Shred Guitar Made Easy

So you’ve purchased the guitar, mastered a few chords, and memorized the note names.  But if your style is more “Crazy Train” than “Your Body is a Wonderland,” at some point you’re going to need to learn how to shred.  You’ll probably find tons of resources on YouTube, but outside of private lessons, it’s much more fun to have a more interactive practice session.

Enter Dave Mustaine: Guitar Prodigy, an app that provides the perfect solution, all for just $9.99 – and no extra equipment needed.  Simply plug in your electric guitar, or use the mic with your acoustic guitar, and start playing along with Dave and receiving instant feedback.  Similar to the original Rock Prodigy app, users can watch tutorials, check note and chord names while playing along, and use the in-app guitar tuner.

Shredding can be challenging for every guitar player, so the most important thing is to just keep working at it.  But before you start, it’s wise to prepare yourself with a little real-world advice first.  After all, even Dave Mustaine himself didn’t wake up one morning, pick up a guitar and learn everything in just one session.  And as with any instrument, you’ll need a solid foundation before you’ll be able to shred guitar like the best of ’em.

Check out Shredaholic.com‘s tips here:

1. Know your mentors
Its important to have heroes, and if you have heroes, then you should be copying them. Do what they do, and see if you can do it a little bit better. Learn to become a total sponge for information and especially for sounds.

Study every note, try to stay away from tabs as much as possible, and work to develop your own style based on what you have learned from the greats. Basically, they can give you the skeleton, and you can put the skin on it.

2. Your own style
By nurturing your own sense of musical self, it makes the trip a lot easier. This way you can learn to do things your way, which is not a bad thing at all. You’ll develop your own tricks, learn new ways of producing notes, develop your own takes on technique, learn to express yourself better, and finding your own voice makes practicing a lot more fun.

3. The knowledge of practice could be its own college course – become a student of it!
Practice is very important, but knowing how, what and when to practice is a big piece of the puzzle. There is almost an artistic science to training to learn how to shred guitar.  Instead of just going in blind, take a break and really think about what you could do to make real progress. A lot of people say “how am I supposed to know that?”, but if you really just let the ideas flow into your mind, you’ll get it, and here’s how…

4. The game plan
You’ve got to have a game plan and you’ve got to stick to it. Define on a piece of paper what it is that you wish to accomplish, and there is your blue print. Now you can develop a sub-plan with specific actions, like what you need to work on in terms of picking, or left hand strength, or arpeggios, chords, theory – whatever!