alt Hacker NewsHow to get better at guitar
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I’ve transcribed hundreds of hours of guitar music over 25+ years, using the method described in this article. It was such a slog that I ended up creating tool to help streamline the process: Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/).
It combines audio playback directly with a tab editor, so that you can immediately write down what you’ve figured out and your transcription stays in sync with the original audio. This makes transcribing incredibly fast and (importantly) accurate.
It’s got audio slowdown, precise looping, “synth overlay” (playback of the transcription and original audio at the same time, to spot errors), auto stem separation and a full-featured tab/notation editor with support for hundreds of notations.
When you’re done, you get a very useful artifact: a synced transcription, effectively a bespoke practice environment for that piece of music.
Over the years, Soundslice has expanded into a lot more than a pure transcription tool, but lots of people still use it for its original intended purpose. (It supports any instrument that uses western music notation, not just guitar.) If you’re at all interested in transcribing music, give it a shot.
One truth I've observed from decades of keen hobbyist involvement in guitar music and playing is that a lifetime of music is largely an individual journey.
The fact that some players learn by transcribing, while others learn by jamming, and yet others learn by rote theoretical study, or 10-hour practice sessions, etc, is a big part of the variety which results in the wonderfully varied tapestry of music styles and approaches that humanity creates and enjoys.
Not to take away from the age-old, valid advice in the link about the value of ear-to-fretboard work.
Wow, Justin with his hair!
Been plucking at the guitar (literally and figuratively - trying to learn) for a couple of years now and Justin's (free) course was the best I've found. His videos are compassionate, funny, explain things really well and easy to follow. He also dog-fed the instructions by learning to play left-handed (and posted those videos as well, hilarious to watch).
Compared to that, some time earlier I subscribed to a Berklee free course on Coursera (iirc) - Beginner guitar. Felt like a fumbling idiot, almost never touched guitar afterwards.
Really recommended: https://www.justinguitar.com/
Sting famously learned to play bass using this sort of technique with music on LPs, lifting the needle and dropping it back a bit in the track over and over again as he gradually worked out the notes and fingering.
Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
It’s a great article on something that’s useful, but a bit overconfident in its universality. Better at what? There are many dimensions to being a guitar player. Is it technique? Theory? Ability to pickup a song by ear (this article)? Better at playing in a group? Better at playing solo? Better at reading music? Better at accurate bends? Better at fingerpicking?
One of the nice things about music is you can’t get good at ALL of it. You have to pick where to focus. I’ll also say, you might need to ask yourself if you want to get better. I love relaxing by reading through the chords on a new song and playing it. I already have a job, and the time I truly have for intentional practice is like once a month. Most people are not studying to become guitar pros but to enjoy their time with the instrument. If that is your goal let joy be your guide. Perhaps some short term pain is part of that journey but really weigh out what you want out of the experience.
I very recently inherited a guitar-harp. One thing I love about it is that it is so straight forward to play - unlike guitar (where you have to press frets), a guitar harp is laid out like a piano (left to go lower frequency and right to go higher frequency). So it's been easy to just listen to a song and play along. I can't sight-read music, and trying to learn a song by reading music is tedious and boring to me. Just listening and playing along feels MUCH better.
I'm only good enough to impress people who don't know what a good guitar player sounds like.
My advice to people, which seems to work OK, is just to have the guitar out and ready to play wherever you're likely to be - maybe even in the way so it has to be moved sometimes - and just pick it up and play it as often as possible.
Waiting for the kettle to boil? Play the guitar. TV is showing ads? Mute it and play the guitar. Your partner needs to go to the bathroom before you both go out? Play the guitar.
It doesn't matter what you play, it doesn't have to be good, it can be a random improvisation, it can be scales. Your fingers are learning.
Sure, this is a way to get better at learning songs, in particular. Any consistent practice will result in getting better, though. After about 20 years of playing (though less as the years have gone by and life has been busy), I actually find playing live to be the most impactful thing. You have to find a way to make the song work and keep up with the tempo! Often that means improvising. Being able to improvise even a little covers so much that can go wrong while playing.
But there are lots of ways to get better, and to a degree it depends on what your goals are. I enjoyed the article.
The way I learned guitar:
1. Lessons for 6 months, didn't learn much.
2. Started playing cover tunes, did that extensively for years. Practiced by butt off. Played with a lot of different people.
3. Went back to learning theory.
For me my main motivation to learn guitar was to play in a band, not to become good at the guitar itself. But it turned out that I was talented enough to learn a lot by just screwing around. When I went back to learn theory, I already knew the sounds and patterns - I just didn't a name for them.
With that said, If I could go back, I'd just start with learning all the notes on the fretboard, all the basic chord and scale shapes. It's actually not that hard, but you need motivation.
I've played with hundreds of other guitarists since then, given lessons, played session etc. and one of my early surprises was how many different reasons people had to learn the guitar. I just assumed everyone were like me - wanted to jam and play cool tunes. But then I met some really good players that had zero interest in playing with others, play cover songs in general, or even write songs. They were perfectly happy with exploring theory, for the sake of theory - the complete opposite of myself at the time.
Recognizing melodies by ear is a hugely useful skill, but I can't help but think it's going to be nearly impossible to do without a sound foundation in music theory.
Tabs are, in large part, paint-by-number. Lots of guitarists out there are only interested in learning a song. Regardless of key, mode, or what the notes actually are. And, tabs satisfy that group by saying: "Play this fret on this string".
To write tabs, you'll need to be able to make an educated guess at what's being played. ex. "Is that a minor pentatonic scale? Or are they arpeggiating a minor 7th chord?". If terms like that aren't in your musical vocabulary, and you haven't played enough to recognize the difference, I don't see how a guitarist would even begin writing their own tabs. Maybe the author is assuming this skill set.
Tommy Emmanuel apparently learned by transrcibing, famously thinking that both the bass line and guitar lines he was hearing were a singular "guitar part". Just by having his expectations (incorrectly) raised, he rose to the occasion and played both parts.
I forget where I heard this story -- it's probably either rather famous, or buried in an interview somewhere.
A variation on this is to use one of the many helpful tools, such as The Amazing Slowdowner. Easily loop over snippets and do the hard work of listening/transcribing, but without faffing around trying to rewind just the right amount.
Deliberate practice. Whatever you do, take it slow and careful. Learn it the right way once slowly. If you learn it too quickly and too surface level, you’ll practice-in mistakes and create 10X “tech debt” to solve later.
Listening and transcribing is an excellent thing to do. But it would be terrible advice to say it's the only thing to do.
Also, I would argue that if you really want the benefit of transcribing, don't write it down until you have memorized whatever chunk you are transcribing - the act of memorizing it and learning it solely by ear is where the real value is.
On the other hand, this is not a good way to learn technique or the fretboard, as the easy keys will be vastly overrepresented, and you don't need to know where you are. That's a challenge that's almost unique to guitar and bass, and getting over that hump requires learning material by note name (whether from scores, tabs, or just chord symbols).
(my bonafides: 35 years playing, gig on sax, bass, piano, and percussion, currently doing an interdisciplinary PhD in music and CS, and running a jazz club night where I perform weekly)
>When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down.
OP, you should have mentionned the prerequisite of absolute pitch...
There is a good graph for transitions that works well for learning since it is a process of forced change.
https://cdn.shrm.org/image/upload/c_crop%2ch_883%2cw_1401%2c...
It's still tabs, but marginally better because you're making your own tabs. Work on hearing the key and chord progression and you won't need tabs. You'll be able to jam with anyone, anytime. It'll take a couple months to get there, but you'll no longer rely on tabs - which I think is the goal.
This piece of software has been my goto on transcribing music for all of the instruments I play for the past 25 years. I can't recommend it enough. It has been pivotal in me being a better musician. Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Music and guitar performance is an academic subject like any other, and has a standard curriculum. There are a few well known top schools, Berklee, MI etc. There are a couple of standard method books.
There really is no need to try to discover "how to get good at guitar" any more than you need to discover how to get good at mathematics.
Music is a language, you practice reading, writing, listening and playing (speaking).
