If learning guitar is one of your main goals or you’re getting back into it it’s important to get the  fundamental techniques of playing down. From fingering chords to strumming rhythms to picking individual notes, making music with the guitar is becoming a reality. As you continue to develop as a player, here are some techniques you can use to make your playing more expressive.

Palm-muting

Palm-muting can give your playing a percussive quality that works well in a variety of music genres, from the distortion-driven chugging of heavy metal to the percussive rhythms of acoustic rock. This technique involves lightly resting the bottom of your palm on your strumming hand down on the strings close to the neck. The goal is to lightly deaden the sound when you strum but not completely. 

Palm-muting reduces the sustain of the strings, creating a muffled staccato sound when you strum. This sounds especially well when you’re playing power chords, but it can be used to spice up your lead playing as well. The closer to the bridge your palm rests, the more sustain you’ll allow from each strum. As you move further away from the bridge, the sound becomes deadened. Even though palm-muting adds more expressiveness to your playing, it’s a relatively easy technique to begin experimenting with. It’s also a technique that fits well with acoustic or electric guitar styles.

Take a look at this video lesson from JamPlay on Palm-muting. Explore the many ways that JamPlay can help you improve your technique to become a more expressive guitar player.

Pick-raking

Closely related to palm-muting, pick-raking also adds some percussive spice to your playing. Pick-raking, however, has less to do with muffling the sounds of notes played and is more about deadening the pitch of a string entirely. Instead of using your pick hand to mute the strings, you’ll use the fingers of your fretting hand. The idea is to play two or three muted strings followed by an unmuted note in quick succession. This creates a percussive click sound just before the note sounds. 

For example, you might lightly rest your index finger against the 4th and 3rd strings while fretting a note with your middle finger on the 2nd string. Quickly strumming through the 4th, 3rd, then 2nd string adds some spice to the note played on the 2nd string because of the clicks of the 4th and 3rd strings immediately before. This technique is typically used by lead guitar players in a variety of genres, from country to blues.

Bends

Few techniques create more expression and more emotional resonance in a guitarist’s playing than string bending. A staple of any lead guitar player’s toolkit, string bends create a lyrical quality to your playing. Instead of plucking individual notes one at a time, string bends allow you to seamlessly slur two or more notes one after the other. 

To play a bend, finger a note on any string, preferably the higher four strings over the lower two, and after plucking the note, use your fretting finger to push the string up toward the string next to it. This causes the note to rise in pitch without requiring a second plucking of the string. Bending can be tricky to master because you have to learn the feel for how far to bend a note. There are half-step bends, whole-step bends, and even whole-and-a-half-step bends, and you have to practice a lot to get the feel of each.

Explore string bending with this video lesson from JamPlay.

Vibrato

Vibrato adds character and expression to your notes and gives personality to your overall playing. In fact, vibrato mimics the qualities of a singing human voice and makes individual notes stand out. Along with string bending, vibrato is a common technique in any lead guitar player’s arsenal. 

To give your notes vibrato, you can either rock your finger back and forth to create a wobbly sound in the note, or you can subtly and rapidly bend the note up and down on the fret. This technique works best with the sustain of a distortion-driven guitar.

Harmonics

Whenever you play any note on the guitar, the sound you’re hearing is called the fundamental note. For example, if you play the note on the 5th fret of the 6th string, you’ll hear an A note. But on top of that A note are several overtones or harmonics that you don’t hear because they’re mixed in with the fundamental note. Guitar is a unique instrument because you have the ability to isolate those harmonics. 

Natural harmonics sound out when you lightly place a finger on the string over certain frets and pluck the string. The easiest natural harmonic you can play is on the 12th fret, but there are also natural harmonics on the 5th and 7th frets.

Artificial harmonics can be played by fretting a note and using your pick hand index finger to lightly touch the string roughly 12 frets above the fretted note and picking the string. Harmonics are an expressive technique that can be a challenge to master, but they create some interesting opportunities for sound exploration.

Watch this JamPlay video lesson to learn more about harmonics. 

JamPlay is home to more than 500,000 guitarists with guitar lessons from world class instructor artists in every genre and for every interest to power up your guitar skill. Join at JamPlay.com.

