John Mayer and John Petrucci didn't learn the guitar the same way. Although both of them attended Berklee College of Music, I suppose John Mayer rather for a shorter amount of time.
What they do with guitar in their songs is massively different.
And as a guitar player, you can simplify that with just... But I'll discuss that after pointing out the abundance of insanely skilled guitarists named John.
Alright,
Guitar can have two functions: support (rhythm) or leading (lead).
When you see someone singing and playing guitar, with their right hand moving and left hand making shapes, that's rhythm guitar (assuming they are right-handed). The vocals are usually at the forefront, supported by an acoustic guitar.
In the other scenario, imagine long shabby hairs on a monk-like guy, moving his finger fast and making weird faces.
That is the perfect example of the latter.
So, we have two terms: rhythm and lead. These are basic classifications, but in the real world, lines are blurry. Someone like John Mayer might use the guitar in a supportive function, but what he's doing on the guitar can be equally complex.
If you think about it, the utility of the guitar is inversely proportional to mainstream music. And yes, my heart aches while bringing that up.
Sob sob.
Genres massively popular, such as hip-hop and pop, usually utilize a loop, some particular guitar (or other instrument) sound goes throughout the song, with nothing much changing.
A guitar player's life gets interesting within genres like rock, hard rock, progressive rock, metal, blues, and jazz.
Based on the genre, your role as a guitarist varies and it's a hard pill to swallow. Why? Because mostly the role is supportive unless we're talking Steve Vai kind of scenario.
Let's practice acceptance and not secretly turn down the volume knob on our guitars during the sound check in order to later turn it up and sound louder than everybody else.
An eerily uncanny characteristic of guitar players all across the world.
Acceptance of your role as a guitar player brings relevance and efficiency to your guitar journey.
A particular situation beginners face is performance scarcity. Performance is anyway altogether a different skill set. This combined with the inability to read their audience and blurred lines between the two functions of the guitar is a beginner's nightmare.
Simply put, just playing chords in front of the audience can get boring and monotonous pretty quickly.
For the longest time, I wasn't sure what to perform because the effort I was putting in and the audience response weren't adding up.
Can't really 'skip to the good part' when it comes to reading your audience, only comes with experience, the latter issue is addressable though. Let's get to it. Now on to the original flair of this conversation: the most meaningful way to pick guitar lessons and practice based on the difference between rhythm and lead guitar.
My approach with 'singer-songwriter students' or 'rhythm guitar players', focuses on less finger-intensive exercises. Theory discussions involve music-subjective topics more than guitar fretboard subjective topics.
The performance segment includes songs with minimal solos and more interesting chord changes.
For someone singing, the guitar is rather playing a supportive role, the complexity of what is being done on the guitar does vary but never exceeds vocals.
Still, the very basic exercises such as 1-2-3-4 spider (horizontally and vertically) are relevant.
But rather than trying the same at a physically challenging pace, getting those chord shapes under your fingers makes sense.
It's about accompanying themselves with accurate chords for any song, possibly by ear later on. Knowing chord families, using a capo, and mastering basic open chords are priorities.
An obstacle for people singing while playing guitar is sync - it's somewhat amusing to watch people die on the inside when they aren't able to sing and play guitar at the same time.
Chill out, don't let your inflated expectations take over.
Right-hand-only workouts such as playing a pattern ( D D D D or any other) while talking simultaneously works well — at the risk of your family walking in on you and confirming their suspicions.
By the way, mute the strings on the left while trying out the activity above.
Most pop songs are within grasp using 8 open chords and a few strumming patterns (and capo). A rhythm guitar player may start there and segue into plucking-based songs. To further take it up a notch, a student may try a song like "Girls Like You" by Maroon 5, supporting their vocals with a riff instead of simple strumming.
This was a quick glance towards approaching rhythm guitar mostly from a beginner's perspective and is massively beneficial over trying out cool-looking riff from Metallica.
Moving on now to the latter category of guitar players — Long shabby hair with fast-moving fingers. Step one, get rid of all the shampoo in the the house.
The finger exercise module explores in-depth both musical and non-musical exercises and mandatory use of the metronome.
Although the starting ground might be the same — one-string exercise, they quickly segue into angular and advanced string skipping exercises in the case of lead guitar players.
Sprinkle in speed burst exercises where you kind of burst into 8 notes or 16 notes whether within a scale or any non-musical pattern.
I'm going out on a limb here to build on these 'guitar learning scenarios'— These categories may span over months if not years.
Strictly use these examples only to differentiate between the two guitar roles and maybe adapt a few nuances in your practice.
I found it effective to use popular riffs as finger workouts, for instance, Thunderstruck by ACDC. At the same time, it can be massively disadvantageous to go straight for the entire intermediate to advanced songs (if you're just starting).
Five major scale shapes come much earlier in the theory/workout section.
Lead guitar players tend to pivot towards fancy solos and riffs but it takes unreasonably long to learn those at somewhat initial stages.
So although I use riffs or a particular part of the 'fancy songs', full-length performance comprises tracks like 'The Reason' by Hoobstank segueing slowly into songs with short solos.
This was a story in a nutshell, practical equivalent workouts of what's mentioned take tons of practice — we compared two hypothetical student personas.
Take it with a grain of salt.
Real-life guitar progress is months of playing and maybe weeks of not playing followed by days of self-loathing.
Say Bye!
Anubhav Kulshreshtha
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