Guitar How-To

Archive for the ‘Free Guitar Lessons’ Category

In many fields of endeavor you will find experts recommending that identifying a small technical problem and finding how to work on it is the best way to make progress. When you learn new guitar songs you will find that you can make one or two bars a special project that you can work on, whether it be a chord change, scale passage or whatever. If you are having particular problems changing between the C and the F chord, try slowing down the change to feel where the problem is in your hands and arms.

It doesn’t have to be a continuous fifteen minutes or half hour of going from one fingering to the next. You can make it interesting by making the change faster or slower, using the metronome and playing without any rhythm, but all the time learning how your muscles are rebelling against what your brain is trying to make them do.

This video is on chord changing but the general laid back approach to working with the guitar will help you in all aspects of your relationship with the guitar.

To become familiar with the guitar you will need to start simply. First you need to find someone who can show you the correct way to hold your guitar. It is absolutely essential that you get this right because if you don’t learn how to hold your instrument, you risk damage to your back or hands.

To get the feel of playing the guitar, play the open strings one at a time. Hold the pick firmly but without unnecessary tension as you pick the strings. Keep this in mind as you start playing fretted notes. The guitar strings are fretted by the tip of the finger. By the tip I mean the top of the finger if you are pointing upward. The finger presses slightly behind the frets, so if a guitarist says he is playing “at the first fret”, he means his finger is just BEHIND the first fret.

Repeat going through the open strings and the first fret position a few times. It’s not necessary to do this kind of exercise for hours – just for a few minutes each day during the first week or two of learning the guitar.

This video will help you with the next step – playing chords . . .

The two pentatonic scales we use in guitar solos are the major pentatonic and the minor pentatonic scale. The major pentatonic scale has five notes – the root note, the second note, the third, fifth and sixth. The minor pentatonic scale contains the root, flattened third, fourth, fifth and flattened seventh. In the key of C the major pentatonic scale is C D E G A and the minor pentatonic scale is C Eb F G Bb

The minor pentatonic scale is commonly used to solo over guitar chords. Mastering the knack of soloing with the minor pentatonic scale will add unimagined excitement to your hitherto dreary guitar solos. So how do we best exploit this handy guitar player’s tool? We are going to learn to how to play solos over major, minor and dominant chords.

Let’s take a common chord progression using the root, fourth and fifth notes of the scale. If we are playing a song in the key of C major, the I, IV and V chords are C, F and G major.

For every major chord there is a relative minor chord. You can best find the relative minor of a major chord on your guitar by finding the note that is three frets below the major chord’s root note.

Here’s a video guitar lesson on the minor pentatonic scale . . .

Let’s say we have a C major chord, the root note will be C. If you take the C note on the fifth string of the guitar which is at the third fret, three notes below that gives us the open fifth string which is the note A. So if you ask what the relative minor of C major is, the answer is A minor. So if you want to play a solo over a C major chord, you would use the A minor pentatonic scale. To play a guitar solo over an F chord, you would use the D minor pentatonic, and over the G major chord, the scale to use would be the E minor pentatonic.

It is a little simpler to explain how to solo over minor chords. You just play the E minor pentatonic over an E minor chord, a D minor pentatonic scale over a D minor chord, and so on.

For playing over dominant seventh chords you would play the relative minor pentatonic scale or you could use the minor pentatonic one tone below the root of the dominant seventh chord.

To simplify things you could just use the A minor pentatonic for all the chords in the key of C. As with all musical theory, converting these ideas into practice is easier than explaining them.

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