Improve Your Guitar Skills, Sans Guitar? TakeLessons Shows Students How

TakeLessons, the nation's fastest growing music lessons provider, shares strategies for fitting in practice time even without a guitar.

San Diego, CA (I-Newswire) January 25, 2012 - Former Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher can now add “Godlike Genius” to his resume. NME, a UK-based music publication, gives the award to one musician each year, to be presented at the annual NME awards gala in February.

What makes a guitarist a genius, exactly? With previous winners like Dave Grohl, the Clash, and the Cure, Gallagher has some big shoes to fill.

For the beginner guitarists who don't have hours upon hours to commit to practicing, TakeLessons (http://takelessons.com), the nation's fastest growing music lessons provider, shared a few handy tips for enhancing guitar skills sans the actual guitar. The following is an excerpt from the TakeLessons blog post:

"1. Learn The Fretboard
The better you know your fretboard, the better you know your instrument and the more easily you can move around it. Here’s one technique to try: slip a small fretboard diagram into your wallet so you’ll carry it around with you everywhere. When you have two spare minutes, you can pull out your chart and name notes to help memorize them. If you don’t have the slip of paper handy, you can use visualization exercises. Picture a fretboard in your mind, pick some notes, and “see” where they occur on the fretboard image.

2. Learn About Chords
No matter how long you’ve been playing, there is always something new to learn about chords. Look around for sources of new ideas or information, find yourself some chord theory books, or study the chords used by great songwriters.

3. Visualization
Use visualization to work on all kinds of guitar skills. Visualization is the process of picturing a situation in your mind as if it were real. It has been proven that visualization stimulates the same nerve paths as actually performing actions, so it helps to reinforce your learning. Use visualization to practice chord changes and progressions, scales and licks, picking patterns, and whole songs."

By sharing the tips with blog readers, TakeLessons hopes to continue engaging current students and help with any musical goals they may have. Readers are invited to share their thoughts by commenting on the TakeLessons blog, where they can also read about how to handle stress, and comments are also welcomed on Facebook (http://facebook.com/takelessons).