The easiest way to think about developing strength and endurance in your fingers for playing the guitar is to think of each of your hands as an Olympic athlete. Huh? Yep. If each of your hands were an Olympic runner and had an event to compete in, there are a few things your hands would have to do:

1. Train every day
2. Progressively work to improve skills
3. Celebrate each victory and then take on a new challenge every time a goal is achieved.

If we set up a strength and conditioning program for your hands, and you actually do the practice every day just like an athlete who wants to win, you will find your playing gets better really fast.

In order to play guitar, the first thing that must learn some endurance is your fingertips on your left hand. Your fingertips need to develop callouses so that your fingers can press the strings against the fingerboard and make the note ring in a crisp and clean sound. This means you must practice in a slow and steady way each day to allow the skin on your fingertips to grow and thicken into callouses. No matter how strong your hand is, if your fingertips hurt, you won’t want to practice!

The most effective way to work with your fingertips and avoid the discomfort of developing callouses is use the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th strings of the guitar. Even though these are thicker and heavier strings, and it seems like they are harder to press, they actually are more comfortable on your beginner fingertips. The wrapping on the string makes pressing them less intense than the 1st and 2nd strings.

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Being in a band can be some of the most fun you can possibly have if you are a musician. Starting a band and making it work will be much easier if you ask the right questions first and organize your mind to get the end result you want.

By thinking about each of these ideas, and taking your time to answer the questions completely, you will have done most of the hard work up front.  Creating this starting plan for designing a great band makes it much easier to achieve what you want.

What kind of band do you want to play in?

Is it casual and just for fun, or is your band something you want to make into a professional performing career? A group of people that meet one night each week in someone’s garage for fun is very different than a band that performs three times per week and makes recordings.

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Have you ever noticed how many gadgets are available for guitar players to make things about playing easier? A simple trip to the music store can make you add an hour a week to your practice time just to try to learn how to use your new stuff!

Do not fret… Just to make sure your practice time stays on your guitar and not on learning your gadgets and gizmos and accessory objects, here’s an explanation of all that gear, what it does and why it makes your playing and learning experience better.

Capo’s

A capo is a handy device for when you need to move a song to a higher key, but don’t have the chords or notes available in the new key. By clamping the flat part of the capo onto the fretboard against a fret, it makes all the strings shorter so they

sound higher. Think of a capo like the nut at the top of the guitar neck, but it’s a “moveable nut.” For every fret you move the capo down the neck, you raise the key of the song one half step. For example, if you are playing a song in the key of E and need to move it up to F, put the capo on the first fret. If you need the song in F Sharp, capo the second fret. If you need it in G, capo the third fret.

A “cut capo” is another type of capo that presses only strings 3, 4 and 5 (G, D and A in standard tuning) at the second fret. By using the capo on only those three strings, it allows you to change the voicings of all your chords. If you are a worship team player, you’ve probably heard many songs that use cut capo.  The sound will be very familiar to you if you play a lot of Contemporary Christian music, which is where it is used the most. For beginners, there are advantages and disadvantages to using a cut capo, but if you are curious, give it a try! For some beginner players, the advantage is that it allows you to play complex chords with easier fingerings, or fewer fingers. For some beginners, this is also more confusing, so if you are still learning your chords and don’t want to have to rethink everything, wait a few months and try it again.

VoiceCapo (https://www.voicecapo.com) is an electronic capo that will hold your chords for you in a very interesting way. It fits on the first four frets of the guitar. Once you’ve played a chord, the VoiceCapo will hold those chords notes down, allowing you to move your left hand further down the neck and continue playing other notes, like a scale or a solo passage. The chord will hold until you move your hand back up the neck and strike a new chord. How this can benefit beginners is that it’s like having a second guitar player with you while you learn to “jam,” since you can solo over a sustained chord. You can also use it to help you learn more complex chords that your hand may struggle with as a beginner. To play the chord, you press and hold the buttons on the device and it holds down those strings. By using the Voice Capo this way, it will help your hand learn the shape and develop your strength before your hand would normally be ready to tackle more difficult chords. 

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Choosing the drumsticks that are right for you comes down to two criteria – comfort and sound. Firstly, you want a stick that has just the right weight and balance in your hand and is vibrant and responsive in relation to your playing tendencies. Secondly, it should produce the sound volume, dynamics and nuances you need for your music on both your drums, cymbals and any accessories you employ on your drum set.

For most drummers, finding their “true” drumstick is a many-years long process. It is very likely to be the same for you, but there are guidelines you can follow based on the style of music you play and your personal playing characteristics. Let’s take a look first at the different components of the drumstick and then discuss the combinations of them that are more likely to appeal to certain types of players.

A drumstick consists of four parts – the tip, the shoulder, the shaft and the butt. When choosing drumsticks, you will primarily focus on the type of shaft and tip on the stick.

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Many wise players have said, “Guitar is easy to learn, but hard to master!”  This quote is especially true when we consider the right hand’s job in your playing. By using your fingers or a pick (also called a plectrum) you can create a wide variety of sounds and styles to suit any song you want to learn.

The most basic method for making sounds with your right hand is to use your bare fingertips on the strings, called fingerpicking. With your right hand fingers curved and thumb resting flat, place each finger and thumb tip on its own string. Each of your fingertips plucks the string up, while your thumb plucks down. 

There is an endless variety of beats and patterns that you can use with fingerpicking. All five fingers can pluck at the same time to make chords.  Alternating the thumb and fingers will make a “chord with a baseline” sound. The more involved the rhythm of the song, the more intense the job of the right hand in making all those sounds. A “simple baseline on the beat” up to a complicated pattern of “all five fingers working independently” is possible.

The simplest strumming method for bare finger playing is strumming all six strings up and down with the fingertips, or the more comfortable option of using the fingernails of the right hand. By curling your right hand fingers, and resting the tips of your fingernails on the string surface, your hand is automatically in the most relaxed position for strumming. 

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