Don't get stuck in a rut. If you started yesterday's practice playing arpeggios, start today's with scales. Also, try to make a song out of what you're practicing to help break the tedium.
As a guitar player, I've been influenced by dance music - it was Crystal Method and The Prodigy back in the day. I would listen to those textures and try to approximate them on the electric guitar.
I practice more than ever ... mostly scales and arpeggios ... and anything I can't do.
The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice.
After 35 years of bone-crushing rock guitar playing, I'm finally starting to get my head out of the harmonic sand and learning how to play over chord changes.
My ability maps my own writing. I haven't spent a whole lot of time biting licks from the really quick masters. That's why I'm not very good at that sort of super-fast, shreddy sweeping. So I've never considered myself a traditionally good, fast-playing guitarist.
By the time I got to the Paris Conservatoire I was very good at the scales and arpeggios.
I learned sweep picking from a variety of sources. One was a Frank Gambale instructional video, but he executes his sweeps a little differently.
Of course, I'm a guitar player, so I'm thinking as a guitarist. I have to work within my physical limitations as to what my hands will do, and also the patterns I'm familiar with, and the places that my fingers are used to going.
I approach playing acoustic guitar more of as a percussive instrument. It's fragile. I don't have a lot of finesse when it comes to my guitar playing.
I've been playing swing chords for a long time.
I really consider myself more of a rhythm guitarist than a soloist.
Using open strings is a great way to add texture and atmosphere to any chord progression.
When I started writing music on the guitar, it started off very folky because of my limited ability to play. It was slow, soft melodies. But then, as I got better on the guitar, I started exploring different sounds.
I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that.
I write almost all my songs on an acoustic guitar, even if they turn into rock songs, hard rock songs, metal songs, heavy metal songs, really heavy songs... I love writing on an acoustic because I can hear what every string is doing; the vibrations haven't been combined in a collision of distortion or effects yet.
It's amazing how a lot of the metal guys have never strummed! And it's not that challenging, but it really opens up a lot of doors in ways they might not have imagined.
I love the subtlety and tonal range of the acoustic guitar.
Before you can apply chromatic ideas to scales and arpeggios, you have to get the chromatic scale itself under your fingers. You should learn it up and down the neck, and become comfortable with the fingerings.
The thing with the piano is, the piano is like percussion almost - well, it is. You have to... not beat on it, but there is more work involved than a Hammond. With a Hammond, you just lay your hands on the keys, man, and you're gone.
I use some pretty radical harmonics at the beginning of 'Heresy.'
The right notes mean more than 1,000 mph arpeggios.
There's more to playing the guitar than being able to split your legs.
I'm more of a strumming guitarist, instead of a lead soloist guitarist.
I noticed a lot of guitar players neglected the rhythm part of rhythm guitar and decided I would try to focus in that. As my skill and knowledge of the instrument grew, I found lead started to come naturally. Sometimes I play guitar like a frustrated drummer. Ha ha!
