on your instrument or anything else.

Be patient while constantly chiseling away at practice, new techniques or whatever else. It takes belief and faith in that things will eventually happen, which is also a great thing to have in your arsenal. It’s the compounded work over the months (or, even years depending on what you are trying to do) that eventually brings success.

When you are too close to it – it is hard to gauge progress. If you think think this happened differently to Steve Vai, Zakk or Dimebag you are mistaken.

Keep going. \m/ \m/

How To Be A Better Guitar Player …

This must be one of the most common questions I get asked.

But, in general terms, my answer is always true and simple. Invest in your learning. Invest in your abilities. Attend classes, workshops, take lessons and don’t be afraid to hang with players that are further along than you are.

Don’t spend all of your money on gear to “improve”. This is a cheap way out and never works. This reminds of the golf guys who spend double for a ball that goes 5% further. These small percentages only matter after you have put in the time, when it makes sense to spend for that little extra.

Remember: new gear gets old fast – new material on the guitar stays with you for a long time. Ask yourself – how committed am I to really get better? And, do my current actions and routines support that? You already know the answer, I suspect. And, practice.

I hear quiet a bit of chatter about guitarists learning things by watching instructional videos on You Tube. Let’s face it – You Tube is full of amazing information and many guitar instructors strut their stuff all over the net. Heck, even my “Metal For Life” instructional videos have been seen by close to 4 million people.

It can be fun watching a snippet of a new guitar idea and then taking it even further or taking the challenge of learning something new note per note.

There is one ceveat. That is a lack of a bigger plan and constructive feedback.

It is hard to get amazing on the guitar by jumping from one video to another.

A student is unaware of what he or she doesn’t yet know. This is not always the case, but often is. Students will also spend a lot more time watching videos on the things they like and less on videos that focus on their weaknesses.

So, although it is certainly helpful and indeed possible to get very good on your instrument by watching You Tube lessons – you can speed up the process quiet a bit by studying with an experienced teacher who can present you with a program or a plan to help you build all aspects of your playing.

A good teacher will also give you extremely valuable feedback on your playing. It is sometimes very difficult to be objective about your playing simply because you are too inside of it. It is hard to step back, be honest and hear yourself with a “different” set of ears. This is what great teachers are for.

So, if I had to give some advice for best and fastest results – I’d recommend both. Learn all you can from You Tube and find a great guitar teacher that is truly interested in teaching you.

One thing I realized over the years is that there is no magic wand or anyone that will come out of your computer screen to make you better as a guitar player, songwriter or anything similar. In short – the greatest way to achieve progress is to define goals of what you would like to accomplish with your guitar playing and start chiseling away at them as the year progresses.

But, being general leads us nowhere as well. We must be specific. Not so specific that you will have every day planned out, but I recommend you thinking of 3 major things you want to do with your music or playing in the p-coming Fall, Winter or whatever season is coming up.

Your goals could look something like this:

1. Get way better at alternate picking

2. Write 8 really great songs

3. Play a show with my band or play live at least once (Open mic, workshops)

Or … maybe something like this:

1. Learn and nail the solo for “I Don’t Know” by OZZY note for note

2. Learn how to change strings on my guitar so they hardly ever go out of tune

3. Learn all the notes on my guitar across all the strings and on the entire fretboard

You can make them as challenging as you want depending on what you want to get done, how much time you have for playing guitar and so on. It is important to keep the big 3 in mind as the year goes on. Sure, you can get other things done, but you would be surprised how close you can get to accomplishing your goals if you keep an eye on them and work little at a time as the year goes on.

Getting the big 3 on paper first really helps. It keeps them in plain sight, gives you something to strive for and having three goals is much simpler to process than trying to get “great” by picking up your guitar, noodling and doing the same thing a week later.

Just a few thoughts below as I often get asked if someone is too old to learn how to play a guitar, etc. In short – your age has nothing to do with it. Unless you are so old that you have no strength left in your arms, if you are thinking about learning how to play, or getting back into playing, I must say – Go For It.

The only real disadvantage that you might have when trying to learn how to play is that adults are usually much busier than their younger counterparts due to families, work, overtime, etc. They often have much less time available to devote to practice. It’s simple and in most cases true.

