Learn How To Play Pinch Harmonics For Guitar That Sound Clean & Badass
One of the best ways to make any guitar lick sound amazing and badass is to add pinch harmonics to it. However, if you struggle to play pinch harmonics clearly, it will end up sounding like a big mess and completely ruin the effect you were going for. To guarantee that every pinch harmonic you play sounds great, you must know the common mistakes that most guitarists make and understand how to correct them.
Watch the video below to learn how to play killer pinch harmonics consistently - any time you pick up the guitar:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
See my other guitar playing videos, available to my YouTube subscribers - follow my channel by clicking the button below:
Think playing harmonics on guitar is cool? Here are some other cool ways to improve your guitar playing:
How To Make Much Faster Progress On Guitar
Nothing is more frustrating than practice guitar endlessly without seeing any major results. Here are three ways to start getting results much faster:
1. Get The Most Out Of Your Practice Time
Practicing guitar effectively is the only way to make fast progress in little time. The first step to making your practice effective is determining clear, tangible guitar playing goals for yourself.
Once you’ve done this, make a practice schedule based on these goals. This helps you understand the skills you must master to reach them.
Having a practice schedule like this keeps you on track, so your practice time is always helping you become the player you want to be.
Tip: If you do not have a lot of time to practice guitar every day, focus on improving the skills that help you master multiple skills at once.
2. Track Your Musical Progress Every Week
Don't make the mistake of not tracking your results only to find that your practice was never effective to begin with. This situation is more common than you think and can lead to tons of frustration. Track your results every week to ensure this doesn’t happen.
The closer you track your progress, the more refined you can make your practice schedule.
For example: Track how many mistakes you make with a given exercise, or how long you can play without making a mistake or at what speed mistakes begin to appear, etc.
Think of more ways to track your progress based on your specific practice schedule/items.
3. Find And Work With An Excellent Guitar Teacher
Learning guitar on your own causes a lot of unnecessary frustration.
Learning with a guitar teacher helps you avoid long periods without progress and makes the entire learning process much more fun overall. You get insight into correcting mistakes you never even knew existed in your guitar playing... so you don't waste time practicing the wrong way or working on the wrong things.
Learn 3 Big Guitar Playing Mistakes That Keep You From Getting Better
Wish you could start making super-fast progress on guitar?
Correct these common mistakes to get started right now:
Mistake #1: Practicing Guitar For Too Many Hours Per Day
It’s not true that all great guitarists practiced 7 hours a day every day to get where they are now. Although some may have done this, many also learned how to practice more effectively than most people.
Practice is about quality over quantity. You get amazing results in your playing practicing only 30 minutes per day when you make your guitar practice as efficient and effective as possible.
If you're practicing excessive hours per day, cut down your overall practice time and practice in bursts of 20-30 minutes throughout the day instead. This keeps you focused and prevents your mind from wandering.
Mistake #2: Having Vague Musical Goals
When you try to become the kind of guitarist you want to be by setting vague musical goals, it’s like trying to construct a building with no prior knowledge of architecture/engineering or any blueprint to help you.
This makes it very difficult to accomplish the things you want... and if you do achieve anything, it takes a very long time.
Take the time to figure out your specific guitar playing goals, then break them down into whatever skills need to be practiced to help you reach them. This helps you create a blueprint for achieving what you want with guitar so you know when you are close or far away from them.
Mistake #3: Being A Self-Taught Guitarist
It’s much easier to make progress on guitar when you have an expert to guide you through the learning process versus trying to learn everything on your own through trial-and-error.
Plus, being exclusively self-taught causes the development of poor playing habits that must be undone before you are able to reach a much higher level in your guitar playing.
Taking lessons with an expert guitar teacher ensures that you develop the right guitar playing habits to make the fastest progress possible.
Why A Guitar Teacher Helps You Become Better Faster
Learning guitar on your own makes it difficult to improve consistently.
The following are 3 big reasons why taking lessons with a guitar teacher is a great option for getting faster results:
Reason #1: Your Guitar Practice Becomes Laser-Focused
It’s easy to develop poor guitar practice habits while learning on your own.
This is because there is no one to help you get back on track when you practice incorrectly or show you why your current habits need to be changed.
Having a guitar teacher accomplishes these things by giving you access to expert advice from someone who has already helped many others achieve the same goals you have.
A great guitar teacher is quickly able to assess your practice habits and finds wasted time or inefficiencies that you may never notice on your own. This saves you tons of time and helps you reach your musical goals much faster.
Reason #2: You Quickly Fix Your Poor Playing Habits
Guitar players who learn on their own frequently develop poor habits that become problematic in later stages of their playing.
For instance: many guitarists only use alternate picking. This approach uses inefficient picking motion, that eventually stops the guitarist from playing cleanly at high speeds.
