Musical Skills required to be a Successful Guitarist

Nitin Saxena
Nov 30, 2024
5 min read

Have you been struggling with online guitar tutorials or complicated guitar lessons just strumming, playing some chords and scales and a little picking but still can’t get that performance right? While it’s great to be able to pick up a musical instrument and play by ear, the real deal to perfect your musical ability is to work on acquiring the important basic skills required to be a guitarist.

First things first, you must be sharp on your listening skills and learning/grasping ability. Armed with these abilities you can hope to pursue the necessary skills for playing the guitar as early as possible in your guitar lessons.

Let’s take a quick look at the guitar playing skills…

Timing

The most important skill you need to work on from the very start of your guitar practice is “Timing”. Do remember this as when you play the guitar without other accomplices you forget to focus on the sense of timing with the guitar.

This will be helpful when you play along with other musicians and musical instruments. Some great ways to develop timing on the guitar are:

Record your Playing

You can record yourself during guitar practice and listen to it thereafter to examine whether you are missing out on proper timing.

Tapping

You can practice tapping on the guitar first without strumming to get the hang of the timing. It is also helpful to use your foot or nod your head for tapping to timing on the guitar.

Subdivide beats

A good way to practice timing on the guitar is with a metronome. Subdividing the beat of the music helps a great deal in getting the song right especially if it has a slow tempo. When the tempo is slow, there are longer gaps between the quarter notes thus giving way to confusion in timing where you might go too slow or too fast. Using eighth notes is simpler as there are less gaps between the notes. Here you can do a double tap for each beat. Going further, you can practice with sixteenth notes where you’ll tap four times on each beat.

Stamina Training

Timing your practice during your guitar practice sessions will amplify the quality of your guitar playing and give you more confidence to perform with others publicly.

Music Theory

Most musicians would agree that “Music Theory” is applied the same to every musical instrument, but only to a particular point. Music notes further form intervals, scales, chords and progressive chords along with rhythm and more concepts when applied to all musical instruments alike. Nevertheless, customary music theory books were not written taking the guitar into consideration but only the orchestra instruments. In spite of that, music theory is still very relevant to making your guitar playing skills more thorough and of course if you aspire to go ahead and create your own music down the line.

Memorize the notes on the guitar fret board

This skill is very useful for guitar learners and must be worked on from the beginning of your guitar lessons. If you intend playing guitar smoothly you’ll need to memorize all the notes on the fret board. Eg. You should be able to play all the D chords or C chords on the fret board without fumbling.

Fluency in Reading Guitar Tabs

Learning to play the guitar is not a short-term process. If you really want to be a pro at it, you must consider learning to read guitar tabs fluently. You would want to start with ‘standard music notation’ where it helps you to identify which notes have to be held for how long.

Understand Rhythmic Notation

To be a good guitarist you have to work on the most important skill of understanding rhythmic notation. Combined with the skill of reading guitar tabs, it can benefit the guitarist in learning songs, exercises and lessons easily on the guitar.

Technical Knowledge

You need to master a few techniques on the guitar before you can think about choosing Guitar as a career option. Following are few of the techniques that you need to work upon:

Barre Chords

Barre chords won’t be easy at first, you’ll need to practice them with the guidance of your guitar Instructor. These chords are not played like open chords. To play a barre chord you need to run your hand up and down the fret board and barre the different frets, using same pattern for each chord. Eg. Major – major, minor – minor.

Guitar scales

With so many notes on the fretboard, it can get pretty confusing to pick the right scale, especially when performing solo. You can think of scales as roads on the fretboard. When you choose the right scale using your ‘Music Theory’ knowledge, playing multiple sets of notes one after the other won’t sound off at all and will be in harmony.

Guitar chord progressions

This simply means practicing how to play two or more chords one after the other on the guitar. Chord progressions are common in rock and pop music eg. I - IV – V progression is done by playing chords C, then F followed by G.

Improvising

This skill allows you the ability to improvise, alter or recreate a piece of music from its original form. Here is where your ‘Music Theory’ skill comes to play as well. Though you may find it hard at first, you will enjoy improvising songs on your guitar if you practice it seriously.

Guitar phrasing techniques

This guitar playing skill can be practiced from early on in your guitar lessons. Guitar phrasing means ‘how you play notes’ i.e. indicates the guitar player’s improvisation skill and their own style of playing.

Power chord guitar riffs

Power chord lends a great sound to your guitar performances, especially when used with distortion and is easy to handle. Power chord helps the guitar player to create their own riffs with ease.

Training your ear

Training the ear is a great way to be more prepared during your guitar playing. With the knowledge of music theory, scales and notes, and arpeggios your trained ear can be a beacon of light down your guitar path where you would be able to tell how a following note or scale is going to sound beforehand.

Playing with others

Once you have practiced enough on your guitar playing skills by yourself, it would do you good to practice with fellow players too. This further strengthens your guitar skills and performance giving you more confidence in your music as well.

Arpeggios

When playing the guitar during performances you’ll come to parts where you would have to linger on a note or some notes for a bit before sliding to the next set of notes. Here is where the “Arpeggios” come in handy which help you recognize which notes to hold, highlight or use ‘phrasing techniques’ like “vibrato” on. These are very beneficial when you play solo guitar helping in improving your riffs and licks.

Conclusion

Apart from these very essential skills you need to have as a good guitarist, we mustn’t rule out the final impact, which is of your “Presentation” and “Attitude” during your performance. At Notation School, we ensure you mindfully use all the skills we’ve discussed here during your guitar practice sessions and performances, and have you playing guitar like a pro! The music you play will be absolutely well-balanced, more appreciated and self-gratifying, also steering you to a better, faster music career growth for those of you who wish to pursue playing guitar professionally.