Hearing your own playing back can help identify key areas of improvement and take your playing to the next level
Every guitarist has bad habits. The best guitarists, though, actively set about kicking them to the curb. To those ends, recording yourself is a crucial step in analysing your playing, identifying shortcomings, and creating a clear, structured pathway to turn weaknesses into strengths.
Listen and learn
There’s always a disparity between what you, whether you’re in your bedroom or on a stage, hear in your head and what the audience – or your DAW – hears.
We’ve all gotten off stage thinking we nailed a solo only to see someone’s Instagram story and discover you murdered the sweep picking section.
It’s the same when you hear your voice recorded for the first time – “Do I really sound like that?” you’ll ask. You do, it’s just the sounds you hear reverberating in your head sounds different.
When you’re focused on your playing, many subtle nuances which can be make-or-break to the cleanliness of a part can be missed.
Recording yourself gives you reams of digital tape to analyse and figure out, not just where your playing is at its weakest, but why. From here, you can create a personalised practice plan focused on the things that need the most work.
Give yourself a hand
Speaking from experience, my right hand can often be blamed for a shoddy take. It doesn’t even have to be what I’m doing picking-wise; if I move my hand in a certain way, especially with a high gain tone, a lot of extraneous noise can be generated, ruining what could have been perfect playing.
Or maybe your fretting hand isn’t cutting out unnecessary overtones, overcrowding a take. The smallest blemishes can have a big impact on how something sounds.
Every guitar is its own animal too. Your hand position may need to change depending on the bridge system or pickup placement. Record yourself playing the same passage a few times with different hand positions and hear the subtle – but ultimately crucial – differences it can make to your tone and performance.
But whatever you do, don’t use a fret wrap – that won’t fix the problems you have.
Lick it up
Aside from noting where your playing goes from gold to gaffe, recording yourself improvising over a backing track can be a great way to discover what your cliché moments are. Do you have a go-to lick that you overdo without knowing it?
Having a failsafe trick shot like this is no bad thing, but it needs to called upon in moderation. Discovering this via recordings of your playing can be a great way to force yourself to think a little more creatively. It can help expand your phrasing vocabulary and build up a wider arsenal of licks.
Recording improvisations and riff-writing sessions means that when that moment of genius comes out of your fingers, it’s not left to float into the ether and be forgotten.
Some of the best creative moments happen by accident, recording everything you do helps capture those bursts of brilliance. Otherwise, if you’re anything like me, the essence that made something great can be lost in figuring out what exactly it was you did. If it’s recorded, it is there to listen back to.
Feedback and progress
Two other positives from recording yourself are the ability to chart your progress and share it with the Modern Metal Community.
Revisiting something you played months prior can show you how much you’ve improved since, and opening yourself up for feedback from the MMA community can allow others to offer constructive feedback, so you don’t have to Sherlock Holmes your own playing style to figure out where your weaknesses are.
It can be a lot easier for others to find out what is and isn’t working than when you self-analyse, so this approach helps give you the best of both worlds, accelerate your improvement, and turn you into the guitar player you’ve always wanted to be.
Win a Schecter TAO guitar
Does new gear help inspire you to play more? Well, Modern Metal Academy has teamed up with Schecter Guitars to give away a John Browne signature Tao-8 in Azure Blue.
Featuring a contoured swamp ash body and loaded with USA-made Colossus & Chaosbreaker Schecter humbuckers, the beastly riff machine is up for grabs in a brand new competition. Better still, the competition is open to everyone, not just MMA members.
Entries are open from 9th - 30th August at 11:45pm BST Head over to our competition page for details on how to enter. If you win, record yourself playing and thank us later when your skill level has gone from Charmander to Charizard.
For more top tips, check out our blog page, and for tapping into the supportive MMA community spirit, head here.
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