Strings Muted? Are You Tilt Guilty?

Hey, guitar enthusiasts, are you someone who just picked up learning the guitar and you are having the darndest time getting those chords not to sound like this? It happens to everyone. It's kind of like a rite of passage of learning the guitar is getting these chords to actually ring out nicely like that. Okay. So we want all of our chords eventually to sound very, very good. But for a lot of beginners, it's a very, very difficult thing. You feel like you've tried everything to make these chords sound good. Well, I'm going to show you some of my top tips for. For getting these guitar chords to start sounding better, possibly even today. So I kind of have four point. That's five kind of four points that I'm going to show you in this video. Starting out with my number one reason that a lot of beginner students mute their guitar chords. And it's actually a very, very simple fix. I was on a YouTube live not too long ago, and one of my students came up with this term tilt guilty. So I want you to ask yourself if you are tilt guilty, and what does that mean? So a lot of students, when you're first learning to play the guitar, it's very hard to see the strings on your fretboard, right? So what happens, A lot of students, they either lean over the guitar or they do this. They tilt their guitar like this. Because when your guitar is at this angle, you can clearly see all six strings on the guitar. Makes it very, very easy to visualize where you are putting your fingers. The downside of this, I'm going to go to a side angle. The downside of this, if you look at my close up, is it now changes the angle of the fretboard. It means it also changes the angle at which my fingers are coming into the fretboard. So, so typically, when our guitar is straight up and down like this, you can see this is what we want our guitar to be doing eventually. Okay. And you can see my fingers can really get very perpendicular to the guitar. Now if I tilt my guitar, I've now changed the angles. If I play a C chord, I'm going to play it tilted. First. Let me play a C chord. You can hear that some of those strings, particularly on the bottom end, are getting muted. Now, if I just straighten out the guitar, I now have a beautiful sounding C chord. So this is the first step in the check to see why are your chords muted. So if you are a student who tends to play your guitar on a tilt, what I want you to do is first, if you need that visual. Put the chord, whatever chord you're doing could be a G chord, it could be a D chord, E minor. If you're someone in my seven level guitar system, it could be the two finger chords. What you're going to do is build whatever chord it is. I'm just to use a C major chord because that's the one that tends to give most people. The issue is build the chord on the guitar so that you can see it. And then I want you to straighten out the guitar. Okay. And then I just want you to strum the chords. Right? And if you do that and the chord rings true, what it's telling you is that you actually don't have a problem playing the chord. You've actually got the mechanics down. The problem is that you are twisting your guitar and you're changing the angle of the fretboard. Now, if you're a beginner, you probably need to do that because you can't see the strings. So solutions for this, some tips. Practice in a mirror. You can put a mirror in front of you so that you can keep the guitar straight up and down. But just like I can see myself here in my camera, I can see the strings and I can see my fingers, what frets, what strings. It gives you that visual and allows you to keep the guitar straight up and down. Now, if it's not possible for you to play in front of a guitar and you need to do the tilt to see the strings, that's perfectly fine for now. As your muscle memory develops, you won't need to look at the strings as much. And then you can straighten out the guitar. But if you do that, just understand you're going to have to accept that this is probably how your playing is going to sound until you can straighten out the guitar. Now, a note. Because I do teach a lot of students who are older, 50, 60, 70s, and they're like, Lauren, you know, I'm not 20 anymore. I'm carrying a little bit more weight around my waist, right? You might have a little bit of a beer belly. I totally understand that. And a lot of students, sometimes they'll play the guitar off to the side like this. Again, this is changing the positioning of your wrist. So I much rather you loosen up your guitar strap and bring the guitar out here further and try to keep it as straight up and down as possible as shown earlier. Again, everyone's physicality is different. We all have different sizes and shapes of our body. So try to find the most comfortable position for you to allow you to keep this fretboard as perpendicular as straight, straight up and down to your fingers as possible. Alright. Number two, you've tried the tilt Gilty method, all right? And you found out Lauren. No, it still sounds like crap even when I straighten out the guitar. So what are some other things you can check for? This is something I talk about in my seven level guitar system. Your thumb. Okay. A lot of beginners have to keep an eye on their thumb because we're trying to make all these changes in our wrists to accommodate for this really weird mechanic we're learning. So I tell students, just hold your hand in front of you like this, okay? This is the natural position of your hand. For you to straighten your hand, you really have to flex the muscles that your hand likes. This little C shape here that you can see, okay. And you'll see your wrist is like this. Your wrist is not doing this naturally. I have to force my wrist to do this. My wrist is also not doing this. So if you