Guitar How-To » Electric Guitars

The New Gibson Firebird

gyorgy — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:38:34 +0000

The guitar was originally an acoustic instrument that was used as a solo instrument or to accompany singers in situations involving small audiences. The popularity of jazz bands featuring a guitar as part of the rhythm section led to efforts by guitar players to be heard above the other instruments.

The result of these efforts was an amplified guitar that did not sound like a loud acoustic guitar – it was a totally different instrument! So the electric guitar’s progress became a story of changes in the way the guitar is played and the way it sounds.

The Gibson company spends lots of money on innovations in guitar technology. An outstanding example is the Robot guitar which takes only ten seconds to tune itself. Now, a new Gibson electric guitar is born. Due out in Decemger, the new guitar looks the same on the outside as the nineteen sixties Firebird X but the inside is about as 2010 as you can get.

Powered by a mobile phone battery, the guitar has built-in effects and sounds numbering in the thousands. The new Firebird never goes out of tune because there is an automatic tuner built right into the neck.

Sounds great but many guitar players are complaining that the new guitar is too expensive and full of features no real, working guitar player would ever want. Also, there are doubts that those of us who will be able to afford the new Gibson will be able to buy parts for it in the future.

And another thing . . . not everybody sees built-in effects as a desirable feature. A lot of guitar players prefer their effects separate from the guitar so that they can change them.

More info on the electric guitar can be found in the first of my free PDF articles on the guitar called Learn How To Play The Electric Guitar.

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How To Get The Hank Marvin Guitar Sound

gyorgy — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:23:05 +0000

Hank Marvin is one of the original guitar heroes. He helped to popularize the Stratocaster and the electric guitar in general, back in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and is still an active and innovative professional guitarist.

Hank Marvin made good use of echo and vibrato to achieve a highly individual sound that many guitarists have tried to emulate. One way of copying the Hank Marvin sound is by using the Gemini III, a true-bypass analogue tone-shaper with digital switching that enables today’s guitarists to get the thin sound produced in the Abbey Road studios in the sixties.

Another way of getting the Hank Marvin sound is by using two digital delays as shown in this video:

How To Play Electric Guitar – Basic Techniques

gyorgy — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 05:05:56 +0000

If you are going to learn how to play electric guitar, you should know about the basic techniques that you will be learning. Some of these guitar techniques have been used for hundreds of years but others were developed by electric guitar players in jazz, country and rock styles. To learn more about these electric guitar techniques, do a search on YouTube for video clips of guitar players putting what they have learnt into action.

For an electric guitar player the first technique to learn is picking. This is an art that should be learnt carefully and practiced every day. For playing scales and fast passages you will need to learn how to use your pick in alternating up and down strokes. As a guide to beginning your alternate picking, just assume you are going to be using a down stroke for the downbeat and up strokes for the upbeat. You can depart from this rule as your technique gets better.

Some metal guitar players will just use down strokes in their playing to get a heavier feel to their playing. Johnny Ramone is said to have used the downstroke picking technique exclusively in his guitar playing.

For fast playing on a single string, rapid up and down strokes can be used. This is called tremolo and a great exponent of this technique is Dick Dale. So you can work on your fast playing using alternate picking or another technique you can learn is called sweep picking.

Sweep picking works well on arpeggios, making you sound like a real electric guitar hero. You begin by working out the shape you are going to play. Arpeggios are just chord shapes picked as single notes. Once you have got sweep picking under your belt you can move your arpeggio shapes up and down the fingerboard.

An important left hand technique for electric guitar players is vibrato. This is where you prolong a note by picking it and then rapidly moving the finger fretting the note from side to side. The same effect can be produced by using the tremolo arm on the electric guitar but, depending on how good your guitar is, this could lead to broken strings.

You can also use your left hand to “bend” notes up. Put your finger at any fret, pick the note and while the note is sounding, push the left hand finger up or down. You have just produced a higher note. With practice you will find many cool ways to use this technique, such as what is called the “unison bend”. This is when you do a bend up and at the same time play the note you are bending to on another string.

An important part of learning how to play electric guitar is using electronic effects. Electric guitar players have been making use of electronic effects since the early guitar groups of the sixties. Some effects were originally undesirable side effects of using electric guitars. Feedback is a good example. One minute guitarists are frantically figuring out ways to eliminate it, next minute it is a new tool for using electronics to produce music.

