Is The Guitar The Easiest Instrument to Play?

Its been said by many musically inclined individuals that the guitar is the easiest instrument to play. This is not true. With this article, I am going to provide the reasons why it is untrue and the reasons why people think that it is true, and the reason I am going through the trouble to do this is that it is unfair to guitarists to be labeled as lesser musicians.

First, we must make clear that every instrument has for all practical purposes an unlimited music making potential. You can spend a lifetime mastering any of the serious instruments and they can each lead you deep into music theory and creation. With this being true, we cannot look at the maximum potential of an instrument to determine ease of playability, for all of the instruments can be played in an inspiring and highly complex manner at their best.

To find the easiest instruments to play, we must look at what it takes to do the smallest and simplest action: playing a single note. Going by this lens, it’s clear that the guitar is not the easiest instrument. On the guitar, it takes a coordinated, yet different effort of both hands to produce a single note. One hand has to fret and the other has to pluck. Just think about how many instruments make it easier than that; the piano takes a single downward motion of one finger to produce a note, and for a drummer its pretty similar.

Many instruments make it even harder to produce a single note, but it does not come down to this criterion solely. I think it is logical to say that an instrument that is capable of polyphony is harder to learn than one that can only produce single notes. It makes sight reading harder and greatly increases the required coordination. This gives the guitar, piano, and other chordal instruments an advantage.

Something else guitar players have to deal with is the vast amount of different fingerings the instrument requires. This also adds difficulty to sight reading and creates a large amount of interval, chord, and scales shapes to memorize, and all of this is in addition to the normal challenge of single note playing that every other instrument has in some form.

The reason that many people consider the guitar easy to play is that a lot of people learn the basic chords and a few popular songs and consider their selves to have learned the instrument. Other instruments do not have such a large repertoire of relatively simple popular music to learn, and so when people learn some of this, they think they have mastered the guitar. However, the difficulty of the guitar reveals itself in the deeper levels of playing and theory.

It is hard to say what the hardest instrument is to play, but it should be clear that it is not the guitar. Just memorizing all of the notes of the guitar fretboard is an immense task, and then you have to be able to apply that knowledge. Let’s put to rest this idea that playing the guitar is easy.

January 26 2010 | Guitar Practice | No Comments »

Practicing Guitar With Overdrive or Distortion

Practicing guitar with overdrive and distortion effects engaged is something that just about every guitar player will do at some point, but when should you and when should you not? There are times where this can both help and hinder you in the practice room, and its important to realize the difference. It all depends on what the goals of your practice are, and what you are trying to get out of it.

To start off, let’s talk about some of the scenarios where you do not want to use guitar overdrive distortion. If you are working complex picking technique you are going to want as clean of a tone as possible. The reason for this is that when you are going through scale runs or something like that, you want to be able to hear any mistakes that you are making. Overdrive and distortion have a tendency to cover up small slips or errors in playing notes that you are going to want to hear.

If you cannot hear the mistakes that you are making, you will not have any way of correcting them. Some people approach practicing looking to make as little mistakes as possible, and so they turn on the overdrive or distortion so they sound better, but practice is where you want to make mistakes, and you don’t want to ever have to rely on a certain effect just to sound good.

This applies the same to when you are practicing chords. With distortion engaged, the more complex chords will come through as clear, and you want to make sure that you are getting each note ringing clearly. Overdrive distortion will just get in the way for these types of exercises. Even if you are practicing a solo that may use distortion, you should practice playing it with a clean tone to make sure that you are getting all the notes out well.

Now, when can overdrive and distortion help your practicing? There are times when you are going to want to improvise and just play your instrument a little but for the experimentation and fun of it. This is when you should work with effects to explore different ways of playing. When you play your instrument, you react to what you are playing, so if you are reacting to a distorted signal instead of a clean one, you are going to play with a different style, and you might discover some techniques that you would not have used. You may also discover some problems you have in your playing that would not have come out without the effect.

Overdrive and distortion effects should be used responsibly in practice because just as they can be great ways to increase the ability of the guitar to make music, they can also hurt your music making abilities. Just be sure to always treat them as effects and not instruments in themselves and you should be using them in the right way.

January 09 2010 | Guitar Practice | No Comments »