How to improve your down picking

Fast and powerful down picking is essential if you want to become a mighty good riffer. Even for playing guitar solos, down picking is a very commonly used and useful technique. The best thing about down picking is that you get a nice uniform sound for every time you hit the strings with your pick unlike alternative picking. The dynamics of a down stroke and up stroke is so very different. So there are times when you would require only down strokes to get the desired sound. It is a skill that you should have in your arsenal.

Now how do you improve your down picking? There are two important things about down picking, speed and power. Specially if you want to use it for playing some powerful guitar riffs you must have both to make it sound good. Now here are some tips to improve your down picking

To improve power: You must remember that dynamics is very important and you want that skull crushing powerful sound when you are using down picking, specially when you play riffs. So always play powerfully when you practice. Its going to hurt a little at first. Your muscles will become slightly sore. If your wrist muscles tense up then take a break for few minutes and resume the practice. Play one part of a song that you like that uses down picking. You don't have to play the full song at the beginning. If you do that then within few months your wrist muscles will develop the power and you will be able to play the whole song. And slowly you will develop the power and control to play few songs using powerful downstrokes. Always remember, if you can play powerfully, you can also play with light delicate touch if its required. But if you don't practice this then your wrist muscles wont be able to deliver the sort of power that is required when you will need it.

To improve speed: The most important thing for improving speed is economizing the pick movement. You don't want to move your wrist too much, you don't want to move your pick too much cause that's just going to waste time and energy. You want the pick to stay very close to the strings and you want to play with minimum movement of the pick. To maintain good power while minimizing pick movement can be a challenge and that would require few months of good practice. You have to understand that its not going to happen in a day. It will require some time so you need to have the patience.

How to be a successful musician

 Before we get to that lets define success. I mean what is success without happiness? What's the point of being successful but unhappy? Doesn't really work that way right? So we are talking about being a kind of musician that will make one happy and give musical success at the same time.

Now we human beings require many things in life to be happy and successful. There is no one thing that can make us happy or successful, Its a combination of many things. Many young stars when they get into music, specially guitar, they really forget about everything else in life. I know that cause I was the same when I started and so were many of my friends. I used to practice long hours ignoring everything else that I was supposed to do. After a while my guitar playing skills really improved, but was I really happy? Well to some extent yes, but I could be happier if I worked differently.

The key to success and happiness would be maintaining all the priorities of life. As I said we need a combination of things in life to be happy, you need to maintain a priority list and go for all those things, not just one.

Imagine having crazy guitar playing skills but unhealthy and unfit at the same time. Or not having any friends, financial liberty, or social acceptance. Can you be happy with just your skills? Most likely NO. You might think that's all you need specially when you are young but trust me, in the long run you will regret.

So how can you be a mad guitar player or musician and be happy at the same time? The key is consistency. Instead of working too hard and long hours on practicing guitar you have to practice for a short time ( say two hours max) but you have to do it consistently. And two hours of good practice, not just fooling around. No matter what, whether you feel good or bad you have to do your 2 hours practice everyday, and have patience. Don't expect the good things to happen over night. Make a long term goal and slowly move towards it. This way you can also work to achieve other things in life that you have on your priority list.

Trust me, this works. The second thing you have to do on a regular basis would be 'marketing'. Spend about 30 mins of your time everyday on marketing your music on social networking sites, blogs, you tube and any other web based media where you can share your music. Don't expect people to discover you and become your follower just because of your musical talent. There are thousands of talents like you out there if not more. So why should they follow you? The only reason can be good presentation and good marketing. You need to spread your music and let them know you exist.

You do these two things consistently and let me know how it goes for you. The most important thing is to have patience and be consistent.