Musical U for Guitar Players
You love guitar… but something’s been holding you back.
Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been playing a while, whether you play classical acoustic or electric rock guitar, you are devoted to those six strings and want to reach your full potential as a guitarist.
Your fingers have been getting pretty fast, you’re learning the chords (even those tricky barre ones) and the fretboard patterns… But you thought it would be easier than this.
It seems like something’s missing inside, leaving you frustrated – having to endlessly practice and try to memorise songs, or else be dependent on tab or chord charts to be able to play something. You tried soloing and found all you could really do is wander up and down scale patterns.
You’re not looking to turn pro or expecting the record labels to show up and sign you tomorrow. But you do want to be able to confidently join a jam session, connect with other musicians, and be able to express the music you know you have inside you.
What you really want is some freedom on the fretboard. The instinct for which notes to play. The precise accuracy of perfectly placing each note to sound great. This is where Musical U comes in.
We can help you develop your musical ear so that you can play by ear, improvise, get great rhythm and really feel like a natural when you pick up your guitar.
What Guitar Players Can Learn in Musical U
There are three main areas where Musical U helps guitarists:
- Playing Chords By Ear
- Improvising
- Rhythm
Musical U is a fully flexible training system, meaning there are no fixed courses you have to follow.
Instead we support and guide each member to construct their own perfect personalised training plan, using the dozens of training modules provided inside. So whether you want to focus on one of the three areas above, some combination of the three, or something else entirely, Musical U can support you in reaching your guitar potential.
Let’s look at how Musical U can help with each of these three main areas.
Play Chords By Ear
Have you wished that you could hear a song and immediately know how to play it on guitar? Or spent hours memorising chord charts so that you can perform the songs you love without needing a bundle of printouts or heavy songbooks when you play?
Despite what many people think, playing chords by ear is a learnable skill.
At Musical U we provide a full suite of training modules for learning to recognise chords and chord progressions by ear. We use a particular approach which lets you rapidly learn to play a large number of songs by ear, by focusing on the most common chords and patterns.
→ Learn more by previewing our Roadmap for playing chords by ear
Improvise Solos
For many guitarists, playing killer solos is the ultimate goal. Whether you want to be on stage playing an amazing face-melting electric guitar solo, you want to solo properly over standards with a jazz trio, or you just want a bit of freedom to experiment when writing songs on your guitar, learning to improvise melodies (tunes) is a great skill to add to your guitar toolkit.
At Musical U we take the mindset that improvising is best thought of as “playing by ear what you hear in your head”. So we teach our members the ear skills they need to imagine new music vividly in their mind and then bring it out on their instrument.
We have some advanced improvisation modules currently in development, but for now we recommend our “Melodies By Ear” Roadmap to help with guitar soloing:
→ Learn more by previewing our Roadmap for playing melodies by ear
Rock Solid Rhythm
If you’re a rhythm guitar player this one goes without saying, but in fact every guitarist needs a tight rock-solid sense of the beat and the ability to precisely place each note in perfect time if they want to sound professional and be able to play well in a band.
Strength in the rhythm department comes from a number of factors, including:
- Understanding the beat and tempo
- Having rhythmic precision in your mind and with your fingers
- Being able to read or write rhythm notation
- Creativity in using and adapting rhythm to play in different styles
We have training modules inside Musical U which help with all of these aspects of getting great rhythm, and they’re encapsulated by our “Get Rhythm” Roadmap:
Something else?
Is there a different aspect of guitar playing you want to improve on?
The beauty of our flexible training system is that you don’t need to neatly fit one of the categories above to benefit from Musical U. We can help guide and support you whatever your particular guitar mission might be.
Please note that we don’t teach the specifics of instrument technique inside Musical U – we recommend a site like TrueFire or GuitarTricks for that.
But if what you’re looking for is the “inner skills” of music – to free you up on your guitar and help you feel like you have an easy, natural, reliable instinct for playing guitar – then the chances are we’ve got what you need and we would love to have you join us at Musical U.
Join Musical U
As a member of Musical U you get immediate access to all Roadmaps and Training Modules, along with a friendly supportive community and expert help whenever you need it.
Join today!
Member Story: Guitarist Brian
Here we share an example of a guitar player who joined Musical U and how it’s helped them.
Brian started playing guitar as a teenager and has never been able to put it down since. But there was always something he felt was missing which he felt handicapped his abilities. Trying to play by ear was always a frustrating painstaking process – but his idea of utopia was to simply sit with his guitar and be able to fully express himself musically. So he kept at it, trying a variety of training courses and approaches over the years before joining Musical U.
Since discovering ear training and joining Musical U, Brian has been working methodically through the chord progression modules and making great progress.
Although his journey is only partly complete Brian says he’s been seeing glimpses of “Wow, this is really possible” – like there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel.
Guitar Instrument Pack
The guitar Instrument Pack provides video tutorials and practice MP3s to add instrument-specific guidance to the core musicality training provided at Musical U.
