Guitar: Playing What You Hear: An Open Learning Guide

The ultimate goal for many guitarists is to be able to create with the guitar – that is, to be able to conceive of a melody or a chord sequence, "hear" it in one's head, and then translate it onto the fretboard. Ideally, guitarists should be able to do so with the minimum possible latency and with as few errors as possible, and they should fail gracefully – that is, when they play an unintended note, they should be able to recover from the mistake. The best improvising guitarists, from blues players like Eric Clapton and Freddie King to jazz players like Wes Montgomery and Allan Holdsworth, have mastered this skill.

Staring at the fretboard while playing is considered the mark of an amateur. In most performance situations, it isn't possible to look at the fretboard while still communicating visually with other musicians and with the audience. In addition, looking at the fretboard introduces additional delay between thinking the note and playing the note, because the guitarist has to visually verify that his or her fingers are in the right place.

A good way to break yourself of this flaw is to practice with your eyes closed, or even better, to practice in the dark. You will probably find yourself playing mostly clichés that lay out well under your fingers. Resist the urge to do this. Practice until you can play new or difficult phrases without looking at the neck.

Pianist and teacher Barry Harris stated in an interview for the 2008 Stanford Jazz Series that he believes that piano players would be better off if they played the "piano in their head" more often. According to Carroll Smith's book "Drive To Win," Formula One drivers can sit down in a chair, close their eyes, and move their hands and legs as though they were driving a lap, and surprisingly enough, they often get within several seconds of their actual lap times.

Practice running through a solo in your head, humming or singing the melody line and fingering in the air like you would on an actual guitar. Without the feedback you get from hearing the notes coming from the instrument, your weaknesses are exposed. Any chord or melodic fragment that you're not confident playing in the air will likely be played with hesitation on the actual guitar. The other advantage to visualization is that you can do it anywhere, since it doesn't require a guitar. People may give you strange looks as you walk down the street playing air guitar, but you can be self-assured in the fact that you're actually playing the right notes on your air guitar rather than strumming aimlessly.

As an improvising guitarist, if you're truly creating on the fly, you will make mistakes. The best improvisers, including guitarists like John Scofield, can use unintended notes as starting points for new motifs or ideas. As an improvising guitarist, you need to know how to recover from a mistake. Recovery requires that you first know what note you actually played relative to the chord change, and then find a way to proceed from that note in a logical way, usually resolving the dissonance into something consonant.

A good way to improve your fault tolerance is to play the random note game. Put on a backing track with chord changes, such as the ones by Jamey Aebersold. Close your eyes, move your left hand up and down the guitar neck, and pick a random string and a random fret. Play the note. First, listen to the note, and try to hear where it fits into the current harmony relative to the root note of the chord and to the other chord tones. For example, maybe you just played the seventh instead of the sixth, or the flat third instead of the natural third. Next, try to create a melodic line that starts on the note and resolves logically into the tune's harmonic structure. There are a few devices you can try here:

Is the note a member of the current or next chord or scale? If so, you can play something diatonic (in the key).

Is the note a member of a chord or scale that can resolve into the current chord or the next chord? If so, play something over that chord, and then resolve it into the harmony.

Is the note a member of a chord or scale that is a half-step off from the current chord? If so, you can sidestep back into the correct key.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Guitar/Playing What You Hear by Wikibooks contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.