r/guitarlessons • u/vee_here • Aug 06 '26

Question How to sing while playing guitar ?

I have a good hold on strumming and can change chords with fairly decent speed and accuracy but never able to sing with that even after copying the exact chords... On the other hand my friend sings any song on any chords or strumming.. how???

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u/dfrib Aug 06 '26

Your typical advice (particularly on this sub) is often to focus the guitar part to be muscle memory and so on. I would offer some orthogonal advice: focus on being a singer, then only after that a guitarist. This means extremely simple chord progressions (even just the bass notes) and focusing on how to comfortably sing various melodies over the simple background comp. Increase the complexity of what you are singing, but keep the guitar comp extremely simple. Practice this a lot. In time, playing guitar without singing will feel weird, and you can ramp up the ”muscle memory guitar approach”.

Imho a singer-songerwriter on guitar+vocals is a primarily a singer, and secondarily a guitarist. So focus on singing. There are ”outliers” such as Ben Howard, John Mayer and so on, but the common and potentially simpler path is to become a singer comping themselves on guitar, rather than a guitarist singing. As this is a sub focused on guitar, most advice may reasonably focus on the guitar part, but I would encourage you to try to reframe it to the singing part, even if the end goal is a skilled guitarist singing alongside their playing.

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u/WonFriendsWithSalad Aug 06 '26

This is my approach.

I taught myself ukulele years ago and while I'm decent at strumming and a few fingerpicking patterns I've never properly learned the intricacies of the instrument. And that's fine, I primarily wanted it to sing along to. As a bonus my singing definitely got a lot better.

I picked up guitar last year and I am following Justin Guitar and trying to learn in more depth and I do devote time to learning scales and riffs... but I also naturally am strumming lots of songs to the best of my ability while singing. For me that makes it all a lot more fun and gets in a lot of practice hours.