5 Habits Every Recording Guitarist Should Develop

If you’re anything like me, you’ll never forget the day you brought home your first electric guitar. In my case, it was a beautiful black Fender Stratocaster. (Okay, it was actually a Squier, but that didn’t dampen my excitement even one bit.)

My brother and I bought it together at a music store that we had visited many times before. Usually, we would just stop in and stare, occasionally daring to try out one of the gorgeous and expensive guitars hanging in the store. But that day we had pooled our money and were able to bring home this six-string wonder, complete with a practice amp, cable, and a bonus pack of strings.

It was an unforgettable experience. The excitement of unboxing this incredible contraption crammed with strings, knobs and shiny chrome; the feel of the neck against my palm, the first touch of fingertips to strings—it all adds up to a moment that is stuck in the attics of my mind for lifetimes to come. Luckily for me, my brother’s interest in the guitar soon began to wane, and I happily bogarted the instrument, keeping it in my room and setting myself to the task of learning how to play.

Learning guitar is one thing. Getting great recorded guitar parts is another. Adopt these 5 habits to get better results in the studio, much sooner than you would otherwise.

Unfortunately, the moment of unboxing and pure bliss was followed shortly thereafter by a dumbstruck realization: learning guitar was hard! Even after months of diligent daily practice (and of building up my callouses), the sounds I was making were nothing like those that I wanted to emulate. Like many, I gave up shortly thereafter.

Years later, I picked up the guitar again, with considerably more luck, after I had started learning about home recording. But, I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t given up that first time. What advice would I give myself if I could? How much farther along might I be today?

Unfortunately, the state of time travel technology has proven it impossible for me to impart such wisdom to my younger self. However, I can share these tips of wisdom with you, and whoever you choose to pass them along to. So without further ado, here are five essential pieces of of guitar-based wisdom that you can put into practice as five cornerstone habits that will help you develop faster and more fully as a player.

1. Always listen to what you are doing, as opposed to looking at what you’re doing.

The guitar is an inherently visual instrument, in its construction and its design. Not only do the curves of a guitar attract our eye, but it also takes a fair amount of hand-eye coordination when you’re first learning guitar to get your hands into the correct shapes.

This is true for both your left hand, which needs to learn to barre, to fret notes cleanly, and mute other strings, as well as your right hand, which is the rhythmic center of your playing. The placement of your right hand relative to the strings will also have a great effect on both your tone and the accuracy of your playing.

Because of this, especially when you are beginning, it’s very easy to get too caught up in the habit of looking at what your hands are doing, as opposed to actually listening to the sounds that are coming out of your instrument.

In order to develop good habits early on, start trying to play everything that you can without looking at the neck of the guitar, or glancing at it as infrequently as possible. This will not only allow you to become more fluid of a player and prepare you for more situations, but you’ll also learn to listen much closer to what you’re playing.

As you progress, you’ll be able to hear the sounds you want to make before you even make them, and before too long you will develop and instinctive, musical way of interfacing with the instrument, as if it were an extension of your body.

This habit is not only valuable when it comes to the parts you are playing. It carries over to the tones you are able to get as well. How does a chord sound strummed nearer to the bridge than the neck? What happens when you arch your fretting fingers ever so slightly more? How does it sound to palm-mute using the fleshy part of your thumb as opposed to the back of your palm?

Listening to the tonal and timbral changes that all of this minute adjustments make will train your ear and you’ll develop as a player much quicker than if you constantly needed to rely on visual confirmation that your hands are in the right place.

2. Start recording every time you play.

It took me about fifteen years of playing to realize that my improvement as a guitarist would have been exponentially quicker if I had simply begun recording and listening back to all of my practice sessions early on.

While recording every practice session might seem like overkill, especially at the beginning stages of your musical life, the simple act of being able to listen back to yourself when you aren’t playing is going to allow you to hear things in your performance that you might have missed otherwise. It’s also going to allow you to keep track of what you are practicing and how you improve over time.

