Choosing an instrument can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be so hard! If you sit back and consider these key points, you will be in the right direction to find your future instrument.
Age
Some instruments are easier to play as a young child while others can be extremely difficult! For one thing, some instruments are just too big. It would be difficult to imagine a four year old playing an upright bass. For younger children, piano, voice, and violin are popular choices.
Young guitarists love writing songs! As with any creative task, the hardest part is getting started, so here are some ideas to inspire budding composers.
One of my guitar students recently asked me if musical tones vary as much as the color palette does among cultures and languages. For example, all languages have words for the fundamental colors such as black, white, red, yellow, blue, and green; but vocabulary for more complex variations varies greatly. Some languages do not have words for colors like purple, pink, orange, or brown. Other languages have specific words for colors that we English-speakers would consider subtle variations. In Russian, the colors light blue and dark blue have completely distinct and unrelated words.
When improvising a solo, beginner guitar players tend to pick one scale and go with it for the entire solo. While this strategy can be really cool, solos are often made more interesting by mixing together a variety of scales in order to achieve different sounds.
You can break down the mechanics of classical guitar playing into three fundamental techniques: slurs, arpeggios, and scales. Spending time improving each of these mechanisms will make playing a lot easier and improve your sound. This is the third of a three-part series that will give you the ingredients you need to build a short warm-up routine. I will introduce several studies of varying difficulty, so choose the examples that best suit your playing level.
Good technique is key to mastering any instrument. In addition to facilitating quicker movement around the instrument, proper technique also helps prevent injury (every musician’s worst nightmare!). This article explains three crucial aspects of piano technique which should be practiced by pianists of every skill level. Keeping these points in mind will help virtually any pianist both improve their facility at the keys and reduce their chances of strain or discomfort.
We live in a world where young musicians have access to a wide assortment of instruments and a limitless variety of musical styles. Given the wealth of musical resources available to us, why limit ourselves to just one instrument or genre?
(Note: if your knowledge of music theory is not that great, this lesson might seem a little complicated. If this lesson seems over your head, I’d encourage you to book a lesson with your favorite guitar teacher and go over the basics. You might also want to look at my earlier blog post dealing with the fundamentals of music theory on guitar.)
As guitar players, we all should understand the basics of music theory. A working knowledge of music theory enables us to better communicate with other musicians and to explore different ideas on the instrument. This is the first of installment of a three-part series on basic music theory for guitarists.
Let’s start by talking about relative keys. Every major key has a relative minor key, which simply means that for every major key, there is a minor key with the SAME notes. That’s it! Easy, right? Let’s pick a scale to illustrate this idea:
