The TuneUp Program

The martial arts teach us to achieve power and speed with technique rather than strength. The essence of which is the ability to redirect opposing forces back to where they came from, so that the harder your opponent pushes you the more force you have to send back to them.

To play fast we need a strong right hand and a quick, accurate, responsive left hand. Try this exercise

Developing accuracy, touch and speed will require you to have a solid handle on your focused awareness skills. A Zen practitioner would refer to what we are doing here as mindfullness. Zen practices such as archery and calligraphy are simply techniques used to focus the mind, let's see if we can play some Zen guitar.

The overriding relationship here is between you and that piece of wood. You need to connect to it in the same way that the archer connects to his her bow. The three most important factors in martial arts are equally applicable to guitar players.

This section of the program is dedicated to the playing of your instrument. As there are lots of ways to do that I've limited these discussions to the application of the various tools you've learned here. There'll be a lot of valuable information and insight in the blogs and forums that come from the personal experience of myself and other players.

So if you want to apply your focused awareness skills to improving the accuracy of your playing you look here. If you want to debate the pros and cons of metronomes, footstools, string guage, etc. check out the forums.