How can I become an excellent guitarist?

Question

I have been playing guitar for 8 years and I want to try and push my electric guitar skills even futher without getting a teacher or paying!!1

I want to be able to play fast guitar parts with such bands as Blink 182 etc

Answer 1

Practice Practice Practice You must be quite experienced, so do some web searching for more and more challenging music. Practice it. Perfect it. Then recreate it and put your own spin on it. Play it for your friends. Make some new sounds. Be original!! Good Luck!

Answer 2

Ive been playing guitar for 15 years and i will tell you i have never had a teacher and i have found that to be a proffesional like rockstars they practice about ten hours a day. what to practice well you must practice rithym with a metronome technique i would look for excercise videos or books for different types of excersises and also practice shredding songs and chord progressions all this ten hours a day and you will see a major difference roughly in about a month.

Answer 3

Practice! Watch videos of the Pros and try and pick up some stuff, those learning dvd's aer pretty good becasue they will also explain to you how they do certain things. but practice would be my suggestion. Listen to a lot of different music to, aural ability is a big thing too.

Answer 4

Okay, try this experiement. Seriously! Try it!

Record your playing and forget about the recorder. Just play as you always do.

Go down to the nearest guitar shop or music store and listen to the guitarists there trying out instruments. What do you hear? Ask yourself:

1) Do they play in tempo or with varied tempos?
2) Do they need to slow down in their practice in order to clean up their playing, or does their playing sound clean enough right now?
3) Do they gloss over mistakes and little glitches?
4) Are they able to play for more than two bars of something before they stop or start over?

Now here's the hard part. Play back the recording of YOUR playing.

Ask yourself. What similarities are there? Do I play in tempo? Do I gloss over little mistakes and glitches? Am I too sloppy for the tempo or can I slow down to improve my accuracy?

Ouch! That pain you feel in your chest is the first step in your development...

Buy a metronome and always play with it. Every time. In order to play better you have to play better than those slobs down at the store! Don't allow yourself to play out of time, or play sloppy runs or riffs.

Practice slower than you want to play. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Play in tempo always. Slow down. Get it right.

Don't believe it when someone says, "Practice makes perfect." Only perfect practice makes perfect.

Answer 5

From what I have learned, If you were interested in playing lead guitar, you need to learn the pentatonic scale learn how to transpose it as you move up the neck of the guitar. This is the foundation of all guitar solo's.

Answer 6

Practice. Learn new material and practice it until you play it perfectly. Sometimes going to a good teacher just a couple of times here and there can give you a new direction to head, too, so just consider it.

Answer 7

Practice makes perfect

Answer 8

There's some tablature out on wholenote.com.

Also, there are some DVDs you can order on Amazon that come with tablature too.

I'm not great, but I've improved whenever I've learned somebody else's style and let it sink in for a while.

Answer 9

with 8 years under the belt you should be excellent already. Try learning the roots of the instrument your playing. it will benifit to learn the history and certain riffs of each era.

Answer 10

Quite simply, PAY a good teacher to improve what skills you have