Things You Need to Know About Guitar: 101 Electric Guitar Facts and Guitar Jokes to Alleviate The Pain of Being a Rock Star!

101 Things You Need to Know About Guitar reveals the ugly truth behind the perils of playing guitar for a living. Learn secrets like how to dress like a rock star, facts about this cutthroat music business, along with the insertion of a little music humor.

101 Electric Guitar Facts is all YOU need to know about how to be a REAL guitarist in this tricky, convoluted, backstabbing, egomaniacal self-serving, high-risk business, which is the Music Industry!

So buckle up, imminent Rockstar, it's gonna get UGLY!

Disclaimer:

This article is written with a sense of tasteless humor. It is geared towards mature audiences who aren't easily offended by adult language and mild drug references.

This article is by no means meant to be a reflection of MY stance on the subject of illegal substance use, whether recreational or medicinal, one way nor the other.

If you are under the age of 18, offended by slight adult humor, or one of my guitar students, I recommend you turn the other way! Do something productive such as Learning easy lead guitar tips.

Guitar is first and foremost about being COOL! People tend to forget why they started playing guitar -- to get LAID! So stop taking it too seriously. If anything, I am living proof that you can be REALLY good at guitar and not take yourself OR your craft all that seriously. The Bible has 10 Commandments. "101 Things You Need To Know About Guitar" has one!

That brings us to "Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #2: Don't wear your guitar strap so high that your face turns the color of PLUMS! Not since Jimmy Page slung it low is this atrocity allowable! Unless your name happens to be John, Paul, or George, I wouldn't take the risk.

Don't try so HARD to be cool that you wear your guitar so LOW that it's impossible to SHRED! Shredding is cool. The guitar should be worn right over your naughty package. This perfect positioning of the guitar does two things: it serves as an accurate representation of the generous contents contained within your naughty package AND helps you achieve that classic Rockstar pose with minimal effort.

Dress like a rock star: Stage pants. The tightness of your stage pants is directly relative to the greatness of your ability to PERFORM well on stage! But don't wear them so tight that you can't even take a step onto your pedal board without busting a seam in the crotchal region of your plum smugglers. It is a well known fact that wearing loose pants on stage makes you suck at guitar!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #5: Play in tune! Having a stage tuner will facilitate your capacity for professionalism in the music industry. It is not uncommon to tune between each and every song and ESPECIALLY during blackouts (that's a fancy Rockstar term for turning the lights off). Make sure you use "bypass mode" and do your audience the favor of not having to listen to your excruciating tuning process.

Don't worry about "playing in time". Playing in time is overrated.

Practice scales to a metronome! Contrary to "101 Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #6, playing SCALES to a metronome will help you view them from a mechanical, practice-centered perspective. This mindset is directly opposed to the organic process of creating REAL music.

Learn music theory. Music theory is a deeper well than can be dug here. Do a search on guitar theory and click on search results that look tasteful. Read to your heart's content!

Learn guitar solos from popular songs such as "Stairway To Heaven." The best way to learn how to play guitar solos well is to learn from other famous guitar solos!

"101 Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #10 is to learn your guitar scales! The pentatonic blues scale is the best place to start.

There will always be someone better than you (or at least someone who THINKS they are)! This means you should keep practicing and getting better so that one day there will be NONE better than you! It should intensely agitate you when someone posts a YouTube video of them shredding faster than you to the point where you retaliate by putting out a BETTER video of your very own!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #12: Be a computer nerd. I'm not saying you should translate binary for fun, but these days, everything is VIRAL: YouTube, facebook, and STDs. Being computer savvy can help you share your guitar greatness with the rest of the world!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #13: Don't be afraid to play guitar in front of people! Everyone has stage fright in the beginning, but that's why God made alcohol! Take a lesson from the BEST: they all play plastered.

Which brings us to "Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #14: how WELL you can play "under the influence" directly translates to how GOOD you REALLY are! I once had to finish the guitar solo for "War Pigs" after getting roofied by some loser who dosed my drink. They CLEARLY didn't recognize the caliber of the seasoned guitarist with which they were messing!

Stage fright is a myth. The more you play the less you care. That's why older musicians tend to play trashed. They no longer need it to fend off the butterflies, but booze provides the perfect suppressant to the increasing feelings of disillusionment resulting from trying to "make it" in the music industry.

Study Buddhism so you can learn how to inhibit your ego. Many musicians have egos as big as the trucks in Alabama. This is perfectly fine if you are Lars Ulrich from Metallica, but making an audience like you is about RELATING to them and just being REAL!

On the contrary, if you CAN shred and you recognize the extent of your own inherent awesomeness, then there is nothing wrong with showing off what you can do! PWN the competition by making lesser guitarists want to go home and wash off the guilt of not being good enough! (If you don't know what "PWN" means, please refer to "101 Things You Need To Know About Guitar" #12)

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #18: Learn sweep picking. Sweep picking only gets easy with practice! It is one of the hardest techniques in lead guitar to learn, but well worth the effort. Once you learn sweep picking, you can impress people!

Learn finger tapping. Once you learn them both, you can combine sweep picking AND finger tapping for ultimate shred guitar worthy of God and Steve Vai only!

