Ultimate Guide on How To Sing And Play Guitar At The Same Time
Learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time. Singing requires a lot of concentration and coordination all by itself, so it stands to reason that adding another musical instrument to the mix requires additional skills.
Demonstration video by Ken Tamplin on how to sing and play guitar at the same time
As you learned in the music demonstration video, there are three components to learning how to sing and play guitar at the same time – or playing any other instrument and singing at the same time, for that matter:
Singing +
Playing guitar +
Keeping time in your head
If you have not played an instrument and sang at the same time, and you want to learn how to do it, start like this:
- Pick a very easy song without too many changes.
- Learn how to sing it without thinking about it. Singing the song should be automatic.
- Learn how to play the song with your instrument without thinking about it, this too, should be automatic.
- Introduce the 1/4 note metronome in your head and start counting.
- While counting, start playing the song with your instrument. So, play and count at the same time.
- Once you can play your instrument and count automatically, start to mix in your vocals.
How to add music timing in your head…
Ken Tamplin singing and playing guitar
Learn what “hits” or where the guitar falls on the beat counting 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.
Does the guitar chord get struck on 1, 2, 3 or 4? OR does the guitar get struck on the “and” of 1 “and” 2 “and” 3 “and” 4.
Start easy with just a verse playing this over and over until you understand where the “hits” from the guitar fall.
Then stop playing and do this exact same thing with the vocal-lyrics. On what “hit” do they fall?
Once you feel somewhat comfortable with this, pick back up the guitar and re-familiarize yourself with the “hits” again and start slowly adding the vocals to the guitar playing.
You will find that much of the time the “words” of the song fall on the same “hit” as the guitar. Sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes they will be “ahead” of the guitar.
Sometimes the guitar will be “ahead” of the vocal-lyric.
But counting them while you play will help tremendously with understanding where the guitar and vocals fall and on what “hit.”
As you practice this, it becomes easier and easier to separate them in your mind much like a drummer when learning how to “kick” on the “1” and hit the snare on the “2” and so on.
If you can sing your song really well and you can play the guitar really well, you will be surprised at how quickly you will learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time.
When you enroll in Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, we will get your singing skills to the point where they are so high, that you won’t even be thinking about the technique of singing, you will just “do it” automatically. You WILL learn how to sing good! And you will also get a bonus lesson on how to play guitar chords when you buy the whole course – check out the video: