Shred Guitar Lessons – Sweep Picking Videos

By Gerber | October 24, 2009

Have you ever listened to guitar players like John Petrucci, Michael Angelo Batio and Paul Gilbert and thought, “I can never play that fast – how do they do it?”. Well, one technique they use is called sweep picking. If you master this technique, you can play the guitar with amazing speed. This is a must if you are in to shredding.

What is Sweep Picking?

According to Wikipedia…

Sweep picking is a technique used on the guitar in which a ’sweeping’ motion of the pick is combined with a matching fret hand technique in order to produce a specific series of notes which are fast and fluid in sound. Despite being commonly known as sweep picking, both hands essentially perform an integral motion in unison to achieve the desired effect.

Videos

The Wikipedia article shows you some practical examples of sweep picking, but the best way to learn this is by watching how are others are doing it. Here are a few videos to show you how to sweep pick.

Have fun and remember you need to practice this a lot, but it will really pay off. If you play some of the exercises in the videos a couple of times per day and you do this for a few weeks, you will notice a definitive improvement in speed.

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Guitar Learning Resources

By Gerber | October 19, 2009

If you want to learn how to play the guitar, there is plenty of information available. The world is full of great guitar learning material. First of all, there are countless tablature books which show you in the easy-to-learn guitar tablature format how to play all your favorite songs even if you can’t read sheet music. If you can read sheet music, then there is sheet music available for every popular artist and thousands of classical and lesser-known composers. There are also “method books” that teach how to play a particular style, and there are instructional guitar DVDs that show you and tell you everything a single guitarist knows how to do. There are books with CDs full of audio examples. There are DVDs that come with tablature books. The list of available guitar learning resources is endless.

In-Person Guitar Lessons
Guitar lessons are still the number one way that guitarists pick up new information. In-person guitar lessons with a local guitar teacher are probably the most effective way to learn new things about the guitar. The world is full of part-time and full-time guitar teachers, who put their heart and soul into teaching their students how to be an ever-improving guitar learning machine. Guitar teachers are expensive, however, and not everyone has the money or the time to commit to in-person lessons. So while this is a truly effective method, it is not for everyone.

Online Guitar Lessons
Over the last 5 years, online guitar lessons have become an outstanding resource for guitarists wanting to learn guitar at a convenient pace and at very low cost. In my opinion, online guitar lessons have come of age, and are now the best tool for learning guitar available to anyone anywhere. Online guitar lessons do not replace books, sheet music, DVDs, and in-person guitar lessons, but they can be more convenient, cheaper, more useable, and provide more breadth of information than any other method available.

Advantage #1 – Convenience
Tablature books are OK, as long as they come with some audio examples. DVDs are OK, as long as they come with a book. The problem is that keeping your place in the book and your place on the CD/DVD in synch is difficult. Every time you take a break (every day basically) you lose your place and have to synch up all over again. Online guitar lessons, on the other hand, solve the problem of synching the tab, explanation, and audio/video samples. A web page is the ultimate guitar lesson format: audio, video, and text all together in one document.

Advantage #2 – Price
Books and DVDs have to be manufacturer, shipped, and inventoried. If you have ever burned a CD or made some copies at a copy shop, you know that manufacturing a product costs real money. Imagine if you had to turn around and sell your product at a profit? Shipping a book or DVD to the retailer is another expense in traditional publishing that occurs before the product is even ready to be sold. Inventory, the hidden expense, can be the largest: every month the book sits in the store, it costs the owner a percent of the price to pay for it to be kept out of the rain, and if the inventory is bought on credit, there is interest on the loan as well. All told, it is no wonder there are few places that sell guitar lesson products even in a large city.

Advantage #3 – Breadth
Guitar books generally can only have a few hundred pages; DVDs can only hold a couple of hours of video. A web site can expand to the size of a whole library full of books and DVDs. This is one aspect of the size advantage of online guitar lessons, but the more important aspect is this: getting a book published is so difficult, that many great guitarists simply never try it. Publishing a web site is so easy that many fantastic guitarists who would never previously have published their knowledge can now publish their guitar lessons online where you can find them.

Conclusion
As you can see, online guitar lessons have significant advantages that should make them an important part of any guitarist’s learning strategy. As the internet continues to grow, and the use of video on the internet spreads, look for online guitar lessons to one day be the recognized leader in helping guitarists improve their skills in a convenient, inexpensive way.

Resources
- RockGuitarWorld.com Reviews – Reviews of Guitar Courses (online and on DVD).
- Guitar Lessons @ Ultimate-Guitar.com – One of the leading guitar lesson sites on the internet (with free lessons).
- Lick Library – Lots of instruction DVDs and downloadable lessons.
- Jamorama – Review of one of the most popular online guitar courses at RockGuitarWorld.com Reviews.
- Sheet Music Plus – Guitar Tab – Authentic transcriptions, easy guitar, play alongs, methods and more.

Topics: Lessons | No Comments »

Beginner Guitar Lessons – Identifying the Parts of the Guitar

By Gerber | October 18, 2009

To begin playing the guitar, you must be able to identify the various parts of the guitar.  The body and the neck should be pretty obvious as they form the basic shape of the guitar and are what everything else mounts to.

Headstock

Guitar Parts - Headstock and Machinehead
On the ends of the neck furthest from the body we have the headstock. Although headstocks are all shaped differently depending on the company that built the guitar, they all serve the same purpose which is to hold the machine heads or tuning pegs.

Machine Heads
Machine heads are the devices that you turn to make the strings tighter or looser. Machine heads can be laid out in a number of different ways depending on the shape of the headstock but will typically be all along one side, half on one side and half on the other or even four on one side and 2 on the other (see picture of headstock above).

