General Playing Advice & Technique

Let’s look at some general playing tips to help with your playing.

Holding Your guitar

• To avoid any unwanted swaying movements from your guitar while playing, your guitar should be pressed against your body using your strumming arm.
• Slightly angle the neck of your guitar forward (away from your body).
• Angle your guitar neck up not down. Using a guitar strap or footstool can help achieve this.

Strumming Hand

• Your pick should be held with minimum pressure as a result strums should be lightly performed (without digging into the strings).
• The strumming and picking mainly comes from the wrist movement. The wrist should always remain loose and relaxed with no tension.
• Your arm should be making contact with the guitar as much as possible.

Fretting Hand

• Always use finger tips when pressing down a single note.
• Press as close to behind the fret as possible without being on top of it.
• Your finger tips should remain parrallel to the fretboard and strings. To achieve this the pinky side of your palm should maintain as close to the neck as possible. 4. Your wrist should always remain as straight as possible.
• Try and find the optimal pressure balance when frettin a note. If you press too hard your guitar will sound out of tune, although if you press too light you will get a muted sound.
• The right side of your fretting hand should remain as close to the fretboard as possible.
• Your fretting hand’s elbow should be free to move alongside your fretting hand’s movements.