Know the names of chords! Just knowing how to make the shape of a chord is not enough. Knowing how to translate an "Amaj7/C#" to the fretboard is a required skill for those serious about guitar! Pick up a chord bible and memorize the names. It will serve you well.

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #21: have a trick bag! A trick bag is a collection of really impressive sounding licks that you can pull out whenever you want. This skill comes in handy during guitar duels against the devil.

Strawberry Cupcake the Groupie says:

"Don't be afraid of dudes who like other dudes. If you are good enough, wear the right pants, AND wear your guitar right, then guys will want some of you too along with the lineup of ladies tugging on your arm after the show! It's cool if you are "straight", just don't be surprised when that well dressed attractive man at the bar buys you your next beer!"

Have a sense of humor. Like not taking yourself too seriously, music humor helps you see the lighter side of this shady business. Otherwise you may get sucked down into the pits of despair after realizing that people care more about Lady Gaga's vagina than your amazing ability to shred guitar (can we REALLY blame them?)

Moore Metal says:

"Listen to METAL! Metal is hard to play on the guitar and learning metal solos will make you better at guitar!"

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #25: Keep a pick in your pocket. You never know when you will want to annoy the guys at your local Guitar Center by test driving new guitars through loud amplifiers.

Don't let your strings get rusty! Old crusted strings SOUND bad, LOOK bad, and they are hard to play on because your finger gets stuck when you try to perform a slide. Change your strings often.

Don't be afraid of a few dints and dings in your guitar's body. These "battle scars" won't hurt anything. Just don't get plastered and a) throw your guitar across the room b) smash it in the road and drive over it after a fight with your girlfriend to "prove a point" or c) take the whammy bar off and beat your guitar with it like a maniac because it "sounds cool." SAVE YOUR COOL STAGE MOVES FOR THE STAGE!

Playing guitar in a band makes it perfectly acceptable to be 28 years old and have PURPLE hair. If you are going to DRESS like a rock star, you need the HAIR to match!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #29: Share what you learn. Teach a few guitar lessons to those who will take them from you.

Write songs of your own. Try writing songs that are hard to play and practicing them until they get easy. This will make you a better guitar player!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #31: don't practice guitar when someone is talking to you! We both know that playing guitar subconsciously requires little cerebral effort and we can pleasantly noodle away while someone is telling us about their day. But it comes across as rude and they think you are not paying attention to the really important things they are saying.

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #32: Strive for a good tone. Your tone can MAKE or BREAK you! People who are not musicians who hear a bad note will KNOW something sounds "off".

Invest in decent gear. If your profession does not generate enough financial resources to buy the BEST gear, that is fine. Just buy some GOOD gear!

Don't BABY your gear. Guitar pedals are meant to be stomped on and guitars are meant to be slammed. I'm not saying stab your amp with your guitar, but DO treat it like the little B!@#$ that it is!

Trim those nails or paint them! It sounds fruity, but nails that get too long make it impossible to play guitar. I KNOW you like your coke habit a little TOO much, just like everyone ELSE on planet earth, but hey, GREAT guitar players put their craft above their drugs...and use car keys instead!

Get out of bed before noon even though it's not in your blood any more than last night's Jeger bomb! Try playing guitar early. Something different happens. I don't know what it is. Just try it!

Play guitar while you follow a television show (this avoids problems from "Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #31). This helps exercise the subconscious part of your mind from which all the BEST notes come. You could even try talking to the show while playing guitar if you don't think it will make you feel too schizo!

Practice block headed finger exercises up and down the neck. For example, the "four finger exercise" from my page about finger exercises will help increase your SPEED and SKILL on the fretboard.

Diversify your MP3 collection. On my MacBook you will find everything from Chuckie P (who?) from Lady Gaga (sans vagina pictures. OF COURSE I goooooogled it, but neglected to save the images to my computer!) to Slipknot (we all need something to cut ourselves to!) A wide taste in music will make you more seasoned.

Know your body parts. Not the ones you found when you were eleven! Your GUITAR parts! Such as the "bridge", the "saddles", the "nut", and the "pickups". Yes, they have funny names. But they DO serve a purpose!

When I was a young guitar slinging lad, I had a stack of tabs printed off the internet that reached the ceiling! Learning as many different songs as you can will help you develop your own unique voice on the guitar. What goes in comes out -- Though your fingers!

Don't expect results without practice.

Don't expect results without practice.

That's NOT a typo! I intentionally reserved three places on the "101 Things You Need to Know About Guitar" list to convey THE IMPORTANCE OF PRACTICE! Steve Vai was said to have practiced up to 10 hours a day. Repetition is the mother of all skill.

It's HOW you practice that counts. It's simple: practice things that are HARD and they will get EASY, making you BETTER. Simple!

Record yourself playing guitar and listen back to it. This way, you hear how you REALLY sound. Learn from the recording and fix things here and there until it's perfect.

Get some studio experience if you have access to it. Being under the pressure of having to execute your parts perfectly for a track will make you a better guitarist.

