Tips and Tricks Guitar Lessons

Before you even play the guitar, it’s really important to warm up and get yourself into the right frame of mind.

I’m going to show you my top tips covering everything from posture, stretching, hand positioning, exercises and more so that whenever you play the guitar you’ll be at your best!

Bring all the gain you’ve got because in this lesson we’re going to get your rhythm playing fired up and push things to the breaking point!

We’re going to start from the top and break down everything you need to know to riff – hard. We’ll work on right-hand details, accents, chord strikes, fitting in licks between riffs and of course – how to get the perfect heavy ‘chug’ on your power chords.

Want to know how to get more speed and dexterity in your playing? Correctly adjusting your hand and thumb positioning to suit what you’re playing is something that I’ve seen guitarists get wrong time and time again and can unlock massive gains in a very short amount of time.

That’s why in this lesson I’m going to focus on what’s going on round the back of the neck, showing you exactly what I do – in full detail – as I break down various techniques. Bending, sweeping, tapping, lead playing, riffing… everything you do is going to improve – a lot!

After you’ve taken some time away from playing the guitar it can be tough to get back into the groove – both physically and mentally. What do you play in order to get your fingers back on track? How do you keep yourself motivated to improve?

First of all, you need to get your fingers physically back into shape, and I have plenty of tips and insights for you on how I personally do that after taking some time away from playing. But it doesn’t matter how many exercises you learn if you’re not motivated to pick up your guitar, so I’m also going to share my best recommendations for sparking inspiration and staying motivated in order to become the best guitar player you can possibly be.

This lesson is packed with some of my very best tips to help you become a more expressive, explosive guitarist. If you’re new to School of McRock I highly suggest this as one of the first lessons you should check out, as it’s going to install a lot of great practices into your playing.

I’m going to cover many of the pitfalls that guitarists can fall into, and break down various approaches and techniques you can apply to your playing today to help you get to the next level and express yourself on the guitar.

This is undoubtedly one of the most important lessons I’ve ever recorded and I feel it contains some of the best advice and information I could give you.

We recently ran a very special solo competition and the quality of entries completely blew me away! But there were a few patterns I noticed that I wanted to address. This lesson was originally intended to be posted directly to the players who put themselves forward and entered the competition but the 5 key points are crucial to anyone who plays guitar.

Sweeping is one of those techniques that I’ve seen people struggling with the most. When I sweep, I do it in a certain way and there’s one particular thing that makes all the difference in terms of making your sweeps really smooth.

It’s a small detail that will make all the difference because when it comes to sweeping it’s easy to start off badly, and once this happens it’s very difficult to recover. So here it is, probably my best sweeping tip in a raw, uncut live lesson packed full of licks and ideas that you can take away and apply to your own playing.

Everyone loves to play fast, right? But there’s a big difference between sloppy licks and exciting, articulate but blazing fast playing.

In this lesson, I’m going to show you all of my tips and tricks on how to play fast, from how to practice properly right through to how to incorporate your newfound speed into your playing in a tasteful way. Trust me, when we’re done you’re gonna be unstoppable.

Many guitarists – even those who have been playing for years – will pick up a guitar and go straight to using fingers one and three (maybe throwing in a pinkie every now and then). That might be fun for a little while, but if you want to feel genuinely confident in your playing you need to get used to using all of your fingers!

In this lesson, I’m going to share some of my best tips and exercises that will allow you to build your finger strength, dexterity and independence – including some ways that you’ve probably never seen before. The results speak for themselves, and by popular demand, this is another live, unedited lesson with mistakes and all, so get ready for a wild ride!

Introducing open strings into your playing can sound fantastic in the right place and this technique is a great way to spice up licks, whether you’re playing Blues, Country or futuristic Shred riffs.

It can also sound downright awful if you get it wrong, so in this lesson, I’m going to show you 5 simple and fun ways to introduce open strings into your playing using patterns and approaches that you already know.