5 MUST HAVE Guitar Items You Didn't Know You NEEDED

So this video is going to be a little bit of a different type of guitar lesson. I'm going to talk about the five things you didn't know you needed to be better at playing guitar. And the first thing we're going to talk about right here I'm wearing it is a guitar strap. And I'm going to talk about setting up a guitar strap and things you might want to consider with guitar straps, because I have a lot of students who are like, my guitar is killing my shoulder. What do I do? All right, so first thing on the setup of the guitar I want to show you. You can see my guitar is really here. My strap is really here just to hold the guitar. Okay. When I stand up, I'm just going to hold my finger here just so I'm holding and supporting the fretboard. But I'm going to stand up and I'm going to sit down. Notice my guitar, it doesn't move at all. So I've set my strap to an appropriate length that when I'm sitting or standing, the guitar is in a good spot. All right, If I stand up and the guitar drops, my strap is too long. So just adjust it, shorten it up a little bit. The other thing the guitar strap does. Boom. Look at my neck. The neck of the guitar is pointed up. So many students play with their guitar like this or flat, and it causes a lot of wrist pain. Okay. So the more you can get this neck pointed up, it's a little bit better. Ergonomically for your wrist, you'll have a lot less wrist pain. So that's why if you don't have a guitar strap, definitely go and buy one. And what should you be looking for so you don't have to get one like this that I have. This is a custom made leather strap. These things are like 2, $300 if you want to go buy one. But what I like about these is they have padding in the back, so it makes it a little softer. On my shoulder, the strap is also much wider. So even if you get a nylon strap, make sure it has something that goes on your shoulder that has padding and get as wide as possible. I think this one's probably like one and a half inches wide. You can get guitar straps that are two inches, three inches wide. The wider the strap, the more you're going to be able to disperse the weight of the guitar. Especially if you have a heavy guitar, something like a Gibson Les Paul. Those things weigh a lot. So having a wider strap will help disperse the Weight and the strap will keep the guitar in the perfect practice position for you all the time. So I bet you would never know about the next item that I'm going to talk about, and it's actually the sponsor for today's video. It is the Vadame pedal. We'll put a link in the description below. Please go and check them out. This is a really amazing and cool practice tool. My students absolutely love it. I knew nothing about the product. It was actually my students who kept reaching out to me, saying, lauren, you got to check this out. Lauren, you got to check this out. And you know when you get, like, 20 students reaching out to you about the same product, you go and check it out. Okay? So I don't. I don't support or promote many products I. Unless I find them very valuable and very useful. And this is the Vadame Blue. So this is their kind of wireless version. They do have a wired version that looks. That's a black casing, and you plug it right in to your computer. And it works with websites like YouTube. It works with my online guitar course. It also works with many other guitar teachers courses. But it's not just for guitar. If you're, you know, if you're in the kitchen cooking, you can use this for a video. And the cool thing about this. So this is a foot pedal, okay? This is a foot pedal, and each of these buttons have different things that you can do. And I know you're saying, lauren, why would I want to use a foot pedal when I'm practicing? So here's the problem with practice for most people, especially if you're playing on YouTube, all right? You got a video up on screen, and then you have to go back. You're like, man, I want to hear that part again, or, man, I got to go back, and I got to practice this part again. So what do you do? You let go of the guitar, you put the guitar down. You put your guitar pick on the table, you pick up the mouse, you have to rewind the video. Then you keep taking yourself away from the guitar. Whereas with the Vanami foot pedal, if you miss something and you want to go back, you just tap the back button, and it'll rewind the video 10 seconds. If you tap it twice, it'll rewind it 20 seconds, right? So you never have to take your hands off the guitar. My students tell me, lauren, this product has made my practice at least two times more effective because they stopped putting the guitar down. They, you know, they had to stop getting away from the Guitar. So that's not the only thing you can do with this. If you need to slow things down, you can slow things down using the speed button. Okay. You can slow them down, you can make them faster. There's also a play and pause button. So you could just stop a video and then rewind it and then play it again. Okay. You can also make loops, which I think this is a super helpful practice tool when you make a loop you could take. So say you're watching a video and there's a piece that you want to practice. Say it's a lick for a song or an intro, and you don't want to. You just want to watch, you know, 20 seconds of a video and loop it over and over again so that you can practice with it. With the Vadami Blue, you can hit the loop button. You can start point A, you can record, hit the loop button again, make point B, and it will only play that portion of the video on loop over and over again. And guess what? If you want to slow it down, boom, hit the speed button. You can slow it. Now you get a loop that you can slow down, that you can speed up. It makes practice so much more effective. So I highly recommend that you go check out the link in the description below to support our sponsor here. And if you want to see a more detailed video of me actually using this foot pedal with my foot and seeing how it works on video, go check out this video up here and I show you in detail how exactly how this pedal works. Now, the next thing you might not consider, especially as a beginner, is your chair. Okay. So many students underestimate their chair in their guitar practice setup. Right. We have the guitar strap, so we've got our guitar in a pretty good position now. But did you know there's actually chairs that are better for practicing guitar? I use what is called a drum floor throne. This is a Gibraltar drum throne with a chair back. I think this seat is probably around $250 to $300. You don't have to spend that much money. But it is super comfortable to be able to sit on. And I also. It has a tripod on the bottom, so I like to keep my foot on the tripod. So you can see here, if I just lift my leg a little bit, I have my foot resting on the tripod. It elevates my leg. All right. And there are other practice chairs out there that you can buy. You just want to make sure it's an armless chair. And I would recommend something with the footrest. Okay? So if you can find a chair with the footrest or if you have your favorite chair, you can buy a separate footrest. And I have so many students that once they elevate their foot, they just find it so much comfortable to hold. The guitar provides a little bit better support. So if I put my leg down, my guitar drops. Not a lot because I have the strap, but I just, I feel a little off. I've gotten so used to having my leg on a foot support, I just find it so much more comfortable for playing. So those are your options. You can get a drum throne or a throne is what it's called. I recommend getting something with the back support because that's what I have on mine. Much more comfortable. Get something that has a foot rest or a tripod on the bottom so that you can rest your foot on one of the legs or, or on the footrest. Or go to Amazon, you know, spend $20 on a foldable footrest that you can just set up on the ground and you can put your foot right up on that. I have so many students who tell me, Lauren, this made playing the guitar so much more comfortable. The next two items go together. This one's not going to cost you an arm and a leg. It's a notebook. Okay? A little spiral notebook. I think this is one of the most overlooked things by guitar students. So you can have the $3,000 Taylor guitar, but if you don't have the 99 cent notebook to go along with it, you're doing yourself a disservice. And I'm going to show you why.