However, I must also mention that it is very easy to chisel out 45 minutes a day by saying bye, bye to facebook for the night or skipping the evening news. There many time vultures prying on your time.

The advantage is that by now you have learned to how to ‘learn’ by getting through school and various life experiences, which can actually make applying new material easier.

Unfortunately, you can’t cram playing an instrument like we did before tests in school, so constant repetition through practice is what you need to do in order to get results.

I started to play the guitar late (age 15/16) in comparison to some of my guitar playing friends who started at 9. My friends were much better than me, played songs and some were already in bands while I was just trying to perfect a power chord. However, later in High School as their focus drifted to parting and going out, I made up the difference and quickly surpassed them. I also remember reading an interview with Jeff Hanneman of Slayer where he stated that he did not start to play the guitar until he was 18 and that motivated me.

I also tell younger players to ‘put their time in’ when practicing. Due to travel, and running a business side of things, many professional musicians do not get to practice as much as they did when they were much younger. Think of practicing like putting money into a piggy bank. There will be a time when you will need to pull out some of that practice at a later date while continuing with your instrument.

Many people ask me how much to play and it always goes back to the goal. If someone wants to play good enough to play metal songs and simple solos or even jam one time a week with buddies – then 45min to and hour a day for 3-4 months should get them very close to the goal. I have taught 100s of guitar students in person and I have never met one person whose fingers were too short, too stubby or just not meant to play guitar. And, that’s the truth.

Is Anyone Really Self Taught?

Here is a topic that is much discussed in the music circles. It is the idea of being a self-taught musician and also the possible pros and cons of it.

There is a certain level of pride that many musicians carry with them for being presumably self-taught and I can understand why. By considering themselves self-taught some take pride that by not taking “lessons” the ins and outs of playing an instrument were found on their own time, by their own skills. On the surface this seems to make sense, but I don’t buy it.

Now, to me, the topic in itself off the bat is fairly silly since I do not think that anyone is ever self-taught. Let me explain.

If you think about it for a second, a self-taught person would have their own way of tuning and holding the instrument, their own scales and a sense of meter. They would not even know what to use to pluck the strings or how to string a guitar so the chord patters or scales fall properly in place. Would they even know strings existed? This is just a beginning. In a nutshell, we all learned it from somewhere. It could be a video, a friend, a fable, a music school or a combination of several outlets. Even if you saw someone strum a few chords and learned a few … initially, you got them from somewhere. Even listening to music can surely be a way of learning about rhythm, melody or song construction. If you really were self-taught your guitar playing would make Jimi Hendrix sound like a Julliard professor.

Think about this. This is great news. By knowing this, you could open up the previously shut doors to the idea of studying your instrument with great teachers. The point is – if you are going to pick it up from somewhere, you might as well go to a great source. Allow the teacher (private or at school) to guide you, bring out your strengths and save you time with their invaluable input and accelerate your playing.

Will studying with a teacher or being formally trained stifle your creativity? Not from my experience. Think of it this way. Imagine you decide to brush up on the English language. You study it from a reputable source and become great at it. You learn many new words, ways to put together sentences that flow and many other amazing things. Can you still forget all about it and talk like a cave-man? You sure can. This is always your choice. No one is going to pull out words from your mouth. Would it make it easier to know several ways you can express a thought with variety of new words you learned? Of course.

You see, by learning more you now have choices and possibilities you did not know existed. And, this is what learning about music theory and how music works is all about. Heck, even if you refuse to learn music theory, just studying with a teacher or jamming with someone better will open up many doors for you. A new riff you picked-up from someone can inspire you to write the greatest song of your life. What you do with it is completely up to you.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against a musician who decides to “teach” himself or herself how to play. As a matter of fact, most of my favorite guitarists were not formally schooled. I don’t care if you go to school for music. What I’m saying is that since we all learn from somewhere, sometimes we can accelerate our learning and playing ability by having a coach or a teacher. This is exactly what happens when a top golfer or a football teach needs to win championships. Even if you are a top athlete you still need someone to offer a different perspective and see if you are getting stuck in a rut somewhere, where you make mistakes. This can be applied to music. I just want you to entertain the option.

The idea is to take new information and suck out the juice that is important to the way you want to play the instrument. When you do that, the new information is super valuable. Don’t close your eyes to new info and ways to absorb it – embrace it. The rest is truly up to you.

