The fastest way to get all the chicks and impress your buddies at the same time is to sing while playing guitar. It might seem impossible when you first try it but it’s a hugely valuable skill to have. When starting a band, the singer is usually the most difficult player to find. If you happen to both sing and play guitar, you’ll be more likely to get the gigs in bands as so many guitarists will have skipped learning to sing.
Start with a very simple song. It can even be happy birthday. Figure out the chord changes that best fit the song and play through it once or twice to really get the chord changes into your head. Doing this not only develops your mind to memorize the changes but it also creates what is referred to as “muscle memory”. Muscle memory is basically the muscles being trained to feel out each chord and how it feels in your hand so you can confidently change to the proper chords without having to look down at the neck.
Next you’ll want to learn the lyrics to the song and make sure you pay attention to the starts and stops and variations in the singers’ voice. The first couple times you sing the song, you won’t be doing any guitar playing. You’ll simply sing along and get the vocal part down as well as you can. You want to go over the tune enough times so that your vocal inflections closely match those of the singer.
Now we get to put it all together. While playing thru the chord changes, we need to shift the chords to our brains subconscious so that you can play the song without concentrating on it. Next, just start singing at the appropriate part of the song and stumble through it. Each time you try the tune, you will make less vocal or guitar mistakes and the song will begin to sound better and better. It’s best to stick to one song until you can confidently play and sing through it. When you can do it well enough to perform it front of a live audience, you’re ready to move on and tackle the next song.
You’ll have to stick with it to train your brain to share its resources between your hands for playing and your mouth for singing and soon you’ll be able to play more intricate guitar parts while singing as well as singing more interesting vocal lines while playing guitar.