Easily one of the most enjoyable aspects of guitar playing is manipulating the sound of your playing through guitar effects. From searing distortion-driven lead lines to thick warbly rhythm tones, there’s almost no limit to the creativity you can use in creating your own unique guitar sound. In fact, the options can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re not sure what each effect does to your sound. With the new year coming up, it’s a great time to consider what effects to add to your arsenal. 

Four of the most versatile effects follow. Find yours here. 

Distortion

Distortion is probably the first go-to effect for most guitar players because it can give your rhythm lines a crisp crunchy sound to drive songs in a variety of genres, such as hard rock or even pop, or give your lead lines a screaming sustain, perfect for guitar solos. A distortion pedal increases the gain of the audio signal coming from your electric guitar so that it’s boosted beyond its peak, creating harmonic overtones that normally don’t sound very good, but create just the sound guitar players want when applied to guitar tones. Most distortion pedals include controls for the actual gain you apply to the signal, the output volume, and a control for EQ, allowing you to manipulate the tone of the distorted sound. 

Many amps themselves include controls for gain so that you can add distortion without using an external pedal, or you can combine a distortion pedal with the gain on your amp to create an even more distorted sound than you could with either alone. 

Ready to dig deeper? Watch our JamPlay videos, Anything Goes, Crank up the Gain  and Amp Gain Overview from the JamPlay course, Overdrive and Distortion, part of the 2020 Gear, Tone, and Studio Toolkit. The JamPlay Practice Plan Toolkit includes 10 lessons on distortion and overdrive techniques. Get a toolkit of your choice FREE with the annual membership to JamPlay.

Because distortion is so versatile, it’s important to understand the individual components involved with creating distortion so that you have more control over your sound to create the tone you want.

Delay

Delay is also one of the most commonly used effects among guitarists. A guitar signal is recorded and repeated, creating an echo effect. You have the ability to control the speed at which the signal is repeated. Quicker repeats create a slapback effect because the note or notes will be repeated immediately or almost immediately after you play them on your guitar. Slower repeats create a cascading wash of sound. You can even create a reverb effect, creating the sound of playing in a large room. Delay can be used to thicken up guitar rhythms, especially if you’re the only guitar player playing in a group, or you can use it to create shimmering lead lines for guitar solos.

Compression

A compressor pedal can be really helpful if you’re playing live performances. Essentially, a compressor evens out the dynamics of your playing, making loud moments sound softer and soft moments sound louder. If you’re playing a soft single-note riff, for example, the compressor will boost the signal so that it’s able to be heard. Or if you accidentally strike a note too hard, the compressor keeps that note from unintentionally standing out from the rest. Guitar players use compression to help their guitar tone to not get lost in a mix with a live band. It can also be used to add sustain to your guitar leads.

Phaser

A phaser pedal was a favorite effect used by Eddie Van Halen and can also be heard in the songs of Incubus and Hoobastank, among others. This swirling sound effect is created by duplicating the input signal from a guitar and combining a dry signal with a duplicated signal pushed through an all-pass filter, which cuts and boosts frequencies, creating a sound that modulates in and out of phase. This effect sounds great with single-note riffs and can be combined with a clean tone or distortion. Most phasers include a control for the speed or rate of the effect. A faster rate creates a more warbly sound, while a slower rate creates slow dips and peaks in the sound.

Each of these effects can give you an incredible amount of control and creativity over your sound, and they’re used by some of the best guitar players around. 

Get ready to use effects to take it to the next level. Make 2021 your year of guitar. 

If you’re a musician, your family is going to ask you to play a Christmas song for them. They’re expecting you to sit down on the couch by the tree and play something on that new guitar they bought you. They don’t realize that you loathe being paraded out in front of the family for every holiday get-together.

So Perform we Must 

But it is our sworn duty as musicians to perform, and so perform we must. So what do we play? Of all the songs of Yuletide, none can equal We Three Kings in terms of melody and mood. This is a dark song, almost foreboding, with a beautiful melody and relatively simple chords that most beginners should put on their hit list to learn.

But before you go running off looking up the tab to We Three Kings, let’s go over the song itself and explore a few different ways to approach learning it and adapting it to fit any style you want.

But First… 

First thing’s first, this song is in the key of G with a dominant third and it makes use of almost all of the chords in that key. So before doing anything else make sure to learn all the chords in the key of G. In case you don’t remember they are (in ascending order): 

G major 

A minor  

B minor  (for this song we’ll play a B7)

C major 

D major 

E minor 

Gb minor7 b5

You won’t need to use that final chord and REMEMBER: the B minor (the third chord) is dominant in this song, so it’s a B7.

