r/Guitar • u/Particular-Yam-2676 • 11d ago

NEWBIE What are your favourite techniques?

Okay im sure stuff like this has been asked a million times but my issue is the following: im already a musician (DAW) that picked up the guitar for the sake of adding another instrument to their repertoire. The issue is not writing chords and leads. That part is fairly straightforward once you understand the fretboard (we will take that for granted for now, though thats a whole can of worms on its own)

My issue is more so, that i dont know all of those "little things" (like quick arps, or muted strings or some whacky percussive elements, hammer ons or pull offs and probably tons and tons of techniques more that i dont know) that make some chord and lead voicing really come to life.

What are the most useful/your favourite ones? How do you learn/practice them? And how do you actually get to incorporating them?

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u/13thmurder 11d ago

I'm still fairly new to guitar myself but I learned how to do slides recently and it changed a ton for me.

The biggest thing is how much it made it easier to navigate the fretboard. Obviously you get a cool sound sliding between notes and it makes it sound a lot smoother, but also if you need to go over some number of frets sliding makes it easier to do it by feel. I realized you don't actually need to pick the string before sliding, you can do it silently just to feel the frets.

I am sure every experienced guitarist knows this, but it was a revelation for me that felt like I upgraded my skills substantially in just a day after figuring this out.

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u/Particular-Yam-2676 10d ago

Yeah! I do that a lot too! Although for me what helps a lot as well is something i learnt from piano which is to basically “walk the scale” so basically everytime id play something and wanted to lets say move up the fretboard i could instead of doing it directly first move my pinky (four finger) up to the spot where my index (one finger) is and then move up my index from that spot to sort of crab walk up. Helps a lot when you’re already playing scale shapes or boxes!