find that your wrist is kind of like flipping around a lot, it could be that you are changing. You see, on my close up here, when I change the position of my thumb on the back of my fretboard, it twists my wrists in various ways. Okay? So ideally we want to try to keep our wrist in a neutral position as much as possible, which you can see my wrist doing here. Even when I'm making the C chord. I find on a lot of students, when they go from a C to a G, they tend to do this. They tend to push their wrist out like that. We don't want to do that. We want to go from C to G. Okay. There's going to be a little bit of movement, but I'm not doing this. Okay. And in this case, I'm technically not over exaggerating. I see a lot of students do this on a G chord. They push out because they do something with their thumb on the back of the guitar. So I'm going to turn around. Here you go. You see the back side of my guitar. Your thumb is supposed to sit here, okay? It's supposed to be flat on the back of the fretboard. We do not want it like this. We do not want it like that. Okay? We do not want our hand doing this. We do not want our wrist doing this or this. Okay? So that's what happens with a lot of students is that they're changing the wrist position. And again, when you change the wrist position or you change your thumb position, you are now changing the angle at which your Fingers can hit the guitar string, okay? So make sure that thumb is flat on the back, okay? And it'll give you the most stretch and reach for your strings. Now here's tip number three. I'm going to give you another quick tip of mine that I teach my students in my course. Use this pen. Okay? This pen will help, you know, if you're leaving enough space under the fretboard. Because a lot of people, they do what I call waiter's pose. They do this with their wrist. And when you do that, it cuts off the bottom E string, sometimes the B string, which causes them to mute. So I tell students, listen, and this helps again. This helps. Like 80% of my students probably figure out the next step of what they're doing. Take a pen or a marker. As long as it's something with a cylindrical shape, put it underneath the fretboard, okay? You're going to hold it with your strumming hand or your picking hand, and you're going to put it underneath the fretboard. And then you're going to form the cord around the pen. Because what does this do? If you look on my close up, it creates space. So if I take the pen out now, you'll see I have space underneath my fretboard. Okay. I'm not, I'm not gripping again. We're not trying to hold on to the guitar for, for death. Okay. The guitar strap, you should have a guitar strap. All right? This is my signature guitar strap, the Lauren Bateman guitar strap. So the key is, if you don't have a guitar strap, you should definitely buy one. Because the guitar straps job is to hold the guitar. Now some of you might have a leather backed guitar strap, and you can't do this. If you do this, the guitar might fall down because you have a top heavy guitar. You can see with my guitar strap, that does not happen because we designed it in a way that the guitar would not slip off your shoulder. So the, the job of the guitar strap is to hold the guitar for you, not you. You don't have to do this. So loosen up that grip as best as possible. Put your pen underneath the fretboard, okay. And form your C chord or your D chord or your E minor, whatever chord it is. And just make sure there's. There's space underneath the fretboard again. Why? Because that allows you to curve the hands, curve the fingers naturally into the fretboard to be more perpendicular. I'm actually going to give you a bonus fourth tip here that I forgot that I talk about with my students all the time. So for me in particular, on a G chord, I cannot play a G chord directly on the strings because if I do, I tend to mute my A string. I have very small hands. So for me, and it's just the way my knuckle works. And sometimes this happens with people on a C chord too. For me, I have to play. Play with my second finger a little higher up on the string. Okay. And that is something for me that I have found because of the size of my hands. So sometimes you have to play with the positioning of the fingers on the string. So say, for example, you're playing a C chord with three fingers and you're always muting that fourth D string. You just might have to see just by lifting up that third finger, it gave me enough space. Especially if you can't curl that third finger enough, that will help a lot. Okay. And you heard. I muted. I was gripping the guitar like this. And what happened? I muted the bottom E string. Okay. So don't do that with the guitar, because then you're gonna do this. It's funny that I did that. And finally, number four is stretching out your hand, especially on the C chord. A lot of students play their C chord with the third finger all the way on the back side of the fret, which tends to do this versus me using the same amount of pressure on the fret side of the fret. So we need to work on stretching, actually stretching out the hand and making it work better. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send you over to another video. This is one of the many great exercises I teach in my seven level guitar system. It's a spider exercise, but I'm going to show you how to properly practice this spider exercise. One, to work on hand dexterity, getting those fingers moving faster, because that's another complaint I hear from my students. And two, also working on stretching out the hand. So. So that eventually you could put a finger in each one of these four frets. So if you're someone who feels like your fingers are not quite moving fast enough, go check out that spider exercise video right over there.