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Why and How to Practice a Solid Song Repertoire

June 21, 2018 By Klaus Crow Leave a Comment

As a student of the guitar you play and practice songs for enjoyment and to improve your skills to become a better guitar player.

After a period of time of regular and serious practice you can probably play a couple of songs. If you’re lucky you can play a few songs from the top of your head but with most songs you probably need music sheets, chords or tabs to help you out. And even then you might need to look into some of the parts of the song again to refresh your memory before you can play it from beginning to end.

This is what distinguishes the amateur from the professional. An amateur can play a couple of songs (sort of) and a professional can play a solid repertoire of songs with total conviction.

What you want is to start practicing like a pro. Create the habits of a pro and a repertoire is becoming part of your skill set.

So why do you want to build and play a repertoire of songs?

Having a repertoire is an amazing asset and a profound goal for any guitar player.
Working on a repertoire will build your confidence as a guitar player and a human being.
You will work towards becoming an accomplished guitar player and musician.
You will practice and build skills like a real pro.
You’ll be able to play songs instantly from the top of your head, so whenever friends, family or anyone else asks you to play something, you are ready to rock.
You are working towards becoming not just a better guitar player but also a musician and performer.
You will be able to play with other musicians more easily.
You’ll be ready to perform with great confidence before any audience anywhere and anytime.
You will face your fears and crush them head on!
Being able to play songs from the top of your head will give a feeling of freedom, flexibility and independence.
Having a repertoire is a great musical accomplishment and continues journey that will set the path for a lot of new discoveries, possibilities and opportunities for you as a musician.

How to practice a song repertoire Continue Reading

Top 20 Easy Blues Guitar Songs For Beginners

May 18, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

For me guitar and blues are like salt and pepper, or like Yin and Yang. They are strongly connected to each other and found in every style of music, whether you’re playing rock, country, jazz or metal. So it’s a good thing for every guitar player to learn some vital blues skills.

Well, today we have a Top 20 Easy Guitar Songs for Beginners. While these songs are a really good fit for the blues beginner, they are just as perfect for the intermediate or advanced guitar player. After all, it’s all about the songs.

The Top 20 starts out with some basic blues chord songs and 12 bar blues shuffles, and at the end of the list there’s room for some nice beginner blues soloing. They are all excellent songs to start out learning to play the blues. Pick your choice.

If you find that some song intros are still a bit too challenging you can just skip the intro and start with the verse. You’ll learn the challenging parts later when you’re up for it. Now just have some fun playing some nice blues classics.

As with all things guitar, you need to invest some practice time to figure out and learn each song thoroughly. Some are easy, and some require a bit effort depending on your skill level. So if you’re really just starting out you might want to use some of these handy tools to figure out the guitar parts.

Each song title in the list contains a link to the song on Youtube. The “Chords and Tabs” links will give you the chords or tabs to the song and the “More Chords/Tabs” links will show you the official transcribed chords/tabs if you want to learn more songs of the same artist.

Enjoy the songs!

1 – Kindhearted Woman Blues – Robert Johnson – Chords – More Tabs

2 – Manish boy – Muddy Waters – Tabs – More Tabs

3 – Sweet home Chicago – Robert Johnson – Tabs – More Tabs

4 – Blues stay away from me – Delmore Brothers – Chords

5 – Take Out Some Insurance – Jimmy Reed – Chords

6 – Boom boom – John Lee Hooker – Tabs – More Tabs

7 – T bone shuffle – T Bone Walker – Tabs

8 – Smokestack Lightnin’- Howlin’ Wolf – Tabs

9 – Suitcase – Keb Mo – Tabs – More Tabs

10 – Life by the drop – Stevie Ray Vaughan – Tabs – More Tabs
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Improve Your Playing Through Slow Thorough and Full Immersion

April 19, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

Nowadays every song is at your disposal on Spotify and Youtube, and you can also find how to play these songs on guitar tablature and guitar lesson websites. Having access to everything instantly makes you want to hear and learn things quicker, easier, faster, better and have more of it.

The tricky part is we tend to forget to dig deeper into the songs. We move on to the next and the next and might not give it the time and attention it deserves.

I’m also guilty of learning songs fast, effective and efficiently for teaching and gig purposes, but there are also times I just want to dive deeply into a song and absorb every single detail.

It’s an immense joy to take the time to learn, practice, and figure out all the nuances and things that make the song what it really is. Total immersion.

You slowly digest the song and learn an incredible amount of craftsmanship that’s built into the song that you probably don’t hear at the surface. You will appreciate and enjoy the song a whole lot more when you take the slow and thorough approach.

You don’t have to do this with every song, but at least with the songs you really love. Start with one or two songs and enjoy the process.

Here are the keys: Continue Reading

Best and Most Accurate Guitar Tablature Websites

March 29, 2018 By Klaus Crow 2 Comments

Most of you know free tablature websites like Ultimate-guitar and Guitartabs.cc. Although these are great websites with lots a tablature, the downside they are not always very accurate, and not everything you want is there when you need it.

Sometimes you just want to really nail a song, and make sure you get it right. You want to save yourself the precious time searching for the right tab without mistakes or missing pieces. In that case, you can choose tablature transcribed by professionals and go to one of the websites in this post.

You can find links to get complete tablature books of your favorite artist or download or request tablature music sheets for one particular song. It’s all here. You might want to bookmark this page for when the time comes you need that great song.

Happy playing :)

Amazon Guitar tabs
Amazon is pretty much the most visited website to look for anything guitar related with an amazing amount of guitar tablature books. Just type in your favorite artist and add “guitar tab”.

Musicnotes
At Musicnotes you can find guitar tablature books as well as single downloadable digital tab sheet music if you’re searching for that one particular song. You can view each first page of the tablature notation to see how it looks.
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