How to Play Like Freddie King — Signature Licks and Style Guide
July 22, 2026
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Staring at a screen while your fingers wrap around mahogany and steel strings can be isolating. You find one tutorial video and attempt to mirror their hand positioning before your recommended videos populate a think piece about guitar gear or someone cutting a squirrel in half.
Sure, you don’t have to worry about physically making it to guitar class, but when there’s no one commanding you to pick your axe up, excitement turns into dread rather quickly. After a few weeks, you go from enjoying the fresh optimism of new guitar smell to lamenting about your fingers hurting and still not knowing how to play an F chord.
Instead of throwing your guitar into hopeful retirement and taking up fishing, changing how you structure your time play guitar can help.
You won’t improve overnight. No one will. Practice is done in the small moments. Most aspiring guitarists give up because they let life get in the way of picking up the instrument. Sure, maybe you picked up when you felt “creative,” but how often do you feel creative? Twice a month? Spend 15-minutes a day or an hour a day, but allow yourself to play guitar.
Setting some time on your calendar can helps you stay on track and on schedule. Make sure you put that calendar event at a time that works for you.
Leave your guitar out where you’ll see it every time you walk into the room. When you glance over and see those strings, that’s the visual cue. When it’s tucked away, and out of sight, the chances of being motivated to play are low.
When it’s time to practice, get rid of the distractions. Silence your phone while you’re still using the device you need for online guitar lessons. Getting pinged by a text message in the middle of tapping your foot to learn a new groove is a surefire way to kill your focus. You won’t feel motivated to learn guitar if you can’t practice with intention.
Learning guitar is great, but learning guitar to play something specific is better. When you’re wandering from lesson to lesson with no end goal, your brain gets fuzzy on what success looks like. Many beginners get comfortable just “noodling” around on the guitar. Literally playing the same three riffs they learned in their first week over and over because it sounds good. Eventually, you want to stop sounding good and start sounding great. You have to be motivated to stretch yourself.
If you know what you want to learn, you know when you’re there. Create short-term goals that you can accomplish in a week, and long-term goals you can hit by the end of the month or year. Getting specific with your goals will sharpen your focus when choosing what online guitar courses to take and what songs to learn.
Nothing zaps your motivation to learn guitar faster than feeling like you’re not improving. The trouble with guitar is that you don’t notice your milestone achievements day-to-day. Maybe you practiced that funky rhythm for 30 minutes yesterday and another 30 minutes today. It feels like you should be further along than you are.
Take videos of yourself playing that tricky passage you are working on today. Sound awful? Out of time? Maybe your fingers are a little clunky? Save that video. Practice some more. Maybe take a guitar lesson online. Then, two weeks from now, take another video of yourself playing the same passage.
Sure, you have improved! But were you honestly expecting to sound like Johnny Ripper when you first started? Tracking your progress with videos is like holding up a mirror to your success.
Another easy trick to measure your progress is taking advantage of free online guitar lessons to learn specific exercises. If you’re practicing your chords for fun, take note of what you can play at and gradually increase the tempo. Looking back at your notes, you’ll see you went from playing a song at 80 BPM to 95 BPM in just one week. That’s quantifiable progress!
Grab a notebook and write down four things at the end of every practice session:
When you’re feeling unmotivated to practice, trick your brain into practicing by convincing yourself you’re only going to play for five minutes. More often than not, your head will get over the hurdle of wanting to pick up a guitar, and before you know it, you’ve surpassed your 5-minute timeline.
The “YouTube hole” is real. You spend half an hour watching guitar tutorials and five minutes picking your guitar. What’s worse is that with online lessons, you learn in a fragmented way. You learn blues guitar one day and metal the next, and jazz tablature after that. Learning online is hard if you don’t have someone putting you on the right path.
Learning guitar online gives you the flexibility of learning whenever you want, but take the time to find a teacher who can replicate the classroom feel through a screen. Watch for instructors who teach you why you are learning certain scales or chords in certain positions. Learn why your index finger needs to be on the first fret of the G string.
Understanding what your fingers are doing will make practice time that much more engaging. Instead of trying to remember random finger positioning, you’ll start to understand the patterns that exist all across the fretboard.
Your brain is wired to focus on the negative. If you botched a riff you’ve been practicing for weeks, you’re likely going to focus on that one mistake you made 15 times instead of how many times you played it right.
Celebrate the small stuff. Finally got that barre chord down without the high E string buzzing? Buy yourself a new set of expensive guitar strings to feel awesome about your accomplishment. Learned how to play through a whole song without stopping? Order that sick banner to hang over your practice station. Share your accomplishments with friends. I bet they’ll say something like “Hey man, that rhythm you were working on sounds really tight.”
Hearing that can give you the extra boost you need to smash through the wall for your next week of practice.
Between improvising over backing tracks and scrolling through Facebook, there’s only a 15-minute skill gap between you and your guitar hero. At The Shred Shed, we pride ourselves on providing that stepping stone through our online guitar lessons.
Whether you’re a “Plateaued Pentatonic Guitar Player” trying to shake up your sound or you’re a “Time-Crunched Professional” who works nine-to-five, we’ve got a 15-minute guitar solo for you. We don’t care if you’re holding piccolo guitar picks or Iron Crosses. Guitar is for everyone, and we’re here to teach you how to have fun with it. Subscribe today, and Let’s start shredding!
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