As the electric guitar has developed, the production of effects has become more sophisticated. Jimmy Page was a pioneer of the fuzzbox and playing the electric guitar with a violin bow, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix helped popularize the wah-a pedal and generations of electric guitar players have helped develop echo, phase shifting, sustain, chorus and a host of other effects.

If you do not have a guitar teacher, the internet is an excellent resource for anybody wanting to play the electric guitar. You will find many online guitar lessons, many of them free.

Here is a video featuring a lesson on how to play the intro to Jimi Hendrix’ Hey Joe . . .

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Make Your Own Electric Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:39:45 +0000

The idea of this article on making your own electric guitar is to give you a real, practical idea of the magnitude of the job and the skills, tools and raw materials needed to make your own electric guitar. The original electric guitar was a railway sleeper with strings. The designer, Les Paul, finally marketed his invention with a guitar shape because he felt that was what people expected of an electric guitar, not because any particular shape was really necessary to make music. One thing you need to get straight on now is you will not save money by making your own guitar. If you want a cheap electric guitar, there’s one with your name on it at your nearest music store.

So if you fancy yourself as a designer, you could try making an electric guitar to your own specifications but you will need certain materials to work with. The first thing you will need is a love of working with wood. The second is an arsenal of power tools like drills, routers, saws, and fiddly bits of hardware. Your environment is also crucial. You will need a workspace which is not too hot or cold or wet or dry!

When you design your home made electric guitar, you will need to know how long your neck is going to be and how far apart your frets will be. You will also have a choice of the basic shape of the head of your guitar – the part that holds the tuning pegs.

You probably already know that a pickup near the neck gives a deeper sound than a pickup close to the bridge. The placement and configuration of the pickups on an electric guitar is a science in itself.

Solid body electric guitars are usually made from maple, ash, mahogany, alder, basswood or nut because they possess proven sound qualities for guitar manufacturing. You will need to buy your wood from a sawmill in lengths rather larger than needed for guitar making, and you will need to cut the wood down to size before making your guitar. You will also need hardware like machine heads, pick guards, fret wire, bridge and whammy bar mechanism. You will also need hardware if you use a bolt-on neck.

For the electronic parts of your electric guitar, you will need pickups – single coil or humbucker, shielding to cut down hum and associated knobs, nuts and grommets.

The first job in making your own electric guitar is making a template of your instrument from plywood. The template is your exact pattern for your finished guitar, and needs to be crafted with care. If you find yourself cutting corners at this stage you may as well stop this project and continue with the home brewing you started two winters ago.

To finish off this short essay, I should mention that there exists another solution for people wanting to make their own electric guitar – the electric guitar kit. As an example, the Yamaha EG-112PF Electric Guitar Kit contains: EGP112 Electric Guitar 2 Single coil pickups 1 Humbucking pickup Vintage vibrato system 5 position pickup switch Tremolo bar Master Volume and Master Tone controls Maple neck Chrome closed tuning hardware Bolt-on neck construction Rosewood fingerboard Basswood body No coil split Scale length: 25-1/2″ (648 mm) Nut width: 1-5/8″ (41mm) Radius: 13-3/4 (350 mm) Frets: 22 Color: Black with white pick guard Guitar cable included GA10 Amplifier 7 watts of power 5″ speaker Volume, Tone Bass, Distortion / Clean controls Headphone jack Dimensions: 10.4″ (w) x 10.0″ (h) x 6.4″ (d) Complete Starter Kit Electronic tuner — YT120 Special Yamaha gig bag Extra set of strings Picks Strap with Yamaha logo String winder Capo Guitar method book. I found it on Amazon while looking through 1,320,000 results for a Google search on “electric guitar kits”! Best of luck!

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

Is it difficult to learn to play electric guitar?

gyorgy — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:42:18 +0000

There are different degrees of difficulty, and it is different for each person. Some people never get the hang of daily practice. Some people learn very slowly or extremely quickly. And there are many degrees in between all these extremes. But the truth is anybody can sit down and easily learn to play electric guitar. It takes practice and continuing interest to develop an understanding of your instrument. You can ask yourself what goals you have for yourself as a guitar player.

If you buy a decent guitar and find some lessons on the internet – either free or paid – then all you need to start to learn to play guitar is the time to practice. Sometimes it seems very slow and at other times understanding comes in a blinding flash.

