Guitar/Singing and Playing

There are some people who are blessed with a perfect singing voice and excellent coordination, and they sing and play the guitar like breathing. For other people, attempting to sing a single note causes them to immediately lose the rhythm.

This section is intended to help people who already play the guitar and gives advice on how to incorporate vocals into their performance.

General Tips
Just keep singing. The worst thing you can do is stop, because stopping teaches you to stop, and only singing teaches you to sing. Start simple. Pick a song with simple chord progressions and simple, on-beat strumming patterns. Start with a very slow tempo and gradually speed up after a successful try.

Other Artist's Songs
First learn to play the song really well. Listen and sing along with the song, over and over again. After you have a good handle on both the singing and guitar part, try putting them together. If this still proves too difficult having both parts memorized, you may try just playing the guitar while listening to the song, focusing your mind on listening to the words as closely as you can until you can think about the words while playing. This could take away some of the multitasking confusion prevalent in first attempts.

If multitasking is not the issue but certain songs are still a challenge, practice playing and singing the song without reference to the original, and when you are sure that you have memorised the lyrics and chord changes, practice along to the original version. Sometimes doing this will help you master the harder sections.

Be sure to keep a copy of the words nearby while you are learning, in case you forget a line or two. It is better to stumble through a few lines and keep the song going rather than stopping in mid verse to try to remember something.

Your Own Songs
After writing the first few lines of a song and with an idea of how you'd like the song to be (having the basic chords and lyrics ), the next step is to explore the possibilities. The idea is to try different tones and melodies. When singing we can stretch words to fill up some space. change any words and chords, or if creating a version of a known tune, add a chord (or word), later you can decide which one sounds better. Sometimes we subconsciously create music that is a copy of our favourite artist; there's nothing wrong with this. After all, some of the greatest names in music founded their early careers with covers of the music of their heroes. After some progress show it to your friends and ask them for some opinions. Sometimes we may also forget the melody or chords, so a good tip is to record it. You don't need a professional studio, just a normal microphone and a computer will suffice. In relation to lyrics during songwriting, if a word doesn't sit well, look for a synonym. Most of the time, it's the best solution.