How to get the time for the study, is the challenge, of which there's no "secret solution". Only people who are relatively well off can afford these schools, and/or take the risk of studying something so frivolous with such a low chance of paying off.
If you practice something diligently for 30min every day, it will still take you something like 25 years to rack up the hours of a 4 year masters degree.
All of it is good but none of it is a shortcut.
The greats who became so good doing this had massive amounts of time to do it and put in massive amounts of effort.
You will improve what you practice, possibly. This is advice for learning to play by ear. I was given the exact opposite advice by my classical guitar teacher in college because I was playing one thing and hearing something else. Sometimes, practice makes you worse or is a waste of time at best. If I could give better advice, it would be to be brutally mindful of what you are playing. Record it, and hear what is there. If it isn’t painful, you probably aren’t practicing.
I learned this way myself without being told. I was gifted a nearly ruined classical guitar that my mom took to a music shop and a guy got into working condition for $20. I then listened to every record, cassette and CD in our house looking for any guitar I could hear, especially individual notes, and learned dozens of songs.
It is painstaking and tedious, but it works. I look back on that time, the first few years I played, and I am genuinely surprised at some of the difficult songs I worked through in this way.
But now, over 30 years later and still playing regularly, I almost never do a note-for-note transcription of other peoples playing. I tend to either just get the gist of the harmony and melody by listening and get into the general ballpark. I often use ultimate guitar or other tab sites just for an outline of the chords (or download sheets from real books for jazz).
But my aim is always to fully memorize a piece, from beginning to end, so I can play it without any reference. That, for me, is the goal. Any way I get there (tabs, sheets, ear, demonstration, etc.) works fine in my books.
I started learning guitar using tabs. It's good for easily picking up a song, but I found it painful to learn new songs. Everything I played I simply memorized and learning a new song was always a start from scratch.
I mostly play classical guitar and now force myself to get better at sight reading standard music notation. I find it extremely hard but very rewarding because I'm now able to simply pick up a sheet of music and with a couple of tries figure out the basics of a piece. It opens up a whole library of beautiful pieces.
My appoach is more focused on continuity rather than stop-analyze-go style suggested on this article. Select a song, get a well sounding tab of that song, pick a section, loop it slow enough so you can reasonably hit the notes, once you play it well speed it up and repeat this until 120% speed, repeat this whole process for all sections and you're done.
When I was 25 I started learning guitar, I'd play an hour a day consistently for about 4 years - at that point I was able to learn new songs by ear, noodle along to 80%~ of songs etc.
Guitar I've always found to be a super approachable instrument, particularly because online you can get a video demonstration for most songs. Compare to Piano which is pretty bias online towards sheet music and the ability to read that..
Are you telling me that spending time writing an app to learn the guitar neck isn't the best way?? Blasphemy, I tell you!
Anyway here is my app of shame:
https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder/
I also came to the realization after making this that my time was better spent transcribing, but I wanted to learn egui (and this was before coding agents, so it actually took some time).
I've been playing guitar for 30+ years. When I was a kid, I learned almost everything by ear - note by note by note...
In hindsight, once I had learned a song, I had actually learned MUCH more than just that song. It is that "extra" that adds up over time and makes one a guitarist and not just someone who can play some songs on the guitar.
Rock on!
One thing I'd add: slowing the track down (without pitch shifting) helps a lot in the beginning
57yo here who started guitar from scratch 16 months ago, with zero musical background. For my fellow players, I'm at the stage where barre chords are playable but switching between them quickly is still tough.
I studied exclusively with an app (Yousician) for the first 13 months, then got a local teacher I see once a week. I practice 45-60 minutes a day and have only missed a few days in the last 16 months.
In my experience, it all comes down to practice. There is no magic forumula or shortcut. The 2000 hours to passable playing is very much accurate. I track that chart nearly perfectly.
It's very much a sprint-plateau experience. This week I was trying to learn the chords in Clapton's "Old Love" and for 6 days I could not switch between them, then on the 7th day I was able to make the leap. There's a bunch of brain science about consolidating memories and such but...it all comes down to practice.