When you are new to the guitar basic things like forming chord shapes with your left hand or strumming the strings with your right hand seem incredibly difficult. But after a while they become second nature. You may be able to manage learning the guitar by yourself without electric guitar lessons, but if you can afford one, a teacher would be good. Even for just a month or two.

You will encounter obstacles along the way, such as barre chords. Quite possibly nobody tells you that learning chords is actually painful. Well, it is, but it stops after a while. If barre chords are a major difficulty there are alternate chord fingering is you can use, but you will eventually need to come to grips with the real thing.

Another important thing to remember is that the internet has a wide range of free guitar lessons on such sites as YouTube. There are also many forums available for players of any kind of guitar. You don’t need to become a member straight away, you can just browse until you feel that you want to start posting. Then you will need to become a member.

If you want to learn a particular song, then the best thing to do is Google it. Include in your search whether you want lyrics, tabs or conventional music notation.

Here is a video on a very popular aspect of learning the electric guitar – power chords:

How To Play Lead Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:54:25 +0000

The lead guitar player in a band is the guy who plays the solos. They may be extended instrumental breaks in a song or just licks interspersed with the vocals. Many guitar students, after becoming competent in playing chords, feel that learning to play lead is the next step. This feeling is often inspired by watching a lead guitarist effortlessly play notes all over the guitar neck.

As well as learning the techniques involved in learning to play lead guitar, there’s the question in the beginner’s mind concerning how the lead guitarist knows which notes to play and whether he learns his solos off by heart or just improvises.

In order to play lead guitar you will know about the minor and major pentatonic scales and the so-called "blues scale". There is not a lot of basic knowledge needed, just a few notes, but you will need to learn where to find these sequences of notes in any position on the guitar fretboard and then have the time and energy to practice playing theses scales till you can play them in your sleep.

The pentatonic scale in A minor consists of the notes A C D E and G. Here is the tab for the A minor pentatonic at the fifth fret:

e———————-5-8-|

B——————5-8—–|

G————–5-7———|

D———-5-7————-|

A——5-7—————–|

E–5-8———————|

It might make it a little less daunting to see this task as learning the scale in three positions on the neck: the first, fifth and twelfth frets. So, they are your starting points.

Here is a diagram of the notes on the guitar to help you get started. It might be an idea to save it on your computer and print it out. Then you can mark the notes you are trying to memorize on the printout. Start by practicing the scales up and down for a day or two, then you can start to see how they sound if you mix them up.

And here is the tab for the blues scale in the key of A.

e————————————–5–8—-|

B——————————–5–8———-|

G———————–5–7–8—————-|

D—————–5–7————————-|

A——–5–6–7——————————-|

E–5–8—————————————-|

When you practice these scales, use a metronome and don’t bother trying to play fast. Just play cleanly with equal spaces between the notes. You can vary your picking strokes between alternating up and down, or all up strokes, or all down strokes.

Once you have got the feel of the blues scale you can start playing some licks. This YouTube video shows you some A minor pentatonic licks:

How To Play Electric Guitar

gyorgy — Mon, 02 May 2011 22:40:29 +0000

Maybe you have already made some attempts at playing the electric guitar. You probably even took some lessons on how to play electric guitar. The Guitar Hero game has given many people the wrong idea about how easy it is to learn the guitar. Maybe you have seen yourself with a red Stratocaster with intricate guitar solos streaming from it without any effort on your part. In your dream people would be impressed by your musical talent and they would give you the respect you deserve.

Maybe that dream got lost somewhere and your guitar is in the corner of your room looking at you resentfully. But sometimes the need to play music intrudes on our mundane lives, like the puppy that jumps on the bed at the worst possible time. Your imagination stirs again, this time tempered with. Now you can clearly see yourself hurrying home after spending the day at work or study. You go to that quiet place where you can be alone with your music.

Indeed, you do need a place where you can practice your electric guitar uninterrupted by friends and family. They will be happy to let you have your practice time once they see that you are serious about the electric guitar this time. You might need to take a look at how you make use of your time. You have a job or a college course to attend to. You need to take care of the environment you live in. There are TV shows and other leisure activities you need to do, after all you are not a monk. If you find you do not have quite as much time to give to learning how to play the electric guitar than you thought you had, do not despair. As you get better at it you will find that electric guitar practice and leisure activities are beginning to be the same thing!

