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Listen to blues rhythm guitar and you hear that it’s not one repetitive wall of sound, but an open, varied sound with breathing room and subtle breaks. It’s these breaks that prevent the chord strums from running into each other and creating sonic mush. The little gaps in sound keep a strumming figure sounding crisp and controlled.

To create a rhythm guitar part with some breathing space between the notes, you need to stop the strings from ringing momentarily. And I’m talking very small moments here  much smaller than can be indicated by a rest symbol in the music. You can stop the strings instantly with the left hand  letting the left hand go limp is the best and quickest way to stop a string from ringing far faster and more controlled than anything you can do with the right hand.

This left hand technique may seem out of place in a chapter devoted to the right hand, but it belongs here because it’s a coordinated effort between the two hands, which can only occur when the right hand plays.

Barre chords may be physically difficult to master for the beginner, but conceptually they’re very easy to understand. A barre chord is like a “human
capo,” in that it allows you to play familiar basic chords all over the neck of your guitar to change keys and transpose music by using only a few forms.Unlike a capo (a mechanical device that wraps around the neck at a particular fret), a barre chord can move quickly and in time with the music.

Because barre chords contain no open strings, you can move them around the neck, allowing you to play any chord by using just one fingering form. The letter names of the chord change (from A to B to C, and so on), but the fingering and the quality stays exactly the same. Because all the strings in a barre chord are fretted, you have more control over the sustain (or ringing out) of the strings, which is why barre chords sound less folky or cowboy-like than open-position chords.

Barre chords are harder to play than open-position chords  and even harder on an acoustic than an electric guitar. But luckily playing these chords gets easier quickly, and before you know it, you can’t even distinguish between a barre chord and an open-position chord. You simply chose the right chord for the job, and if it happens to be a barre chord and not an open-position chord, you just play it and don’t even think about the agony you endured while learning it.

When you write songs for yourself to sing, take into account the keys that suit your voice. Find your lowest note and your comfortable singing, and then any higher notes you could get by pushing your voice, and finally high notes that are reaction Relate the highest comfortable note to the scale of the key in which you want to write a song. Check to see if this note is scale, like the root, third or fifth. You can plan your melody to take that into consideration.

A well known recording trick is to pitch a song in a key that is slightly too high for the singer, so the straining for notes performance. Motown writers like Holland-Dozier-Holland used to pitch songs in keys that were just a bit too high for M Stubbs of The Four Tops, to bring out more passion in their voices. But if you’re going to sing your songs live, don’t use many  or you’ll never get through a set with your voice intact. The opposite effect is not so common, but worth conside something from Michael Stipe singing at the low end of his range, and as for Lee Marvin’s ‘Wanderin’ Star’. . . .With age, the voice naturally loses some of its range. This has had an interesting consequence for a singer-songwriter like relied on altered guitar tunings. Over the years her tunings have had to move down to match the drop in her voice  problems as the guitar strings have got slacker.