TOP 10 GUITAR LESSONS MYTHS #3 | “In order to learn electric guitar, I must first learn to play Acoustic guitar.” — FALSE!
I really don’t know who came up with this: maybe the outlaw devil music Wing of some fundamentalist church or classical conservatories stuck in the 19th century, to steer people away from steel string guitar thereby not bastardizing nylon string I really don’t know.
But as you can see in the link to the Eddie Van Halen article I’ve included here, this is probably the dumbest thing in guitar lessons I’ve ever heard of. You can start to appreciate the absurdity of this by putting blanks in that sentence and replacing guitar with other instruments:
“In order to play the saxophone I must first learn the Tuba. “
Well ummm… they’re both wind instruments, I’ll give them that so you do blow on them and so forth but I would think they’re going to diverge pretty quickly and so too is electric and acoustic guitar. Yes they have similarities and I play both as many musicians to do, but that doesn’t mean that you should be browbeat into substituting one for the other just because someone doesn’t want to teach you hard rock and heavy metal. Which let’s be honest: that’s usually what it’s all about: steering students away from that evil devil music right?!?! Yes, you have Metallica and the Scorpions playing with classical symphonies now but at the local guitar lessons studio level, you STILL hear this… in the 21st century! So what does Eddie Van Halen – one of the greatest musicians ever to pick up an electric guitar say:
I really can’t put it any simpler than that on and this is usually the direction of the Senetece: you don’t really hear metal players trying to talk people out of playing acoustic; always the other way around! I’m not sure where this guitar lessons urban legend started but I think we all have an idea here. Certain techniques many of which are outlined in my video so please watch it… they just don’t translate from one instrument to the other, acoustic versus electric they have some similarity and it’s great play both. But the best way to become a great electric player is to spend your time on electric; the best way to become a great acoustic player is to spend your time on acoustic.
Would you tell someone that was trying out for the Olympics for 400 meter sprint that what they really should do is spend their time in the gym power lifting or running marathons all the time instead of running 400 m sprints?!?! This is so obvious when you take it out of the guitar context that we’re so used to hearing. Don’t be beat over the head with that. Like the US Constitution says: “we hold these truths to be self evident.”And so my advice to all aspiring guitar players when you go to guitar lessons : do not be talked out of playing the instrument you want to play if someone tells you to play something else walk out and find somebody who will teach you what you want to know.
Top 10 Guitar Lessons Myths #2: Playing Fast is the Hardest Thing to Learn | FALSE!
Top 10 guitar lesson myths number two: playing fast is the hardest thing to learn and that’s where I should spend most of my time. This is actually false: learning the correct technique in guitar lessons slowly is where you spend most of your time and scale it up from there.
Practicing the wrong technique may get you playing initially somewhat faster than you could if you were to play correctly however you will hit a glass ceiling with speed very quickly. When this happens, you won’t be able to play any faster, and won’t be able to play up the tempo of the song you’re trying to do… and then you will have to start over and retroactively work backwards. Undoing bad technique is way way harder – 10 times harder – than doing it correctly the first time. Believe me I know I’ve had to retroactively reproduce songs that were done badly by EDM producers with outdated sound design!
As a guitar teacher in the early 2000s, I would get a lot of classic rock and blues players in successful cover bands who would come to me because the 80s metal tunes were beginning to hit the twenty-year nostalgia point and audiences were requesting them. And so the classic rock blues bands are starting to get a lot of requests for Van Halen and Randy Rhodes and Ratt lot of the technical bands of that era.
These were very, very good, very accomplished blues players but they were three finger players and they didn’t know that in order to play these artists that I just mentioned they would need four finger technique because a lot of the 80s solos were based on seven notes scales. So I would have to tell these very accomplished players that their technique was actually all wrong for what they were trying to do. It was great for a play minor Pentatonics but not effective for playing seven note diatonic or melodic scales such as the major and minor scale. I watched very accomplished players in the classic rock and blues domain have to start from scratch in guitar instruction and undo all of these things and then start back over. Not a very fun place to be! You want to learn how to do this right the first time and play the correct technique.
One artist who has a lot to say about this in interviews this Kirk Hammet who is really adamant about playing slow and also playing clean for metal players. They want to turn up the gain and the delay and the reverb and those are really cool sounds, I use them all the time. But you don’t want to learn to play that way! One of the best things that happened to me was when my whammy bar system on my Steinberger Epiphone spotlight broke I had to convert it to a fixed bridge. And that’s what made me really a good guitar player was not being able to hide behind the whammy bar or effects. One of the things I stress in metal guitar lessons :If you do play distorted, play completely dry: no reverb, no delay, nothing really. So you can hear how you really sound. As the saying goes: “garbage in, garbage out” and you want to understand the correct technique to use from the very beginning.
Play it right, play it slow. The speed will come and often quite easily!
HOW TO PLAY: CLICK HERE FOR THE COMPLETE TOP 25 LIST OF CHORD VIDEOS!
Guitar Lessons | A Major Barre Chord 6th String Root:
For guitar lessons, The A majorbarre chord is a very common chord used in thousands and thousands of pop songs it is most commonly associated with blues music such as the 12 bar blues structure however you will find it in everything from Jimi Hendrix to Stevie Ray Vaughn or Zeppelin. Unexpectedly, you can also find it in minor progressions as well as classical pieces where the chord is a borrowed chord from the parallel harmonic minor key (more on this in advanced theory and composition!). Scales that work with it include the mixolydian, minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, blues, and Phrygian dominant — common scales used by guitar teachers. Popular songs that include it are lots of 12 bar blues progressions of lots of songs by Stevie Ray Vaughan such as Pride and Joy, “Stray Cat Strut” by the Stray Cats and also “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne as well as “Sweet Emotion” by Aerosmith. Know this chord ! It is very common and one of the first taught in guitar lessons with Jimmy Cypher
It is composed of the root note A the major third C# the perfect fifth E. (A-C#-E).It’s chord formula is 1-3-5 . As with most of the chords in the beginner section there are many different “voicings” of the chord whereby the order of the notes played will change, the notes that are doubled, the notes that are omitted or where they are played on the guitar fretboard and what register. However the form showed here isA majorbarre chord to know first which is what guitar teachers focus on. Songwriters, rhythm guitar players, lead guitar players will all need to know this chord as as such, it is taught in guitar lessons the very first week.
Artists who use the A majorbarre chord: Johnny Cash, Bob dylan, Kasy Musgraves, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Pantera, Foo Fighters, Queen, Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, Rush, Dream Theater, Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Oasis, Ozzy Osbourne, Tool, Lucinda Williams, Ben Harper, Tracy Chapman, emerson, Lake and Palmer, Lenny Kravitz, Aerosmith, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Ed Sheeran, Stevie Ray Vaughn, John Fogerty, Jack Johnson, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Dixie Chicks, Jimi Hendrix, metallica, Santana, Joe Satriani, Van Halen, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, Supertramp, One Direction, Sam Smith, Taylor Swift, Neil Young, James Taylor, Stone Temple Pilots, AC/DC, Lynard Skynard, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Maroon 5, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Susan Tedeschi, Allman Brothers.
This chord list is by no means complete but gives students the most bang for the buck for a very small amount of information. Jimmy cypher is often asked by students in guitar lessons if ALL of these chords are necessary since some are not easy to play on the first day. The answer is YES 🙂 Most chord encyclopedias list over 1000 chords in mostly random order, irrespective of importance. Jimmy has pared it down to less than 50, and every one of them will eventually appear in student’s favorite songs that they bring into guitar lessons.
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