Beginner Guitarist? Don’t Miss These 4 ‘Life Changers’

Things I Wish I Knew as a Beginner Guitarist

Understanding Chords and Inversions
The first thing is whenever someone is teaching me a chord, that chord can be inverted. That chord can be a melody, that chord can be all over the fretboard, and you can get beautiful ideas just from that chord. But you need to understand a few things. First thing is, what are the notes that are making this chord?

Learning from Piano Lessons
I remember my first piano lesson. I learned this chord, C. I automatically kind of knew just from her telling me that this is the C major scale and what the notes are, that this chord has C, E, and G in it. And then when she showed me that it can be inverted, I knew that from now on whatever chord I learned, I’m gonna invert it. And that’s where melodies started to form. I started to see how those melodies kind of live within those inversions.

Applying Triads on Guitar
For some reason, on the guitar, I didn’t start doing that. I just learned the chord and from now on, that C and whenever someone told me to play C, I would just go here. So it took me a while, you know, playing all kinds of songs and stuff until someone showed me the idea of triads and inversions. It really changed the way I see the guitar, and especially when I started practicing songs that I love using triads, that’s when everything kind of started connecting and opening up. So you know, I have C, E, and G, but it can also be E, G, and C, in G, C, and E, and all of those are all over the guitar.

Triads and Galactic Modern Guitar Series
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Which by the way, if you want to learn triads in a very methodical level, definitely check out my Galactic Modern Guitar Series, and the link for that is in the description of this video.

Understanding Voice Leading
Now, so that’s good, you know. And then if someone shows you an F, so okay, it’s F, A, C, that’s inverted. Now just having that as a habit earlier would have been very good. Another thing that I wish I was, you know, thinking about earlier is just the concept of continuity in harmony, meaning voice leading. So you know, if I had a C to an F, and of course that’s kind of leaning on the fact that you need to know your triads, but if you’re learning a C to an F, and you now know them over here, I mean, don’t just move them, look for the closest way of moving from C to F. So you know, this is a C:

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And then F would be right here. And then you have this continuity of motion:

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Melodic Movement
Right, so just having that kind of continuity also affects your melodies. You know, if you play an idea:

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C to F:

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You know, just having that kind of movement within your lines really helps sound more as if you’re playing through changes rather than on changes.

Avoiding Comparison
Okay, so another thing that I wish I knew as a beginner guitarist or a beginner musician, I guess, well that’s ever-changing, but you should definitely not compare yourself to others as a kind of like competitive thing. It should really be a quest for finding your own personal voice rather than comparing yourself to others. The truth is that no matter how much you try and how much you practice, the odds of you sounding exactly like someone else are almost unachievable. I mean, you could maybe transcribe something to the point where it sounds exactly like what you’re transcribing, but the thought process behind it is not there because it’s a different human being.

Developing Your Own Voice
And it’s very important to, you know, while you’re putting time into learning other people’s music, also put time into learning what it is you hear and what it is you are born to create. If you don’t put that time in, you’re just gonna spend a lot of your time just trying to sound like someone else, and that can become a habit. I mean, if you’re someone who wants to be an artist, a creator, that can kind of confuse you. So transcribing is something that really helped my playing for sure, but at the same time, I think it’s very important to set time to just discover your own voice and embrace it and develop it. It’s hard, but it’s really worthwhile.

Implementing New Concepts
And I think it’s very important that if you’re an artist in this world, you need to strive to have your own voice right away when you’re learning stuff. If you’re learning voicings, scales, or videos, all these materials, and that’s definitely something I wish I, it’s not like I knew, but I wish I thought about even more, even as an advanced player. Just keep in mind that it’s very important that whenever you’re learning a new arpeggio and you know, a new concept, it’s good to practice it for a while until you get the idea. But it’s important to, as soon as possible, start implementing it into your favorite music. It can be a song you wrote, it can be a jazz standard, it can be the blues. It’s very important to always invite materials that you learn into actual real-time playing.

Advanced Learning Resources
So those are the things I wish I knew earlier, and I’m sure there’s a bunch of other stuff. If you really want to learn all the harmonic melodic materials that you need to understand this instrument on a professional level, I’m talking about the triads, the arpeggios, the voice leading, adding notes to triads, being able to use different chromatic approaches to create phrases, and how to be able to see jazz harmony on the fretboard and being able to play overall keys, it’s around 16 or 17 modules in there, around 110 videos as for now. And you should definitely go check it out, Galactic Modern Guitar Series, and the link to do that is in the description of this video.

Creating Melodies
Now, learning scales is one thing, but how do you create melodies with them? So check out this video where I talk about how you can take the major scale and start creating bebop phrases with it.

[Check it out]