The BIGGEST Mistakes Self-Taught Guitarists Should AVOID

Are you frustrated with the muted sounds of your chords and you just don't know what to do to fix them? I'm going to go through my tried and true test for figuring out exactly what the problem is, and we're going to start with the most likely culprit.

So this is something I talked about on a live that I did recently, and one of the students on that call termed this as tilt. Guilty. Okay? Tilt. T I, L, T. Guilty. And the reason he said that is because the majority of students, especially beginner guitar students, tilt their guitar. What do I mean? They do this to their guitar. Boom. Why? Because it makes seeing the strings so much easier. Okay, now, me, when I play the guitar, I play with it as straight up and down as I can because we want our fingers to hit the fretboard perpendicular. Okay? As soon as you change the angle of the guitar, you change the angle of the fingers into the fretboard. So when I'm looking at my guitar in full transparency, I really only can see this top string, which for a lot of beginners is very hard because you don't know where the frets are. You don't know where the strings are. You're trying to form these chords, and you feel like you need to see everything. So the result is that you tip the guitar. But I'm going to show you what happens. I'm going to play a C chord here, okay? And you can hear it's ringing. There's no muting on any of these strings. All I'm going to do is I'm going to tilt the guitar. Okay? So by tilting the guitar, I've now changed the angle of my fingers to the fretboard. And now this is what my C chord sounds like.

If I straighten it back out.

I now have a clean C chord. Okay? So for a lot of my students, simply just fixing the tilt or the angle of the guitar will solve their problem. Now, if you're like Lauren, but I'm a beginner, I can't see the strings. What do I do? So what you could do to remedy this is you can look over the guitar like this. All right? Now, a lot of my students find that really awkward, and they're like, I still can't see the strings. Another option that is quite clever is you could set up a mirror in front of you. This way, you can look at the mirror, you can put your hands on the strings. You'll be able to see the fretboard in the reflection. You'll be able to see the strings. I Know, it's a little weird looking into a mirror versus looking at the guitar directly, but it will help you with finding the strings and finding the placement on the fretboard. The other option is the to work on placing your fingers and then straighten out the guitar. Okay? So again, this usually helps fix 70 to 80% of my students problems. But there are some, even when their guitar is straight up and down, they're still having problems with getting clean sounding chords. So what do we do next? A big point that I tell all my students in my seven level guitar system, I say, you know, if you're a beginner, you may not have calluses yet. Okay? So that's something. Just a little tip I want to throw in here before I get to the next point is that you will get calluses on the top of your fingertips and when that happens, you'll be able to press down on the strings without as much of the flesh of your fingers kind of surrounding the string. So that helps too. But it does take time, it could take a few weeks for you to develop good calluses on your fingers. So that could be another issue. But something else to look for is thumb placement. Okay. And I have a little tip, little trick that I teach students in my seven level guitar system that I'm going to show you here to fix this problem. So a lot of students, when we play the guitar, the thumb should be like this on the back of the guitar. But what happens is a lot of students, they do this and they play the guitar with their thumb to the side versus like this. Because I mean, when we play the guitar, we want to keep our hand as natural as possible. So if I went to hold, you know, a glass or a mug or something, I don't hold it like this, right? We hold it, we grip it like this and that's how we want to hold the guitar. So we don't hold a mug like that with our thumb sticking out. So what you want you to do is just drop your hand, bring it up to the guitar and gently hold it. Now form your cord because what happens, I'm just going to turn to the side a little bit and you can see where my hand is. Okay. My thumb is flat in the correct position. Now I'm going to change my thumb to the side. Look at my forearm. Okay? Watch the movement. Okay, so what's happening is, this is happening to my wrist. Okay. I'm losing a lot of the spacing underneath my guitar when I choke up like that. So I'm losing a lot of My stretch. And most likely you're going to mute the bottom E and B strings. Okay. Most likely the high E string here, that tends to be muted. So if you're playing a C chord.