I agree with the sentiment that you have to practice correctly, but even if you learn bad habits, more practice and challenging yourself will weed them out. It's really crucial to always challenge yourself. Practice is doing hard things, not playing things you already know. You have to separate practice from playing, because they're two different things. Yes, there's a value in picking up the guitar and fooling around, but to really get better, you have to challenge yourself constantly.
Guitar is a game of millimeters, to an extent I never appreciated. This is where a local teacher can be hugely helpful. How you position your hand, where your thumb is, the arch in different knuckles, how much you're pressing down, how you are positioning that barring finger, where your right hand is, etc. - it's all extreme fine-tuning.
It's massively rewarding. But the learning curve is brutal. I practice for an hour at mid-day and would never have imagined the incredible health benefits in terms of stress relief. It's an hour (to borrow a Steely Dan quote, albeit not in its original drug context) "time out of mind" where I'm doing something completely orthogonal to the rest of my life, for no reason except to hone a skill and enjoy.
I HIGHLY recommend keeping a journal and noting every day what you did. Day by day you'll think "I'm not improving at all, I suck, maybe I'm getting worse"...then you look and realize how much progress you've made compared to two months ago, etc.
BTW, my daughter, 16, practices half as much as I do or less, yet learns 2-3x as fast because she has a long younger brain.
By the way Justin had a new video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gse5EuM_HWU
"I Practiced Wrong for 40 Years?"
Obscure "learn it by ear" guitar story...
Upon hearing Eruption for the first time, the story goes that Tony MacAlpine learned to play the finger tapping section by PICKING IT because he didn't know finger tapping was a thing. Only after seeing Van Halen in concert did he realize what Eddie was doing.
If memory serves me right, I read this in either Guitar Player or Guitar World magazine back in the late 80s or early 90s. Whether Tony was embellishing or not is unknown.
Personally prefer to search for guitar tabs of things I can barely play. And also sound terrible while playing them and tense my whole body while doing so. This is the point of playing the guitar, RIGHT?
This is equally true for game design
I'll often have a video game open. Play about 10-15 minutes, and then spend 1-2 hours practicing the knowledge gained.
It's inspiring
I’m a beginner electric guitar player and what motivated and helped me is learning songs I want to play. The first was Zombie by The Cranberries. The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment when you pin down the chords and strumming is amazing.
Second was Tomorrow by Silverchair (excluding the Daniel Johns solo which is way beyond my skills). Rant: Silverchair is super underrated of the grunge area bands, Daniel Johns is a fantastic musician.
I learned to play guitar this way -- listening to CDs and scrubbing back and forth, writing down what I heard. It's great, but it only gets you so far. Learning pentatonic scales was a step-change for me.
I am playing for quite a while... Had private lessons with a coach to practice solo guitar, and general understanding for a couple of years. Before that around 10 years or more as amateur, now it's been 3 years since I spoke to a guitar coach last time.
I play every day, I do my solos, I play blues, I don't need chords. But it's hard.
Just don't underestimate how hard it is - to be able to play any solo by ear. I guess I just don't have any freaking talent. Pretty obvious at this point, since some people do a better progress in 3-5 years of work.
But for me it's not. I realized that for me something isn't just clicking. There was no breakthrough moment I expected all these years.
I invested a lot into playing guitar, but... meh. Honestly, I wish I spent all that time learning AI math or just math in general. Or spend my time on something that would have a better ROI.
Looking back I see how much effort it took, and how low my ROI is. I wish I gave up earlier.
> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down
How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there huge number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
how to get better: https://berkleepress.com/music/guitar/page/2/
dissect Volume 1, 2 and 3 of A Modern Method for Guitar, no excuses, no cries
Practice a lot. Try things you "can't play" and do them a lot. Pick it up every every single day.
How do I get started if I don't even know the notes yet though?
Learn to play by ear. Practice scales. Practice arpeggios. Learn open chords. Learn barre chords. Learn moveable shapes. Learn to move among chord shapes. Practice with a metronome. Find people to play with. Learn to read music. Learn to sight read. Do all of these things and you will be a musician.