While it’s easy to record yourself using your DAW of choice, I recommend getting a small handheld recorder with a pair of built-in condenser mics strictly for this purpose. Not only will this disconnect the process of practicing from the process of recording, allowing you to focus on each task more completely, you can also bring that recorder anywhere you go, rather than being tied down to where your studio and audio interface are.

3. Learn about gain staging! 

Perhaps this scenario will sound familiar: You’ve found a song with a stinging solo that you want to learn, you’ve found the tab online, or even better, you’ve learned how to play it by ear. You’ve got the notes down, with the right rhythm and fingering, and yet what you’re playing sounds nothing like the guitar tone of your idols.

Compared to your favorite recordings, your notes are plinky and fade away almost immediately, while that solo you’re emulating sounds rich, saturated and deep. The factors as to why my tiny five-watt solid-state practice amp sounded nothing like a stack of Marshall tube amps was a complete mystery to me for years.

This is because one of the most confusing aspects about learning electric guitar in particular is understanding gain staging. From the instrument, to any pedals you are using, to the amp, to the microphone, to the preamp, there are a lot of places that gain needs to be adjusted in the signal path. Where you increase gain is going to make a huge difference in how your guitar sounds when you’re ready to record it.

How do you learn the proper gain staging for your setup? Read, listen, experiment, take notes, and experiment some more. Try changing or swapping things out in your signal path. You’ll quickly discover that certain sounds will have a natural appeal to your ear, and certain approaches are better for getting certain kinds of sounds. Learn to differentiate between types of overdrive and distortion, and study and experiment on how they are achieved.

While the most important part of your tone may come from your fingers, the electric guitar as we know and love it is effectively an electronic, technological instrument, and studying the possibilities of tonal shaping is just as important for the would-be guitarist as it is for a synth player.

4. Practice playing your guitar while standing instead of sitting.

This is one that is especially important for anyone who is likely to find themselves recording or performing in a live setting. As a beginner, if you’ve only been practicing playing guitar sitting down, you’re setting yourself up for a lot of re-learning later on. This is because the position of a guitar against your body is quite different while sitting down than it is standing up. In most situations, while standing, you’ll have to re-position the guitar slightly in order to be able to reach those same chords you were able to while sitting down.

Because of this, it makes sense to start practicing at both playing and recording while standing up as often as possible. You should be able to play everything that you can both sitting and standing as fluidly as possible. This will be especially helpful if you have aspirations for performance later on, as you’ll usually be standing up on a stage, or when in the studio collaborating with other musicians.

Learn to feel where the frets are standing up and be able to jump to the 12th fret without looking. Learn all of the open chord shapes and be able to fret them cleanly while standing. Even when you’re recording a simple overdub, switching to the standing position can sometimes help open up a type of feel and level of expressiveness that can be hard to achieve with your backside glued to a chair.

5. Learn what YOU want to learn.

When I was learning how to play guitar, the Internet was a much smaller place with far fewer resources. While this made it tougher to seek out information, it also meant that there were fewer voices shouting at you, telling you that their way to learn this or that is the best way for you .

This does not get said enough in the world but it’s important in the world of music: Learn what you want to learn, no matter where you are learning it. Don’t spend time learning classic rock solos if you know you want to be a folkie or an ambient musician. Don’t worry about being able to play fast sixteenth-note rhythms if you know you want your playing to mostly be an accompaniment for your vocals. Curate your own lesson plan by focusing on the goals you really want to achieve, and then follow it.

There’s an incredible amount of information out there on learning how to play music, how to record it properly, and how to get it out into the world. Trying to sort through the entirety of that mountain at the start is enough to stop you from ever playing a single note; so make sure you are listening to the voice inside yourself and learning the things that you truly want to learn, instead of jumping around from technique to technique and approach to approach without any focus on the big picture, as determined by your true tastes and values.

Truly mastering the entire universe of guitar techniques might require a lifetime and a half of study. But achieving a reasonable level of mastery in just one domain on the guitar—at least to start—is enough to allow you to start incorporating it into your recordings, and start making music people will actually look forward to hearing.

Happy recording!

Leo Maymind is a producer, DJ, and writer living in Los Angeles, CA. He is obsessed with sound, and you can reach him at lmaymind@gmail.com.

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