1) Draw neck diagrams and label the note names on the strings. This will improve your knowledge of the instrument, and solidify your ability to quickly jump to any note (like when a fellow musician tells you it's an A chord). Start with just one string, such as the low E string, and label every note: E, F, F#, G, G#, etc. Do this a few times for each string and you'll soon know your way around the guitar sooo much better than you do now!

2) Draw more neck diagrams and fill in scale patterns. You know that old joke about the school teacher making you write something stupid (I will not chew gum in class.) 100 times on the chalkboard? That teaching method may not have successfully kept you from chewing gum, but it will successfully help you memorize scale patterns.

3) Give your fingers a workout with a stress ball. A tennis ball, or any other squishy ball will work too. A big part of playing guitar satisfactorily lies in the development of the muscles in your fret hand and wrist. You'll recognize this fact real quick if you pick up an acoustic guitar and try to play lead guitar. You can do this at work, at school, or anytime actual playing is not an option – and it will improve your playing abilities!

4) Analyze the tablature in your favorite artists' songbook. Learning to read the most advanced tablature notation is not much easier than learning to read the actual sheet music – and it takes practice. Don't forget that there is usually a key to all the weird symbols – all those arrows and squiggly lines – in the back of many, if not most, song or method books. Study that key until you know what is meant by all those symbols, and then actually read through a few songs – all the way through. Your tab reading will become a whole lot easier after you've done this a few times.

5) Better yet, work on reading sheet music instead. It's not really as hard as it seems, but it absolutely takes practice. And sheet music has one huge advantage over tablature – it can tell you the actual rhythm of the music, which most tab does not. Start with easy stuff, such as a Guitar Method 1 type book where all you're expected to read is quarter notes and half notes, and only the notes as they fall on the low end of the neck in the key of C major (no sharps or flats to worry about!). Then work your way up from there.

Learning to read sheet music is a skill that can be built one step at a time, one new concept at a time. And you can practice reading without a guitar in hand, by simply picking up any piece of sheet music and literally reading it as if the notes were printed alphabet letters put into phrases and sentences, just like the ones you're reading right now! Understand that becoming really adept at sight-reading may actually take months or years, so be patient with yourself. But you're planning on playing your guitar for decades, right? The extra effort will pay off a thousand-fold!

Want to see more advanced guitar tips and tricks? Subscribe to Planet of Rock VIP Newsletter now.

Every so often, we decide to dive into a new aspect of playing guitar that many are either afraid of, or just simply have no idea what it's all about. Today, we're going to tackle one of the more feared issues evolving around guitar... Transposition.

Join us as we teach you the most simplistic and easy ways to transpose your music.

With transposition in the spotlight this week, we're also going to show you some handy sites that will give you some very quick transpositions in addition to some software programs that can help you transpose larger scores of music.

Getting That Riff In Your Favorite Key!

Where to get started.

How many times have we composed a riff that we absolutely love, or perhaps found a song that we really enjoy playing and wanted to put it into a new, original song and truly make it ours? Chances are that we've all wanted to at least try it out once or twice but always came across one roadblock... Keys.

As mentioned in our last article, the probability that two riffs will be in the same key is very low if you are writing a lot of songs or wish to link two well known songs together. This is where you need to transpose one of those riffs so you can connect them together and put them in that song.

Another scenario is that you just wrote an awesome riff that you envision going into one of your band's songs... The only problem is that it's in the wrong key! With transposing, you can still use that riff and play along with the rest of the band.

If you're a true band nerd, like myself, you have probably been around transposition since the days of Jr. High or Middle School. Now, if you're still like me, you didn't have two clicks on how to do it either. I was always amazed to see how my teacher would take a trumpet part and transpose it so I could play it on my sax and still be in the right key!

With guitar, this is invaluable. You can take a sax part and transpose it to your guitar. If you happen to have a sax player around, you can now play along with that sax and still be in the proper key.

One of the most unique things about playing guitar is that we have a number of tools available to us to use for easy transposition. Many other musicians envy us for this and call us cheaters in the game of music theory, however, if you can use it... Why not?

The tools that you can use.

One of the most common tools used to transpose music on the guitar is the capo. The capo is essentially a piece of rubber that is glued onto two pieces of metal with a spring placed in between. When clasped onto the neck of your guitar and placed behind a fret, it acts as a new nut (AKA the "zero" nut.) This new nut raises the pitch of your guitar, therefore changing the key.

Most guitarists use them so they can make really complicated chords into easy open chord shapes. This is where the whole joke about cheating comes in. Instead of actually practicing those really hard chords and getting your technique down, you can transpose that chord using the capo and turn it into an open chord shape such as an E Major or an A and still have the same chord.

While I don't recommend that you always do that because it's always good to know how to play a song if your capo breaks, it's great for live performances where you want to minimize the risk of messing up a complicated chord. If you're a lead guitarist, you can still use a capo but in all honesty, it's far easier to find the key that everyone else is playing in relative to the capo and just use the scale that suites the song best.

In most cases, it's actually quicker for a lead guitarist not to use a capo and just find a scale. Switching a capo around the neck of your guitar can cost valuable seconds between songs.

Want to see more advanced guitar tips and tricks? Subscribe to Planet of Rock VIP Newsletter now.

Come join us as we journey into one of the biggest myths of the guitar community and learn how the key to speed is through accuracy and clarity.

There are a ton of theories floating around in the guitar player community about the secret to improving your guitar playing speed. Most of these theories are based on some sort of half truth, but a good part of the time these theories are nothing more than myths and really offer no help to truly improving a person’s playing ability or their speed and style.

One of the biggest myths out there about achieving faster playing speed is that you can’t play fast with thick strings and high action. Most of the proponents of this particular guitar playing myth say that in order to be able to make your fingers fly across the fretboard, your strings have to be thin and the action in the strings needs to be low.

The reason this is a myth is because in reality, thinner strings and lower action do not at all make it possible for you to play faster, or better. Thin strings and lower action just reduce the amount of resistance you get when you play. This makes the notes easier to hit, but does nothing for the quality of your tone, nor for your speed and skill. It just makes making noise easier.

Playing with thin strings doesn’t take an individual who is still an amateur and make them into a guitar master, even if they play faster. What it really takes to be able to play faster isn’t lightning quick fingers, at least not at first. The key to successfully mastering speed and any part of guitar playing is accuracy and clarity.

A lot of people who get into playing the guitar immediately want to jump into learning how to play fast, and forget all about accuracy. It doesn’t matter how fast you play if you always hit the wrong notes and play sloppily. The problem is people tend to put a higher value on how fast you play, rather than on how well you sound when you play. Accuracy is the key to developing fast fingers. Learn how to play all your scales and chords, master them and their positions on the fretboard, slowly at first. Then after you have them committed to memory, start working on speed. By doing this you will develop into a very well rounded player and will be able to play lightning fast solos with pinpoint accuracy and clarity.

Another great tip for aspiring guitarists to improve accuracy and speed is to use guitar backing tracks. Practicing your solos and your speed techniques can be made even more beneficial when you can play along with an entire band of musicians. Guitar backing tracks provide you with a whole band to back you up while you play and help you to develop your skills while learning how to play with other musicians.