Klaus Crow, Author at GUITARHABITS

16 Ways to Fuel a Burning Desire to Practice Guitar

16 ways to fuel a burning desire to practice guitar When you start out playing guitar everything is new, fun and exiting. Your playing improves, expands and grows further.

Then all of a sudden life gets busier. Your job, school or other activities are taking their toll. You meet the love of your life, get married, have children or you need to move to another place. This means you have to divide your attention and your playing could get stuck in a rut. You don’t want this, but it’s happening.

Now, if it’s been a while since you’ve picked up your guitar and you need some fuel to cultivate that burning desire to practice again or you could just use a good boost, then check out these 16 keys to get back in the saddle:

Let’s thrive again!

1 – Read and study guitar magazines
Get a copy of Acoustic guitar, Guitar world or Total Guitar. Magazines are full of inspirational stories, tablature, reviews and interviews. Put them on the table in the living room so you can’t miss.

2 – Watch and be galvanized by awesome videos
Search your (or my) favorite guitar players and songwriters on Youtube. Watch lessons, interviews, concerts, documentaries and behind the scenes.

3 – Find a guitar tablature book of your favorite guitar player.
Get a copy of your favorite guitar tablature book. Put the book on a music stand in the living room. Don’t put it on the bookshelf. You need to see the book right in front of you every time you pass by. Check out the Top 150 greatest guitar players of all time accompanied by the best tablature books.Continue Reading

Easy Guitar Riffs & Intros for Beginners (Tab incl.)

By Klaus Crow 17 Comments

Easy Guitar Riffs and Intros for Beginners

When you’re learning to play guitar you practice chords, strumming patterns, fingerpicking patterns, guitar songs and scales in order to become an an accomplished guitar player. That stuff can be hard and challenging sometimes so it’s healthy for you to take a pleasant break now and then. That’s where easy guitar riffs and intros come in.

Indulging in the best and easiest guitar riffs is good for the soul. It’s motivating and will keep the fun alive while working on your regular practice workout.

What is a guitar riff?

A guitar riff is a memorable sequence of notes or chords that has a main part in the song. It has a strong melodic or harmonic pattern that is used as a repeated catchy hook and makes the music stand out. Riffs can be found in all styles of music from rock to latin all the way to classical music.

While riffs are usually short in duration, there are examples of longer riffs and they can differ in complexity from really simple to super challenging riffs.

How to practice a guitar riff

Before you start practicing a guitar riff you want to listen to the riff a couple of times. Put on the original track and carefully listen to the notes (the melody or harmony), to the duration of the notes, the beat, the rhythm, the tempo, the timing of the notes, any dynamics or accents of the notes in the riff.

Analyze the riff with your ears in anyway possible. This is a really important process and skill to learn and gives you a great advantage before you really start learning any riff on the guitar.

Once you’ve listened and analyzed the riff you look for the Tabs (see the easy guitar tabs list below) and try to figure out the riff note by note. I recommend you first try to figure out the riff using only the tabs and your ears and when you’re stuck you watch a video guitar lesson. Trying to work out the riff on your own is so good for developing and improving your guitar skills, it’s huge!

Combining Minor and Major Pentatonic Scales

By Klaus Crow 6 Comments

Combining minor and major pentatonic scales The minor pentatonic is the most important scale in blues and rock music. It’s an awesome scale and sounds great, no doubt about it. There are a million ways to express your emotions through the minor pentatonic and use it for your soloing.

However it always has that same dark classic minor pentatonic sound. It doesn’t take you anywhere else. Combining the minor pentatonic and the major pentatonic will take you to different places.

Suddenly you have the ability to produce the same kind of sounds and licks you hear in the solos of Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Combining the notes will give you a wide selection of flavors to choose from and to play around with. You will keep attracting the listeners attention with all these extra lovely notes that will make your soloing a lot more interesting.

So how do you approach this? Let’s take a closer look. Continue Reading

6 Cool Guitar Player Apps for iPhone and iPad

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

Portrait of burning young attractive blond woman playing on electric fire guitar
Once in a while I check if there are any new good and useful guitar apps available. While there’s a lot of baloney out there, sometimes you’ll find some really nice tools that can help you out with your guitar playing. It makes the life of the guitar player easier, more comfortable and increases the progress.

These guitar apps are really cool. They all have an easy interface design that will make you start practicing within a minute.

Here you go:

Riffr
800,000+ Guitar tabs & Chords. Riffr is daily updated with the latest tabs and chords from various guitar websites. Built in Chord Dictionary. Video lessons and audio playback. Just awesome and it’s free!

GuitarTuna
A ridiculously accurate guitar tuner and easy to use. Works for Guitar, Bass, 12-string guitar, mandolin, ukulele, banjo and other string instruments, and contains most of the alternative tunings too! It also includes ear training practice. Yes it’s free.

iReal Pro
iReal Pro simulates a real-sounding band that can accompany you as you practice, and also lets you collect chord charts from your favorite songs for reference. You can import 1000’s of songs from the forums. Especially if you want to learn to play jazz, this is the bomb. It’s rather expensive for an app, but a must for the jazz student.

Spreadsheets
This isn’t necesarily a guitar app, but I use this app to write down my guitar practice goals. I create my guitar goal lists on the computer in google spreadsheet and when I practice I use my Ipad to check what I need to be practicing, add stuff I need to work on later and keep track of my progress. It’s free.

MTSR
While Garageband can do many things, sometimes I just want to record and export a musical idea. Nothing more nothing less. Multi-Track-Song-Recorder is my savior. It’s an easy to use 4 track recording app. Export your songs via Dropbox, Email, SMS and iTunes File Sharing. Great for musicians. It’s free.

Ear Trainer
Every musician should work on Ear Training (or Aural Training) and Interval Ear Training is a very important element of ear training. You will learn to recognise the relationship between two notes (by distance), when they are played together or apart!

Do you know any cool guitar apps? Please share in the comments.

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