Frets

Guitar Parts - Frets
The frets are the little metal bars that sit on the fingerboard or fretboard on the front of the neck. The frets break the neck up into smaller areas. As you push the string down onto the frets you are shortening the distance from the bridge to the point that stops the string length. The shorter the distance between the two points, the higher the pitch.

You can find your way around the fret board by looking for specific markes. Some of the frets are usually marked with position markers like dots or other images. Usually the following frets are marked: 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21. In the picture above the frets 12, 15, 17, 19, and 21 are marked with a dot.

The bridge

Guitar Parts - Bridge
The bridge is the point on the body that is furthest from the headstock and it fastens the strings to the body. The bridge can be fixed or floating and can be made of metal or wood. Acoustic guitars generally have wooden bridges while electric guitars have metal bridges.

A floating bridge will be suspended off of the guitar body by two metal bolts and may have springs attached to the back of the bridge.  This allows the bridge to be moved up and down to raise or lower the pitch of the strings for some really cool effects. This is done through the use of tremolo bar. You can see one in the picture above.

Pickups

Guitar Parts - Pickups
Are the magnetic devices that are mounted to the guitar body under the strings. They transform the vibration of the strings into a changing magnetic field which causes an electric field to be set up in the wire of the pickup which makes current flow and is transformed into sound. A single pick up is called a “single coil” while a double wide pickup is called a “humbucker” (see picture above – look for the black rectangles with 6 dots).

Acoustic guitars can also have pickups and they are usually either mounted in the sound hole of the guitar and visible from the front or they are thin metal strips mounted under the saddle of the bridge where the strings rest. These pickups are called “piezo” pickups .

So know you know the basic parts of the guitar. More beginner lessons are coming up soon.

Topics: Lessons | 1 Comment »

Shred Guitar Lessons – Learning How to Play Fast

By Gerber | October 17, 2009

Many guitarists long to be able to play fast or “shred” guitar and we all know it’s not an easy task.  Not many beginner players (or even many advanced guitarists) can just sit down and play smoking fast lead lines that tear up the fretboard and sound impressive.

If you’ve ever tried to play fast and just weren’t ready, it would have been very obvious right from the start.  All of the notes would sound jumbled together and just sound like a horrid mess.

Right now you are probably wondering “well, then how do I get to play fast too?”.  Have you ever heard the saying “you’ve got to walk before you can run”?  Well, like it or not that is true in this case as well, but there are a couple little shortcuts you can take to make sure you get shredding sooner rather than later.

Metronome
The first thing you’ll need is a metronome.  These come in many different styles but the easiest one to operate is the simple electronic one that has a small speaker built in whose speed or BPM (beats per minute) can be increased and decreased one BPM at a time. There are also digital metronomes, like the one you get as a bonus with the guitar course Jamorama.

Simple Exercises
Next you’ll take a super simple exercise like the standard 1234 warm up exercise where the 1234 represents playing the first, then second, then third and then forth note on each string starting with the 6th string and then moving onto the 5th, 4th, 3rd, 2nd and finally the first.

Alternate Picking
Now, rather than playing this exercise using all down strokes of the pick, you’ll want to incorporate something called alternate picking.  Alternate picking is where you pick one note using a down stroke and then the next with an upstroke and then you simply alternate back and forth.  This is a very efficient picking method and is a must to master if you want to play fast.

Start Slow and Practice
Start with a slow metronome setting like 80 BPM or so and see how it feels and work your way up from there. You should be picking a note every time the metronome ticks.  Do this perfectly and adhere strictly to the alternate picking…down-up-down-up-down-up etc. making sure to stay exactly in time and being careful to avoid playing sloppily.  When you’re comfortable that you can easily pick every note clearly and perfectly at that speed, write it in a notebook and increase the metronome BPM slightly. Keep repeating this process and before long, you’ll notice you’re ripping up the notes at a high rate of speed of 150 BPM or more!

Repeat the exact same exercise on any scales you may know. If you need more information on scales and more exercises to increase your speed, try out Guitar Scale Mastery.

You will not turn into a John Petrucci or Yngwie Malmsteen overnight. You will need to practice a lot. Make sure you can play one exercise perfectly before you increase the speed. Clean, deliberate alternate picking is what will help you become a fast player that people also want to listen to.

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Reviews Added

By Gerber | October 17, 2009

Just a quick update to let you know that we have added reviews of guitars, guitar courses and sheet music (tab books) to this site. You can go to the review section by clicking on the link in the top menu, or go straight to the reviews by clicking here.

Every review shows a description of the product and comments of actual users of the product.

The following products have already been reviewed:

Guitars

Guitar Courses

Sheet Music (Tab Books)

More reviews are added on a regular basis.

Let us know what products you like to see reviewed by leaving a comment below.

Topics: News | No Comments »

Welcome to RockGuitarWorld.com

By Gerber | September 11, 2009

This first article will show you what you can expect from us in the following months.

Rock and Metal Guitar
There are a lot of sites on the internet about guitar playing. This site focuses specifically on playing rock and metal guitar. The rock and metal genre can be divided into a lot of sub genres. Some of the genres you will find here are:

Guitar Players
The genres mentioned above feature many great guitar players. There will be articles on some of the legends in these genres. What kind of equipment do they use and how can you play like that particular player?

Here are some of the guitar players that will be featured in the upcoming articles:

Lessons and Exercises
Guitar players in the rock and metal scene use a variety of playing styles. We will post articles about many of those playing styles. Some of these include:

Product Reviews
This site will also feature product reviews. There are a lot of products available that teach you how to play guitar. The review section of this site will take one product or course at a time and show you the good and not so good points of each product.

What more can you expect from us in the product review section?

So, that’s it for now. If you would like to stay up to date with new articles, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Let us know what you would like to see on this site by leaving a comment below.

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