Record Your Rehearsal to Improve your guitar skills

Whether it is with a band or someone just working on their own to learn to play guitar, recording rehearsals and practice can help to become a better guitarist.

There are a lot of little issues that can develop while learning to play guitar that are hard to recognize while playing.  In their own mind, a guitarist might be sure they did something perfect, but in reality their hands might not have translated it just right.  Especially for someone focusing in areas of guitar, such as blues guitar lessons, it can be absolutely critical to do certain things perfectly, like bending vibrato, it is much easier to hear problems after the fact on a recording that while doing them.

When to Record

If it is possible or practical, record everything during practice or a rehearsal.  It doesn’t matter how useless it might be, even if you have no intention of listening to it, just record it anyways.  The reason for this is really quite simple, a recording can be deleted, but it is impossible to go back and record something that has already happened.

It is quite possible a guitarist might stumble on a rather neat sounding riff, and even if they can’t write it down, at least the recording is there to learn the riff again later on.  It is good practice for transcription to learn to play guitar riffs over again.  This is potentially easier that working on someone else’s riff, since any riff recorded by a guitarist will obviously not be beyond their own guitar skills.

Making Backing Tracks

Another nice aspect, particularly for lead oriented blues guitar lessons, is that recording allows a guitarist to make their own backing tracks.  This gives a guitarist practicing on their own the ability to still gain the experience of playing lead over an actual rhythm guitarist, and encourages the guitarist to focus on rhythm and lead, rather than just one or the other.

It also helps to develop better compositional or improvisational skills, since it allows a practical experience.  A rhythm part that might have seemed neat while playing it might turn out to be unappealing when listened to again, or may well turn out to be impractical for putting a lead guitar part.

Developing the understanding that a neat rhythm progression straying outside of key might on its own sound great, but make it very impractical to do any sort of lead over top is something that will help a songwriter out.  Just getting the experience of finding what kinds of rhythm parts work or don’t work under a lead part can allow for better merging of the two when songs are written.

Band Mixing

Another area, which really has no way to practice just by learning to play guitar comes into play when mixing together a band.  Even with all the technique developed as a guitarist learns how to play guitar, all the parts need to mesh.  Even for people focusing on blues guitar lessons or other styles where a particular instrument takes precedence, the rest of the band still needs to mesh together.

From a practical standpoint, all the people in the band in particular need to hear themselves play, and usually they are in closer proximity to their own instruments and amplification equipment.  A recording allows the band to hear what the audience would hear, and finding out what they are hearing is quite important when it comes to performance time.