So what shape are your electric guitar lessons going to take? Start with the most basic answer – get yourself a guitar lesson book. Seriously. It really might what you need. Some guitar students need the guiding hand of a real human teacher or to see their guitar lessons on video, but lots of people manage with printed instructions and music.

If you need the feeling of a teacher showing you how to play, but you do not have a local guitar teacher, then try some online electric guitar lessons. You just sit in your room and absorb the guitar lesson, and then practice. You do not waste your time commuting to a teacher who you might not enjoy learning from. Online electric guitar lessons are much more fun. You can get over any difficulties the way you want to in your own time. And it is a whole lot cheaper. You can get the most expensive online guitar lessons for a fraction of the price of a course of lessons with a guitar teacher!

You could purchase your guitar lessons in video format. They are available for guitar students of any age and stage of playing. With video guitar lessons you can go back and review your lessons as many times as you want.

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How to Buy a Good Electric Guitar

How To Play Purple Haze On Guitar

gyorgy — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 21:18:34 +0000

Purple Haze is one of your iconic sixties pieces. The distincive riff is not hard to learn, but you will probably have to wait for a while till the lyrics come back into fashion. The original recording of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix made use of an effects pedal called an Octavia which sounds notes one octave higher than they are played.

Here is a video showing you how to play Purple Haze . . .

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Learn How To Play The Electric Guitar Before You Get Old

gyorgy — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:56:24 +0000

If you have been thinking all your life about learning how to play the electric guitar and you’ve decided to put your dream into action you need to start looking for an electric guitar. Many seasoned guitar players recommend that you never buy new guitars or equipment. There are bargains to be found online and in the music stores, and there are so many new guitars that are of dubious quality that it is better to make it a policy to become better informed about your musical instruments so you can choose from the range of second hand guitars and equipment.

If you are forced to make buy a new electric guitar most of the top brands like Fender, Ibanez and Gibson have basic low price range models for beginners. Bear in mind that some cheap model guitars are difficult to keep in tune and this could take away from any advantage in price. You could take the route of simply getting the same kind of guitar as your favorite artist.

Here are some user reviews of guitars that might be helpful to guitar players of all persuasions bearing in mind that the reviewers might be somewhat inexperienced but enthusiastic guitarists.

The Vox Pathfinder is a great choice of amp for the new electric guitar player with gain and tremolo built in and enough loudness to satisfy any garage band. The basic guitar effects you need are reverb and distortion. There’s a pedal named Big Muff that does the job nicely and you won’t need to pay a fortune.

For transporting your guitar a hard shell case offers the best protection even though they cost a lot more than gig bags. When you buy your guitar, also get a range of picks in varying thicknesses.

Once you get your guitar and amp home and set up you will then realize that you are not a natural born guitar player and that you are in need of a lot of practice over a fairly considerable amount of time. You have about seven or so chords that you will consider the basic essential chords for the electric guitar player so start learning them and the songs that you can play using them. Also don’t forget to have fun fooling around with trying your chords in different positions on the guitar neck and making up tunes using your chords.

You need to strike a balance between learning other people’s music and creating music that feels good for you. Your own personal style can emerge from day one of electric guitar playing but it will undergo constant change as you learn more over the months and years ahead. But do not let anyone tell you to put your own style of playing on hold.

Whether or not you think that music theory and sheet music are boring and difficult, the truth is that no electric guitar player who has gone through the effort of learning that side of music has ever said, “gosh, I wish I hadn’t done it”. If you learn guitar without learning theory you will still end up being a guitarist but the sad fact is you will miss out on some gigs if you can’t read music.

When you learn to play electric guitar don’t be afraid of a challenge. Setting yourself goals to learn riffs and solos you like will keep you getting better. Keep in mind that you want to improve your technique and the way to do that is to try to play stuff that is a little beyond you at the moment. Part of working on your guitar technique is to keep your fingernails on your left hand short. Long nails stop you from fretting notes. To warm up for a practice session spend a few minutes going up the guitar neck in the first position playing frets 1 2 3 4 and then down 4 3 2 1 using alternating up and down strokes with the pick.

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How To Make Your Electric Guitar Sound Great

gyorgy — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 19:01:12 +0000

There are also rack-mounted effects which sit in a big case looking really cool an allow you to control them with a bunch of pedals. The effects of the rack-mounted variety are mostly of a better quality than your built in effects.

And then there’s the effects that sit on the floor with the pedals and allow you to keep your favorite effects as presets. Here is a video showing you the benefits of the pedal board.