When you’re first learning how to play guitar, it can really hurt to press down your guitar strings. The majority of guitars straight out of the box from the factory come with high action which means the strings are far away from the fretboard and tough to press down. To fix this, you can have your guitar set up by a guitar tech — they can lower your guitar strings by lowering your saddle, adjusting guitar neck relief, etc. This can make a cheap starter guitar feel like an expensive high quality guitar.
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Best Bluegrass Flatpicking Techniques
It’s amazing how fast flatpickers Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton, David Grisham, and Dan Tyminski can pick on the guitar. If you’re anything like me, you’re always trying to pick faster and with more precision to keep up with these legends. In this lesson, we’ll go over some must-know bluegrass flatpicking techniques that will really help you increase your speed and improve your accuracy! If you like this lesson, you might also like our Bluegrass Lick Library.
Video Start Time | Lesson Topic |
---|---|
00:00 min | Lesson Overview |
00:33 min | Pick Direction for Building Speed |
02:24 min | Your Choice of Guitar Pick |
03:19 min | Two Important Pick Angles |
05:31 min | Relax Your Wrist but Play with a Heavy Hand |
2nd Position G Minor Pentatonic Licks
We’ve already covered several licks within the 1st position of the G Minor pentatonic scale. In the lesson videos below, we’ll be moving up the guitar neck to learn some licks built around the 2nd position of the G Minor pentatonic scale. The solo in the beginning of this video is an example of how you can combine each of these minor pentatonic scale licks to create one long guitar solo.
Tuning Your Guitar by Ear
In this video I’ll show you my favorite guitar tuner and you’ll learn a couple easy ways to tune your guitar by ear so you’re always able to tune a guitar when you don’t have a tuner nearby.