And the string that's muted is always high E string, it's probably. Look where my thumb is. It's off to the side and above the guitar where most people, most beginners, a lot of them twist their thumb into it. So that's one that causes a big problem for a lot of students. So sometimes just moving that thumb into the correct position will help you play the chord much cleaner. Now, a little trick that I teach people in my seven level guitar system to help you with this is to use a pen. Okay. So pen, very thin or marker or highlighter, whatever. Something that is dowel shape that is fairly small. And what we're going to do is we're going to put it underneath the fretboard, right on the bottom of the fretboard here, and we're going to form the cord around it. Okay? So there should be some space. There should be enough space for me to just loosely pull out the pen. All right, now if you're. Oh, if you're holding the pen, it's showing you that you want to do this. I call it waiter's pose, because it's like a waiter trying to hold plate. And you're trying to do this with your palm, and that's going to take away a lot of your stretch. Again, we want this. We don't want this. Okay, so put your pen underneath, form your cord, take your pen away, and then play it again. Okay. And you can see I had. I had a muted string myself, and I've been playing the guitar for a long time, and you saw, I had to make a little adjustment, and sometimes that's what you'll have to do. That's a perfect segue into our next section, which is. Okay, Lauren, I've checked my thumb. My guitar straight up and down. I've checked my thumb. I'm still hearing muting. Now we have to literally go to the chord and assess one string at a time to find out what the problem. Great chord. To just show you how this works is a C chord. Okay, so let's take a look at this C chord. And I'm going to play it here, and I'm going to play it very badly. So it kind of sounds like this. And we're going to go through. Because this is what you should do. You should assess one string at a time which strings are sounding Good. And which ones are bad. Okay, so the first string, the A string sounds great. Now I'm going to play the next string. Okay. And I've got a muted D string. Well, I can feel, I can feel that string wrapping against this third finger. So for some people, you might have to bend the knuckle more or you might have to move your finger up if you can't bend your knuckle more. So when I play a G chord, okay, if I don't play this finger higher up on the string, I can't bend this knuckle as well for whatever reason. It's just how my hand works. So if I play a G chord, I either really have to focus on bending the knuckle or I can just play my finger a little bit higher up on the string and it gives me enough clearance. So for some people, just moving that third finger up just a little bit, you're still on the string. It's just not perfectly centered. Gives them enough room to clear that next string. Great, so I've cleared.

Okay, now I get a muted high E string. What's going on? My first fingers touching. Oh, I've cut off. I've cut off my grip. I gotta. I gotta fix my thumb. Okay, now let's try playing the chord again. Okay. And you would do this and play the chord cluny. Then you would take your hand off and you would do the chord again. And chances are when you bring your hand back, it's gonna be muted again. And you're gonna have to do this a number of times to eventually develop the muscle memory needed to get your fingers to place correctly. And sometimes I tell students, you know, I show them how to do like finger push ups where it's. You barely lift the fingers off the strings just to teach them how to get in the right position. Okay. But you're gonna have to still go one string at a time and see which ones are muting and which ones are not and fix it. And for my friends with big fingers, I hear from students all the time, Lauren, I have really, really fat fingers. What I do. Well, sometimes some of you, this actually is an advantage versus a disadvantage. So there are some students, I would say I have pretty average sized hands, but I do have some students who what we have called sausage fingers. Okay. And they literally, me, I have to play an E minor chord with two fingers. But some of my students, they have big enough hands that they could play an E minor chord with just one finger. I can't do that very well. It's very hard or like an A major chord. I play it with three fingers but I have some students who can play it with two because they can get their fingers are so big they only need two fingers versus three fingers. So very, very interesting thing. If you are someone with bigger fingers, you might need to test out different ways. Okay. And in my course I show people different ways to go about playing the A chord for different hand positions and different hand types. Now if you're someone that enjoyed all of these tips and trick, these are things that I go over in my seven level guitar system. It's a step by step system for learning how to play the guitar. If you're someone who's over here on YouTube, I love YouTube, I've got tons of free content here. But the tricky thing about YouTube is you're kind of hopping around and you don't know if you're learning things in the right order and that can be frustrating. You could feel like you're hitting a plateau and you're not making the progress you want to. So a lot of my students, they go on over to my seven level guitar system. They get on the program, they're very happy to have a step by step system. Instead of learning things haphazardly, they're seeing progress again. So if that sounds like you highly recommend, you go check out my seven level guitar system. I'll put a link in the description below and I hope to see you guys in another lesson video real soon.