If you can internalize all that, you’ve just learned a very important lesson in music theory and now you know all the chords for We Three Kings! Now let’s examine the structure. 

The song is a simple verse-chorus repeated ad infinitum. For beginners, the structure of the verse and chorus might be a bit complicated to take in all at once. Here’s what I do whenever I want to learn a song that is complicated to me.

Learn How To Sing It First

Learning and internalizing a melody to where you can sing it on a whim is the single most effective step when learning a new song. It means you’ll know how it goes before you know how to play it and generally it’s very easy to accomplish. Just practice singing along to a recording of the song while you’re in the car or doing chores or at the DMV and you’ll get it stuck in your head in no time.

Work Small

Unless you’re an advanced player, I’d advise against trying to learn this song all at once. Instead break it up into easily manageable pieces that you can learn and internalize gradually. This approach might take you twenty minutes, it might take you twenty days, but the point is you will inevitably learn the song.

Understand The Structure

We know all the chords that are in this song so let’s review how these chords are ordered to make the melody.

Okay, so the first verse of this song is typically played:

E minor /// /// B7 /// Eminor ///

Those little dashes represent beats, and as you can see they’re grouped in beats of 3 which means this song is in ¾, like a waltz.

Practice getting the feel of that chord progression under your fingers by playing along to a recording. Then move on to the next bit which goes like this:

Source: https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/top-hymns-chords/we-three-kings-crd.htm&sa=D&ust=1607724922686000&usg=AOvVaw3VfbnZzOsMiBcfWXJJEhjd

That’s the whole song!

Take all those parts and practice them on their own, then slowly add them together till you can play without needing the recording as accompaniment. When you’re ready to add your doubtlessly perfect, beautiful singing voice into the mix just follow the same sequence of steps you used to learn to play the song in the first place: piece by piece. 

If this is your first time singing while playing then you’ll probably find it incredibly difficult, as it is for everyone their first time. Typically people will complain that they can’t keep their voice independent from their hands and that’s exactly the wrong attitude to have. There is no independence between your hands and your voice, they work together and share the rhythm and the melody. 

Think of your voice as part of the rhythm
Pay attention to where the words land in relation to your strumming hand and your fretting hand and think of them as all working together! That’s the best advice I can give you, learning to sing and play simultaneously is all about your mindset.

From Christmas Song to Rock Song
If you’re feeling mischievous, this song can easily be translated out of its Christmas hymn style into a more… interesting genre. If you want to take this in a rock direction, change the time from ¾ to 4/4 but keep the chord progression the same. 

If you want to go even farther down the rock spectrum, just play all the chords as muted power chords, speed up the tempo, and throw some E minor pentatonic solos over the chord progression. 

There’s nothing more fun than taking a known song and twisting and mutating it into a monster of your own creation. If you have any effects pedals, go crazy with those and try to take the song into a new direction. Try changing the chords around and inventing new melodies. It might sound childish but this is how new songs are created and you might just find you’ll like your version better than the original! So listen to it, learn it, and then go beyond it, all by Christmas Day.

Join the more than 500,000 guitarists who have experienced JamPlay. Guitar lessons from world class instructor artists in every genre and for every interest to power up your guitar skill. Become a member today at JamPlay.com.

Join us for a special virtual holiday concert and learning series. Register now for exclusive access to our JamPlay Holiday events. This month, we’re getting festive with 3 learning sessions featuring some of our favorite JamPlay instructors, private performances, simple song lessons, gear giveaways and other fun prizes. Register today — it’s FREE!

Our first event in the series, Holiday Harmonics with Trevor Gordon Hall, took place Tuesday, December 8, 2020. 

Watch the full video here:

Acclaimed fingerstyle artist Trevor Gordon Hall joined us for our first live studio concert and learning session. Trevor played some of his original pieces for us, discussed his style and creative process, and answered a few audience questions.

Upcoming Events 

Festive Fingerstyle with Amber Russell, Tuesday, December 22 at 9 pm EST
Register Here

Join the more than 500,000 guitarists who have experienced JamPlay. Guitar lessons from world class instructor artists in every genre and for every interest to power up your guitar skill. Become a member today at JamPlay.com.