There's some analogy around learning to play a song without using your ears and painting without using your eyes. Like the silliness on the drawing side is obvious. The benefits gained by using your ears to learn music (again this is such a silly statement when you think about it) are so huge and so overlooked by so many beginner guitar players. An hour of learning by ear is worth a week of reading. Also, as I see it, youtube is full of perpetual teachers looking for perpetual students; being a perpetual student sucks. All you need is records.
The most important ingredient is time. Just make sure you do something regularly. At the beginning you may just care about making anything that works and measures up to stuff you like, but the truest truth is that you can't start getting into a thing and expect your taste to remain the same.
As you learn more about the instrument you will learn more about what you like and it will eventually shift. There are people where this is not the case, but they are rare and they don't make better or worse music than others.
You may also start to notice more and more that the guitar playing was the simpler part in most music you like,the harder part was how it all came together as a band, how it was composed and recorded and mixed. Guitar players the world over try to compete with sounds that have run through microphones, mixing consoles, channel strips, mixed with other instruments and mastered. And some of them can't even hear where the guitar ends and where the bass guitar starts. So you have generations of guitar players chasing dragons and spending a ton of money on gear that gets them nowhere.
Gear isn't nearly as important as anybody makes it out to be, especially if you go your own way. And that is my recommendation: Go your own way. Sure copy others for learning, but develope your own sound, style of playing, your own music.
Reminded me of that scene in “le peril jeune”, a french movie about kids growing up in the 70s
Is there any quick test I can do to see if I can innately determine tones like this? If I fail said test, I can know that I'm not cut out for guitar.
Good advice.
I’m a banjo player. Starting with tab ( and playing for myself ) quickly got me to a certain level and then ingrained some bad habits. Playing by ear is much better.
One way that seems to work really well:
1. Listen to the song, tap the rhythm to learn it.
2. Figure the chord progression.
3. Using standard rolls ( sequence of notes, one measure ) find how to fit in melody notes
The Way I Learn Now: Listening & Transcribing
I lived near a music school and took proper guitar lessons. After getting down the basics from the Alfred Method book, this was the homework my guitar teacher gave me.
Coincidentally enough, I was also transcribing RATM back then too...
Love Justinguitar, but I disagree with this approach, this tells you very little how to actually play the guitar, just to know songs and train your ear and transcribing. The main takeway here is that to become an artist you need to get good at copying.
Everybody that plays guitar have tried to transcribe a riff or a song. But not all have become great guitar players.
The way to go is to have an objective. Is it playing a difficult song like Cliffs of Dover? Playing blues? Rock? What is it? Focus on that style or song. COPY. Become a copy machine.
One example is doing bends. There are many ways of doing a bend. Most if not all blue players do it by holding the neck of the guitar in a very specific manner, so if you want to play blues, you need to copy them. It must be a perfect copy.
Playing the guitar is mostly a physical activity where motions and understanding of the body, and how this is wired into your nerves and brain matters.
If you just transcribe and play riffs, you won't be able to play in a high BPM, because in order to do that, you need to be extremely efficient with your movements, understand speed picking... and people have studied and developed those techniques for many years -- you don't invent this over, you watch videos, practice and copy it!
By just playing and transcribing you'll develop terrible habits which at some point will limit your playing, and will feel like it will take an eternity to correct. That's when most of the people stop playing.
And of course, play songs that are at your level, so typically lower speed songs with simpler chords and then from there understand what music style you want to focus on.
A guitar teacher can help you with that because they can easily come up with exercises and songs that would match your skill, but if you want, you can do that yourself.
Once you become advanced in guitar, then you'll for sure know it, and then you can experiment to do bends in a different way, or do something that would make you stand out, but at first, it's mostly about copying. Later you can innovate.
TLDR: best way of learning guitar is focusing on copying everything, the motions of a player being the #1.
This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass:
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
I think listening and transcribing is great advice. Careful listening will help to improve your own listening ability and taste. It also helps to demystify why something is great.
But it's also going to be a struggle - especially at first. You have to be prepared to struggle, a LOT. Most people won't be able to keep at it, and that's one of the things that separates the greats from everyone else.