ACOUSTIC MASTERY 50 acoustic guitar tips!

With brilliant exercises to measure your progress and keep improving for years to come!

Welcome to our mega, ‘50 tips to become a better acoustic guitarist’ behemoth. With such a broad base of techniques and ideas covered there’ll be something in here for everyone. The acoustic guitar is a beautifully expressive instrument that has been used in many a hit record, in all genres from country to hip-hop. Singer-songwriters armed with just a handful of open chords have written and recorded songs on acoustic guitar that have changed the face of popular music. No matter how technologically advanced music creation becomes, acoustic guitar-slinging singer-songwriters such as Ed Shearan and Jack Johnson continue to be right in the middle of it all. The ‘unplugged’ format of stripped-down acoustic performances is as strong as ever and many performers these days have an acoustic section in their show.

You may well have already looked at improving various areas of your acoustic guitar playing. Our aim is that this feature will contain some new ideas and fresh approaches for acoustic guitar players of all styles and abilities. Be it incorporating advanced harmonic techniques or trying the show stopping YouTube friendly spectacle of adding in percussive elements, there is hopefully something in here for everyone. Practising slowly is great for developing consistent, accurate results.

Practising a technique, riff or lick slowly often gets overlooked, as it’s not the most exiting way to spend time on the instrument and requires focus and patience. By practising slowly you are programming your brain with the correct information and from this position it is easy to up the tempo. By practising too fast in the early stages there is more chance that mistakes will be made and learnt. A good way to set a good learning tempo is to take something that seems slow and then half it.

And there are many basic things that can lift your playing to the standard of a pro: think of open-string muting; it’s often overlooked, but any strings that aren’t damped by either the fretting or picking hand can ring out and make your playing sound amateurish. You will find that implementing some of these less exciting, core concepts can knock the rough edges off your technique and provide truly noticeable gains in the long run.

While you may have already looked at improving various areas of your playing, the hope is that this feature will contain some new ideas and fresh approaches