Overestimated/underestimated techniques to practice

[Li Shenron]

What guitar techniques do you think people tend to overestimate their importance, and often feel obsessed about not being good enough at them?

 

What guitar techniques are instead understimated and usually not practiced enough?

 

On the top of my head, also based on what I read on this forum:

 

*overestimated*

- sweep picking

- tremolo picking

- tapping

 

*underestimated*

- rhythm techniques

- finger slide

- muting

[Jasco]

*overestimated value*

anything to do with playing fast




*underestimated value*

groove

melody

creativity

[Yngtchie Blacksteen]

Pretty much, yeah. Being without a teacher and a band, I've been trying to learn rhythm playing on my own, but it gets hard once I move past basic chordal strumming. I wish there were more good lessons on rhythm and how to develop one's comping ability.

Also, I agree with what Jasco wrote, as there are so many guys out there who teach all these fancy licks, but rarely share their views on how these licks can be used in a musical context. More often than not, these teachers aren't very musical themselves, they just know a lot of theory and how to play fast the 'proper' way.

I think the reason so few people are trying to inspire students to get in touch with their creative side is simply that it's so hard to teach. It's easy to do things by the book, but hard when it's about creating new things, since so few teachers are that good, musically.

[Li Shenron]

I meant mostly *guitar techniques* here, rather than general things like creativity, ear training or sight reading...

So when I said "rhythm" I didn't mean just the sense of groove but rather practicing rhythm techniques such as time signatures, triplets/quintuplets/etc, rhythm patterns and accents.

I think the reason so few people are trying to inspire students to get in touch with their creative side is simply that it's so hard to teach.

There is actually the problem that too many students want the teacher to teach them to play fast and not much else.

[Yngtchie Blacksteen]

Yes, and teachers should stress the importance of getting the basics down before advancing onto fancier stuff. Now, in the days of YouTube, young players are drowning in videos of other young guitarists shredding their asses off, and it's not surprising that a lot of kids want to run before they can walk.

I was like that, and I didn't have a teacher who could teach me more important things, perhaps keep me grounded, so to speak. Didn't have a band that would force me to sit down and learn riffs and such.

But yeah, this is getting beside what you wanted out of this thread. Still, I agree that anything that has to do with improving rhythm techniques is overlooked by default, and that the world doesn't need another lesson on how to become better at alternate picking or sweep picking or whatever.

[jonfinn]

overestimated: licks

underestimated: songs

[gayforjesus]

boring {censored}

interesting {censored}

the end

[jonPhillips]

*overestimated value* anything to do with playing fast *underestimated value* groove melody creativity

 

 

This +1000

 

 

[jeremy_green]

This +1000

+2000 :thu:

[Manimal00007]

How can you say anything is overestimated or underestimated without knowing the guitarist's goals?

[gayforjesus]

i don't think playing fast is bad, if it's done musically. django played fast, jimi played fast, beethoven played fast... tons of very musical people played fast because one of the results of getting good is that you're able to come up with stuff quickly and play with high levels of coordination and ability. they might not have sat there with a metronome and seen how fast they could crank out flight of the bumblebee (or they might have), but almost all the good ones seem to crank out musical ideas at a very dense rate, at least some of the time.