Max Davies

  Recently somebody expressed their frustration to me about the difficulty they were having progressing on their instrument. They were discouraged and felt unmotivated. This was my response.     "There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. It's how we learn and ultimately get better. It's okay to suck. You will suck. It can take a long time to get good and be able to drop into a flow state. You will get frustrated. Just keep going. Give yourself the space to be bad. Some days are golden, others are like swimming upstream thru mud. Some days start great and then fall apart. Some days start hard and then get better. Just show up everyday and do the work. Give yourself permission to freak out, if something is frustrating, change gears, take a walk, play along to a record or just beat the shit out of your instrument and get mad. Throw your stick across the room and scream. Walk away if you need to, but come back. The more you play, in every way, the more the ins

Slide is a different beast when it comes to playing guitar. Often it is played in a variety of alternate tunings, which totally throws off a lot of the shapes and patterns that standard tuning uses. In addition to being a tricky thing to do without making too much buzzing and rattling, it is also important to apply the tonality of the major, minor and pentatonic variations to slide. One trick to compensate for this is to begin to think more linearly. Here are a few exercises to help make that happen. They can be done in any tuning, standard or open. Practice sliding from an open ringing note to the 12th fret. This requires the ability to “drop in” on the already ringing open note. Be careful not to mute the open note when applying the slide and try to minimize the knocking sound as you put the slide upon the strings. Try to play cleanly and with the best intonation possible. (If notes buzz or rattle, use one of the fingers behind the slide to dampen the strings.) Once this is fairly ea

I used to give little thought to stretching and warm up exercises on guitar. Rather, I would just pick up my guitar and play, with little concern for loosening things up in my hands, arms and body.  I would just play until (sometimes) my fingers, arms, neck and back would hurt. I might stretch or rub a tight muscle if necessary. But I usually didn't think too much about it. While this worked for a while, eventually I started to feel more aches, pains, tingles and tension. So I began to really see the value of stretching, warming up and doing seemingly mundane exercises repetitively on a frequent basis. Below are some things that I have picked up from various sources over 30 years of playing guitar. I try to do these on a regular basis -and I try to have my guitar students do these regularly too.  In addition to helping build better technique, doing these things often helps address areas of tension and allows one to relax more in their play