I want to briefly touch upon a subject that many guitar players (and musicians in general) seem to have a mis-understanding of.

Often I hear people tell me that they want to take a lesson with me because they have reached a certain ‘plateau’ that they can’t seem to get past. It sounds good, but it’s unfortunately wrong.

In guitar playing there are no plateaus. We never arrive and stay at some flat, secure place.

Not for long, and certainly not over 24 hours.

This means that if you are not getting better, you are getting worse.

It’s true. For example if you get pretty good at playing a particular scale and take 2 weeks off … your ability will slide back from where you have left of when you put the guitar down.

Even a task like song-writing is a skill that must be practiced. Sure, there are people who write only one song and it becomes a hit, but this is an exception to the rule, kind of like winning the lottery. If you want to be wealthy, you have to constantly work on it. Becoming better at your instrument is very much like it.

This thought process was always very motivating to me throughout time. I always remembered that if I am not getting better – I’m getting worse. This stuck and kept me practicing through the years.

Today I’m going to talk about something that should hit close to home for us creative people: inspiration — and how we, as humans, relate and perceive it.

As musicians, we often wait for the golden gate to open, rays of inspiration to shine in and — presto — we bang out a great new song, lyric, etc. Those moments do happen, and they are awesome. How often they happen might depend on the state or clarity of your mind — or maybe even your luck.

When we don’t feel the inspiration to do something, we wonder when it will come back, or if there’s something we can do to get inspired.

Here’s where the breakthrough happens.

I realized inspiration is usually hiding around the corner, and when it doesn’t appear right in front of you, you must work a little. The work needed simply comes as action. In other words, you need to take action before the shy inspiration can start flowing.

For example, to write this particular column, I had a lose idea of what I wanted to talk about. It was just a skeleton. I took action to sit down, open the Word doc and start typing. As I start writing, a flow of excitement builds and the inspiration to write these words appears. It happens exactly as you are reading this, since I had no idea of the words, nevermind the sentences, I was going to use to complete this piece. I continue to write, trusting that the words will come to me as long as I keep taking action.

This happens everywhere and every time we wait for something to nudge us to do something.

Going to the gym is a perfect example. If we went to the gym only when we felt inspired to do so, trust me — no one would go. But we get into our cars and drive by simply taking action, and by the time we get through the first five minutes in the gym, we’re in. It’s easy to continue from that point on.

One thing that cripples us before taking action is that we often wait to have all the details figured out before we start doing something. When we do that, it is fear running our efforts. I know it’s difficult, but let’s start and figure things out as we go along. Let the world around you pull the pieces together as you work toward a goal. I recently read a great book by Arnold Schwarzenegger called Total Recall. It’s filled with lessons from his life. He talks about the fact that sometimes the more you know about something, the more confined and crippled your mind becomes. Wild, I know.

Now, think about that.

Wouldn’t that explain why someone who doesn’t know a ton about song writing writes a hit, a person who buys the winning lottery ticket because he doesn’t care about the odds and percentages that are stacked against him, or someone who becomes a successful touring musician while others spend their entire life getting the perfect studio to record a perfect demo.

The difference is taking action first. Learn on the job, or whatever you can you about a subject, but don’t wait to know it all before pressing the “Go” button. This is some incredible advice from someone who has been a bodybuilding champion, a Hollywood A-list movie star, a governor and a successful millionaire entrepreneur.

The last example comes from my own experience. A while back, when I was tracking guitars for my latest solo album, The Metalworker, I was waiting around for the inspiration so I could get started. I waited for inspiration, because I knew I had to make the album special. Unfortunately the longer I waited, the bigger the mountain grew and the less inspired I felt to record.

Due to deadlines, I had to take action.

So I just started the process one day. I got a tone, set up my guitar and in no time an incredible thing started to happen. I had a huge flow of inspiration. It’s almost as it had been sitting on my shoulder waiting for it to be unleashed. I then wanted to do nothing but play and record the guitars. It came to the point that I felt completely in love with playing the guitar, the instrument itself, changing strings (which is never my favorite thing to do) and do whatever it took to make the project special.

At that time, I started to put two and two together and realized that inspiration is usually around the corner for us. If it doesn’t show up on its own, it needs a little nudge, which always comes in the process of taking action first.