Because you are going to be keeping track of what this item does. This is called a metronome. And you can hear it just clicks. It keeps time, okay? So in music, time is measured in beats per minute. So every time that clicks, it's a B. It's kind of like miles per hour in a car or kilometers per hour. And it just tells us how fast we're going. So say we're working on a C to G chord change. And we get started, it's our first week and we're like, wow, this is really bad. We're doing 35 beats per minute. C, G. And I'm trying to play the chord. Every time I hear a click, I'm trying to change and strum on a different chord. And you're like, wow, that was really crappy. That was really slow. But you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to open up my notebook. I'm Going to write down today's date, and I'm going to say C to g chord change, 35 beats per minute, and I'm going to write down the date. And then next week, I'm going to come back. I'm going to let a week go by. I'm going to come back, and I'm like, oh, let me. Let me go. That C to G chord change. Let me see how I'm doing. And next week, you're going to come back, and it's going to be this.

Now, can you tell me if that was faster or slower than what I did before? It's 45 beats per minute, so it's a little faster. But the thing that makes most students quit the guitar is they don't know if they're getting better. Okay. You can't really tell the difference between 35 and 45. Now, if I went 35 to say, you know, 100.

You'd be like, oh, yeah, absolutely. That is so much faster. But what a lot of people miss out, they miss out on the progress in between. And that progress sometimes can take a very long time that you don't notice it. But if you have your $1 or $2 spiral notebook, and every time you sit down to practice, you write down your practice speeds with your metronome. Say you're learning a song. Okay, how fast can you play the song? Maybe you start 60 beats per minute, and maybe the song's played at 100, and you work your way up. You need to keep track of your progress. You also want to keep track of your wins. How are you feeling today? I finally played the C chord perfectly. That was awesome. Because you know what? Learning guitar is not easy. You are going to hit a plateau point, you're going to get disappointed, and you're going to want to take this guitar, throw it on the floor or throw it back in the closet, and I don't want you to do that. But when you have a notebook, you can open it up and you can go back and say, I'm having a really bad day. Let me go back to my first week and let me see how I was doing. Wow. When I first started, that C to G chord change was 35 beats per minute, and all I could do is play four chords. But six months later or three months later, wow, look, I know six chords now, and I can play almost all of them at 80 beats per minute. That's progress. All right. You're not going to see the small steps, but when you write it down in a notebook you will never forget and you have it as a reference. I want to thank Vadami for sponsoring this video. Please go down to the description below. Click on the link go visit our sponsor. It's an amazing product, especially if you're here learning on YouTube. It's a definite must have. Go to the link in the description below and go check out the Vidami Petal.