Get in a band and go on tour. Playing guitar every night makes you a more resilient guitarist. Plus, you get to "sample the wares" of various cities as you travel through them.

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #49: Keep backup cables. You never know when one could go bad at the wrong time!

Take guitar lessons. Spending time with other guitarists who are better than you helps you develop YOUR skills exponentially!

Change your OWN strings! If you take private guitar lessons on the other hand, you can gladly ask your teacher to do it for you. It will be a string changing lesson of course!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #52: It's OK to put a sticker on your guitar!

AC/DC said it best when they said "It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll." If you have the capacity to withstand band fights closely resembling the final scene in the movie Detroit Rock City, then you may have what it takes to hit the big time yet!

Read guitar magazines such as Guitar World until you get back around to the same material being recycled at yearly intervals. Then you are free to tear out the pictures and plaster them on your wall for inspiration.

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Crazy T says:

"Submit videos to YouTube of you shredding guitar and see what kind of feedback you get. Don't be afraid of YouTube "criticism." It can be harsh and people say whatever they want because YouTube is full of douche nozzle wannabes who sit home trolling on YouTube and drooling over adult websites in their pajamas. The UPSIDE of this "caveat" is that YOU can say whatever YOU want!"

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #60: Join guitar forums and make quality posts and learn from other guitar players in the online community!

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Take piano lessons. Learning other instruments will help expand your knowledge of music.

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #63: Be a minimalist. Only play what you can sing (like during your improvised solos). This basic approach will help you say MORE with LESS.

Try an extremist approach where you play everything as fast as you can! This will help build your SHRED chops!

Practice improvising. Improvising forces you to play notes that you have never played before off the cuff. Many famous guitarists have been known to improvise, such as David Gilmour.

Try not playing guitar for awhile. If you are finding that you keep getting stuck playing the same phrases over and over again, it may be time for a much needed break from guitar. You will come back with fresh eyes and a fresh mind.

Don't wear band T-shirts of bands you actually LIKE. It's better to stand out from the crowd by putting on a shirt totally different from the style you play! Wearing a Hall and Oates tee on stage puts forth a MUCH bigger statement than a regular old Metallica t-shirt you've had since preschool!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #68: Learn music by ear as often as possible. This is better than always going online for tabs. Don't ALWAYS take the easy way out!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #69: Know your gear. When people ask you about your gear, you will want to sound like you know what you are talking about. Just look up some information on your specific guitar, pedals, and amp, online.

Never play "Stairway to Heaven" in your local music store! This rule has been in place since the dinosaurs left. Don't question it. Just obey.

Learn really challenging music by bands such as Protest The Hero.

Get some tattoos.

Have two pairs of Converse shoes; one old worn out beat up pair and one new pair you just bought.

Play along to a record all the way through every day.

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #75: Try playing acoustic guitar for a period of time. It will make your fingers stronger.

If you break a string, practice playing anyway! This skill will come in handy if you eventually break a string during a performance.

Go see other bands play. This can serve as a MUCH NEEDED source of inspiration.

If someone asks you to play a song, play it. If they ask you to play another song, pretend you don't know it. If a girl asks you to learn a song for her, make a point of not learning it!

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Buy real tab books. They are fun to collect and the tablature is much more reliable than internet tabs!

ARNOLD says:

"IF YOU AHr A REAL MAN, DEN YOU VIL DEWL AS MAnY PUSH UPS UND PULL UPS AS YOU CAN EVVVrY DAY. DEWL IT NOWWWLL AND DON'T CRY LIKE A LITTLE BABY! ARHGAHRGHALRLALRLAHGLL!!"

Get your blood flowing. You can play a LOT faster if you have the strength and stamina of someone who is physically active.

Shorts can make or break your stage appearance. Seriously.

So can facial hair.

Watch yourself play in the mirror. It helps feed your ego makes you look left handed.

Keep extra EVERYTHING: Strings, picks, cables, 9v batteries, tools, even straps...

Use those hand grips you find in the workout section at Target. You can grip them while you drive and listen to metal. And as a bonus you won't have dainty wrists. Arnold would be proud.

Learn classical guitar. It helps hone in your precision and clarity of notes. Just don't tell anyone you play classical guitar. Boooooooooorrrrringgggg. See "Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #1.

Practice playing guitar left handed. Flop your guitar over so that you have to strum with your left hand and fret with your right. Then try playing some songs you already know. It's OK that the strings are upside down. This will add to the challenge and you will feel really good about yourself when you switch back!

"Things You Need to Know About Guitar" #90: Know your fretboard! Randomly point to a spot on the neck and see if you can name the note. If not, you should memorize the notes on your fretboard.

Practice changing keys. If a song is in 'E' Minor, see if you can transpose it to 'F' Minor, 'F#' Minor, and so forth. See how often you can get away with NOT using a cheater bar, a.k.a., a capo!

Sleep with your guitar. This helps alleviate the depression resulting from the need to shave one leg when sleeping alone just to feel as though someone is there who cares.

Every guitarist has a little elf that lives in his closet and comes out at night to twist and turn your tuning keys while laughing to himself and thinking "excellent, excellent." For this reason, you must combat him and learn to tune by ear.