Eric Johnson's Top 5 Tips For Guitarists

Guitar champion Eric Johnson recently sat down with Music Radar to jot down his Top 5 tips for all the guitarists out there.

1. Think about how you attack the string
"The way you do this is very important. When I play with a pick, I'm careful to brush the string in a way that gets the most tonality out of it and least amount of noise.

"If I'm using my fingers, I try to do the same thing. It's a case of figuring out which part of your fingers gets the best tone, you have to practice and find that sweet spot."

2. Learn different ways to pick the same lick
"One thing that really helped me is learning how to do the same runs starting with an upstroke as well as a downstroke.

"If you're playing two-notes-per-string, that will make every note the opposite of how you played it before, and will eventually help you break free as a player that is able to do either."

3. Understand how to build your own chords
"When you're playing under something, there could a lot of options out there that could be more useful in embellishing the melody. The key thing is to understand your inversions: any chord you can play, you can invert.

"You could put the root on the top or the third on the bottom, or instead of playing a sixth here, you could raise it an octave. It might be quite a stretch, but you have the flexibility for any voicing or inversion you want."

4. Sit behind a piano
"You don't have to become a great pianist, that's not really important. A lot of people play just enough piano to write a song or figure out chord changes.

"It's a beautiful instrument for writing and studying music - I would suggest any musicians of any instrument to undertake piano lessons. Not for the intention to become great at the instrument, but rather for perspective."

5. Figure out how to use the wrong notes
"Wes Montgomery once said, 'You can play any note at any time if you play it correctly!' And I think the point of that is some notes need to be recessive, some need to be dominant. So as long as you play it in the right way, any note can work. If it's leading to something, the wrong note can be right.

"Sometimes I'll sit there and force myself to play a bunch of wrong notes to figure out how they could be used."

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