# Guitar/Singing and Playing

There are some people who are blessed with a perfect singing voice and
excellent coordination, and they sing and play the guitar like
breathing. For other people, attempting to sing a single note causes
them to immediately lose the rhythm.

This section is intended to help people who already play the guitar and
gives advice on how to incorporate vocals into their performance .

## General Tips

**Just keep singing.** The worst thing you can do is stop, because
stopping teaches you to stop, and only singing teaches you to sing.
**Start simple.** Pick a song with simple chord progressions and simple,
on-beat strumming patterns. Start with a very slow tempo and gradually
speed up after a successful try.

## Other Artist\'s Songs

First learn to play the song really well. Listen and sing along with the
song, over and over again. After you have a good handle on both the
singing and guitar part, try putting them together. If this still proves
too difficult having both parts memorized, you may try just playing the
guitar while listening to the song, focusing your mind on listening to
the words as closely as you can until you can think about the words
while playing. This could take away some of the multitasking confusion
prevalent in first attempts.

If multitasking is not the issue but certain songs are still a
challenge, practice playing and singing the song without reference to
the original, and when you are sure that you have memorised the lyrics
and chord changes, practice along to the original version. Sometimes
doing this will help you master the harder sections.

Be sure to keep a copy of the words nearby while you are learning, in
case you forget a line or two. It is better to stumble through a few
lines and keep the song going rather than stopping in mid verse to try
to remember something.

## Your Own Songs

After writing the first few lines of a song and with an idea of how
you\'d like the song to be (having the basic chords and lyrics ), the
next step is to explore the possibilities. The idea is to try different
tones and melodies. When singing we can stretch words to fill up some
space. change any words and chords, or if creating a version of a known
tune, add a chord (or word), later you can decide which one sounds
better. Sometimes we subconsciously create music that is a copy of our
favourite artist; there\'s nothing wrong with this. After all, some of
the greatest names in music founded their early careers with covers of
the music of their heroes. After some progress show it to your friends
and ask them for some opinions. Sometimes we may also forget the melody
or chords, so a good tip is to record it. You don\'t need a professional
studio, just a normal microphone and a computer will suffice. In
relation to lyrics during songwriting, if a word doesn\'t sit well, look
for a synonym. Most of the time, it\'s the best solution.

