Learn to play electric guitar, a better choice
Why learn to play electric guitar - Reasons, a lesson on its own.
While busy putting some lessons down for Play-electric-guitar.net, it became quite obvious to me that to help someone else “get” how to play electric guitar, I have to really examine every little thing that happens when I play guitar.
One of the first things that I realized, was that there’s a definite connection between strength and speed.
When I pick faster, the grip on my plectrum weakens slightly. Less strength and more speed. This brought to mind an article I read not so long ago about how too much of a grip on the neck of the guitar will slow down your ability to change chords fast, or execute fast lead runs.
A friend of mine has a terrible problem with this. If I give him my electric guitar to play, he exerts so much pressure on the fretboard that he pulls the strings out of tune. Needless to say, he’s not the fastest player by a long shot.
Not to put the fella down or anything - He admits it himself - But here we have a perfect example of an imbalance between power and speed. Too much power and no speed.
It’s my opinion that this comes from learning to play on cheap acoustic guitars with terrible action and heavy strings. If he’d learned to play on a decent electric guitar from early on, he wouldn’t have developed this problem.
He still plays a badly set up cheap acoustic steel string guitar with a high action and heavy strings, so I don’t think the problem will get solved anytime soon.
People need to understand that this is a bad habit that, once it’s embedded in your subconscious, is not so easy to break.
Parents buying their children guitars to learn to play on need to also understand that. The argument of “We’ll see how they do with it before we buy something better” may just be a reason in itself why they won’t get anything better.
Guitars can be nasty things to try and play, especially some steel string acoustic guitars, and some of them may be downright impossible to play.
Fortunately, an electric guitar is a lot easier to set up nicely, and with a little help from your local guitar repairman or luthier, at very little cost, can be made to play as well as some very expensive guitars.
Fast picking - How tight can you hold the plectrum?
It seems to me that your body is incapable of exerting the same amount of strength when speed is required. When you need to play faster, your muscles need to relax a bit to get the job done.
Case in point - Not so long ago I had to play the acoustic rhythm guitar to Pinball wizard. It’s kind of fast strumming. The plectrum kept falling out of my hand cos I couldn’t hold it tight enough. Mind you, it was kind of cold that day.
On the web page I recently finished - How to use a plectrum, I talk about how my fingers extend outwards slightly when picking fast, so as to get the job done. I think strumming all six strings at that speed might be a bit much.
Anyway, to wrap this post up for now, I’d have to say that, as a lesson in itself, if you learn to play electric guitar and you do it on a decent electric guitar, you give yourself a distinct advantage when it comes to practicing how to play fast.