Taking lessons with a guitar teacher helps you spot these types of problems, fix them and improve your guitar playing in ways you never knew were possible.
Reason #3: You Feel More Motivated To Get Better
Learning guitar on your own is sometimes difficult, frustrating and unmotivating. Great guitar teachers don't just teach you to play better, they coach and mentor you throughout the learning process. This keeps you engaged and motivated.
The result is continual progress and much less frustration.
Of course, these are just a few reasons (of many) for why taking lessons with a guitar teacher helps you get better much faster. If you are learning guitar by yourself right now and want to make more progress in less time, don't settle for poor results.
Do your research and locate a great teacher to take lessons with and fulfill your greatest potential.
Here are several examples of what happened when some of my best students came to me to get better:
“When I met Tom Hess, I knew that this is the guy. Just going through the evaluation form, all the questions, different questions, and he was digging deeper and deeper into all my goals and all that stuff... and no one has ever done that with me before, so I felt right away that this is the guy.”
The level that I was at before I went to Tom for lessons was that I could play pretty fast, I could play sloppy, I didn’t know nothing about music theory, so I was kind of unbalanced, I was uneven. I was a good player technically, but I knew very little about music theory. So I wanted to even that out, and Tom has helped me, not only evening that out, but also exceeding my expectations. So now I’m playing at a level that I didn’t expect that I could play at. So that’s... I’m very happy with that.
I like lessons with Tom because of the format basically. He gives a variety of formats... not just one format, like video for example, but also pdf files and audio files that you can take with you if you’re doing something else... you have to do labor that day, laundry or whatever... then you can listen to the sessions and while... you can actually benefit when you’re not even practicing, so it’s a no brainer.
Gottfrid Norberg Waxin, Sweden
“I found Tom Hess on the net through articles, and I read quite a few of those before I went to Tom’s website. Even though I’m not a metal player at all, and Tom is obviously a metal player, I could still see that his ideas and way of teaching could really benefit me. So I pretty much signed up for online guitar lessons with Tom straight away once I’d gone through the website, and it’s just been a real eye opener with the way he teaches…”
... the integration of concepts that he’ll give you and having a really structured strategy… not just week to week lessons, but things that - you can see from one lesson to the next - really develop and continue to work on your technique and your theory and aural skills and those types of things. So I’d played a long time… 20 years before I really caught onto Tom, and I’d had a lot of lessons, and I’d taught and played but I can really see improvements in my technique, sweeping, and picking which weren’t strong parts of my playing.
I feel like Tom has a good gauge of where you’re at as a guitar player and what you need, and there just seemed to be so much more stuff in the lessons week to week than what you’d ever get in an hour or so in a one on one lesson… way more. So yeah I think that and the forum. I think, I’d pay the money just for the forum. That alone would be fine… I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. So that alone is massive!
The price for the lessons, that’s nothing... nothing. You know, I think it’s, pretty cheap to be honest. I don’t mean that in a bad way, cheap. Cheap is not a good word, but I just think it’s great value… awesome value. I mean, you know, you could pay that for one-to-one lessons and you just don’t get the same results and support of the forum and the content and the strategies.
Other teachers I’ve had have been good players, and some have become good friends too. But when I’ve started lessons with Tom I’ve got something to compare that to and a lot of it is just sort of teaching songs from week to week… a lot of the lesson will be left up to you… you’ll go to your lesson and they’ll be like what do you want to do today? At the time I said, oh do this song or that song, but with Tom you start to realize that you know, there’s more to it… the goals and you know he’s sort of more in contact with what you want to be able to do as a player, because he’s asking you the questions and then setting up the strategies, so I find that really good.
Yeah I can see more results in 18 months in a lot of areas in my playing than you know 20 years. So it’s sort of, you know, would’ve been great 20 years ago to have met Tom.
Simon Candy, Melbourne, Australia
“I've played guitar for several years and I think I've taken it as far as I could take it and I was going on the internet and found Tom, I take Breakthrough Guitar Lessons from him and I have to say it was the best thing that I've ever could have done. There is nothing better than Breakthrough Guitar Lessons with Tom.”
Tom has the innate ability to hone in on whatever problems you have and immediately fix it for you. The lessons are very goal oriented, very detailed and Tom is very approachable. I consider Tom to be a master teacher. A master teacher is someone who cares about their students, who talks to their students, who shares with their students and gets them to the place that they need to be as a guitar player. And Tom, I will tell you, does all of that and more.
Rovan Deon, Rahway, NJ, USA
Playing pinch harmonics makes your licks sound badass. However, there are many more ways to make your lead guitar licks incredibly expressive - Learn them all by taking guitar lessons.