Avoid The Left-Hand Death Grip: When you first start playing, straight away youll discover that pressing the strings against the fret is hard work, hurts your fingers and makes your wrist ache. The natural way to combat this is by hooking your thumb over the top of the fret board to get leverage, which inadvertently causes you to press the strings more with the flat pad of your finger (where your fingerprint is) rather than the actual fingertip.
This is sometimes called the death grip, because you do end up with a fairly fierce grip on your neck and it restricts the reach of your fingers. The proper technique is to have your thumb on the back of the guitars neck. This forces your hand to use the fingertips, which is far better and more accurate when it comes to playing just the notes you want without accidentally muting adjacent strings. The trouble is it feels kind of weird and difficult at first, and your wrist will lack strength. Stick with it and youll appreciate the benefits further down the track. Remember, thumb on the back of the neck.
This may sound odd, but its easy to slightly change the chord youre playing for a nice effect and inadvertently stray away from the original tone. Its the standard tuning of a guitar that can do this, because unlike with a piano youre sometimes still playing an open string that contributes to the overall chord structure. Now, by all means experiment with chords, add or drop a finger or two listen to the neat sounds.
However, its a wise move to identify which chord youre now playing otherwise youll get into a bad habit later on of calling some a C Major thing or maybe a kind of a D Minor when theyre nothing of the sort. Uberchord can fix this easily, because it can hear and recognize chords instantly. So when youre fooling around with chord shapes, take the time to double-check what youve done. In the future itll help you communicate your song-writing ideas to the rest of band much better. Thats a good thing.
Although There can be a large number of possible progressions (depending upon the length of the progression), in practice, progressions are often limited to a few bars lengths and certain progressions are favored above others. There is also a certain amount of fashion in which a chord progression is defined (e.g., the 12 bar blues progression) and may even help in defining an entire genre. Learn more about MP3 to chords.
The growth of any guitarist can be improved by the awareness of that growth. As you develop the discipline to be learning and practicing on a daily basis, it is important to keep a log or diary of the process of your improvement in order to further maximize growth. The easiest way to do this is to keep a log of your routine. Youll find that keeping track of your practice will help you focus future practice sessions, maintain and continue awareness of progress and locate particularly fruitful practice phases in your past that can be replicated and upgraded when you feel your growth has stalled.