** 7 Super Christmas Ideas for Guitar Players (Plus Bonus) **

Please find assorted items below. Note that some of the links below may be affiliate links which means that although the price or delivery service remains the same and your product won’t be affected at all I’ll receive a small commission from your purchase.

I sincerely appreciate if you do buy through my links as it benefits my students and I can also buy more gear to review thereby helping you make better purchasing decisions as well.

These Days by Deep Down

You can view my album These Days on CDbaby here

and on Spotify here

 

Guitar Stuff

Picks or Plectrums

I like using Dunlop guitar picks as they are not only the guitar pick that I grew up with but they have a nice anti-slip pattern on them that can stop the pick from slipping when you are playing live..

The thing to realise is that to get a nice acoustic strumming sound use a soft pick of around .30mm thickness. You won’t be able to play lead lines or fills with a good volume with these picks.

If you go thicker to say around .60mm the acoustic strumming sound becomes a bit harsher and louder but you can play lead lines and fills without any problems

If you play riffs and lead on the electric then thicker picks will suit you best as thicker plectrums get an instant response from the strings meaning that you can play faster.

Of course you probably have an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar so this packet of plectrums might be ideal for you.

Tuners

Guitar tuners are great to tune your guitar to a certain pitch such as A = 440.

Clip on guitar tuners are small and very transportable. You simply clip them to the head stock of the guitar and tune up. You can play songs with the tuner still attached to the guitar for quick tuning between songs.

Clip on guitar tuners tend not to work so well after you drop them which happens more then I’d like to see (that’s speaking from my own experiences as well as those from students).

For something a little more sturdy I’d highly recommend a Korg tuner as they can last many, many years (again speaking from personal experience). You can use these tuners live with an electric guitar as well as the tuner features input and output jacks.

If you are a fan of foot pedals then you’ll love the Boss chromatic tuner. Simply place into your chain of foot pedals and tune up between songs. The Boss tuner is even more sturdy than the Korg tuner and is also easier to see on stage.

If you know anything about foot pedals then you know that Boss is THE brand when it comes to pedals.

Tuning Tip: When tuning your guitar always tune UP to the desired pitch. Don’t tune down towards it as the tension in the string will decrease causing the string to go out of tune.

If the desired pitch is lower than your current string pitch tune down to below your desired pitch and then tune up towards it. This will help your string stay in tune.

Music Reading Books

If you want to learn to read music notation then I have just the book for you. If you don’t want to read music then you should! There is so much beautiful music that is only written in notation (as opposed to TAB) that it’s worthwhile to even read music a little so that you can figure these beautiful pieces out.

The book, or rather books, that I’d recommend is Bill Leavitt’s A Modern Method of Guitar which is the standard text at the Berklee College of Music.

You can read my review of the books here or you can look at the books on Amazon here.