Musicians admire, and enjoy working with guitarists who know what they’re doing. Music can be complex and challenging and the more you know about music, the less you’ll be affected when someone throws something challenging at you. The more you know about music, the more helpful you’ll be in your current playing situation. The more you know about music, the more appealing you’ll be to a prospective employer who’s looking to fill the guitar chair in his band.
Theoretically Speaking…
One of the most important aspects of being an intelligent musician is knowing music theory. Know all your keys backwards and forwards. Know your major keys, know your minor keys and know how they relate to each other. Know the chord progressions of those keys. Knowing that kind of information will help you know what chords will work in a given situation, and what chords won’t. You’ll know what extensions you could add to those chords to add more color without making an ugly sound.
Know your scales and arpeggios. These will be the resources from where you develop your solos and melodic ideas. Know which scales work over which chord progressions, which scales or arpeggios will work over specific chords. The more you know about this, the more easily you will know how to develop great, melodic, interesting solos. The more you know about this, the better you’ll be able to solo on the fly, even when you haven’t had time to go over the material.
Develop Your Ear…
Eartraining is invaluable. Being able to hear and recognize intervals, chords and scale tones will really increase your abilities as a professional musician, making you a more valuable player to have around. If you haven’t spent a lot of time on this, do it now! Start with testing yourself on being able to recognize intervals. Then move on to chords. It helps if you can have someone else drill you on this kind of material by playing a chord, or interval and then you listen to it and tell them what it is you are hearing. Spend a lot of time on eartraining. This will get easier the more you do it.
Be A Reader…
Guitarists are generally known to be the worst musicians when it comes to reading music. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that most guitarists can learn a lot about the guitar without reading music. Where the problem comes in is when you start working with musicians who DO know how to read. Say you walk into a rehearsal and everyone is looking at charts that the sax player has written out for everyone. He hands you the guitar chart and there are some lines that you need to play that are written in standard music notation. If you know how to read music, this will not be an embarrassing situation for you. If you don’t know how to read music, you’ll have some explaining to do. Why should other players have to explain parts to you, just because you are a guitarist. It can be embarrassing to you, possibly cost you the gig, and just gives guitarists, in general, a bad name.
Where To Look…
The more you study music, the more you’ll find there is to study. But it’s not difficult to get a good handle on these things. Resources are everywhere. Check with your local high school, community college, local private instructors. There are hundreds of books available to help you, look for the ones that make the information easy for you to absorb. And last, but certainly not least, the web is an incredible resource to find online sources of any and all of this information.
Being an educated guitarist will make you a better player and musician. It will earn you respect, and make it easier to communicate your musical ideas with other musicians. Being an intelligent guitarist will get you the gig you really want.