Beyond Bedroom Guitar by Spencer Westwood - HTML preview

How can I realise when I’m tensing up?

(If you really can’t read guitar tab yet, skip this and go through the chapter on reading music and tab first then come back)

 

Lets try a little experiment. I want you to pick up your guitar and play a simple single note line below.

 

Figure 6-1 Tension Exercise

 

Now I want you to start to speed up each time you repeat the phrase.

 

Get faster, and faster, and faster.

 

Keep trying to play it even faster.

Faster still – don’t worry if you start to make mistakes. Go faster.
Verse
Chorus
Middle 8/Breakdown Verse
Chorus
Outro

Now if you were to write that down without using repeats or any use of DC or Coda it would both get very long, and also would have a lot of the music looking exactly the same. Our brain is forever trying to simplify things so by just writing out the Intro, Verse, Chorus, Middle and Outro, we can then specify which bits to repeat, how many times and what leads on.

So our music would look like

Intro
| : Verse
Chorus : | % (repeat once notice the de capo symbol) Middle 8/Breakdown
Chorus DC al Coda
Outro

You’ll find great examples of all of these in nearly every guitar instruction magazine out there. Work at your own pace to remember each one. Typically the structure comes first, then the dynamics, followed by the others.