Guitar Improvement – Learn Faster By Playing With Your Eyes Closed

Guitarists can give some pretty good advice every now and then, but you know when something they tell you for guitar improvement sounds a little screwy. You might actually be wondering how having your eyes closed when you’re trying to maneuver across an instrument with over twenty frets with six strings can be beneficial!

But really, there are quite a few things that you can improve upon with your guitar playing like learning the fret board better and learning by ear simply from closing your eyes when you play every now and then. Take a look at this list of some of the benefits of having a few guitar practices with your eyes shut.

1. Improving your chord knowledge isn’t as stressful. Moving between chords as a beginning guitarist might not be the smoothest thing to accomplish, but practicing with your eyes closed can help you address what you actually feel. When you really want to absorb the formations of those chords, remove your sight and you’ll find your muscle memory starting to kick in.

2. Your understanding of the fret board will increase. Sometimes when riffs are being played that have you jumping around to different frets up and down the board, you can get tangled up and start hitting wrong notes. If you were to practice those riffs with your eyes closed, you would find more guitar improvement on your ability to feel subtle differences between the different frets on the neck.

3. You’ll learn to not over-look your mistakes. If you don’t learn to right your mistakes you might not make as much improvement as you were hoping on the guitar. By shutting your eyes when you play, you’ll hear those minor mistakes loud and clear and get more motivation to turn them into correct phrases.

4. Your memory will become better. Looking at the frets and where your fingers are going can sometimes cloud your memory when you have a few tunes to memorize. Without your sight, feeling your way through the song is much more effective and you’ll find your memory improving with each practice.

5. Stylistic song features become clearer. There are musicians that can play music and there are musicians that can play music the way composers intended it. When you have nothing but your fingers and ears to rely on, you actually absorb more important stylistic features of a song that you may have other-looked otherwise.

6. You can adjust to the tempo of the music better. If you’re a guitarist that fights tempos by speeding up and slowing down without warning, playing with your eyes closed can improve your interpretation of the songs rhythms and tempos. Without your eyes to guide you, you’ll find that your listening skills will heighten and your adjustments to the song’s tempo will be more accurate.

Any way that you can think of to have a better relationship with the parts of your guitar is beneficial to the improvement of your skills. Try a few practices with your eyes closed and see if you can’t get your fingers moving more independently of what you see.