How to get better at guitar

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.

> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down

I think the problem for me is I’m so tone deaf I can’t tell which note is the right note.

[dead]

[flagged]

TLDR: practice. If you have sufficient natural talent xor will, you will eventually go past the canon of available material and begin to transcribe your own. Then there are those who move to creation, either immediately or somewhere in the path.

[dead]

This is awesome. "I spent 4 hours transcribing 'Breaking the Law' and now I can play it pretty well"

The fact that this was highly upvoted is a stark reminder of just how dumb the average user of this forum is.