Guitar How-To » Guitar Lessons For Beginners

How To Get The Most From Guitar Practice

gyorgy — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 07:57:26 +0000

Effective guitar practice depends on using your guitar tuner and metronome for every practice session. It is not good to keep practicing when your guitar is out of tune, just because it’s a bother to take the time to tune it. It is also a drag using the metronome, but if you are not using it, you are not playing the music! Set the metronome on a low speed, and work up to higher speeds as you improve.

Another helpful guitar practice tip is to record yourself often. It will show you where you need to improve. Somehow, we can overlook mistakes and weak areas while we are playing, but listening to a recording shows you where you are going wrong.

Every guitar player should be aware of the basic principles of muscle memory. Guitar practice is repetition, and if we are repeating mistakes, we are trying to play too fast!

While you should never rush your guitar playing, you should always be looking for ways to increase your speed naturally. Repeated practice using the metronome is the key, but you can choose exercises that include small obstacles that will help you improve if you work on them a lot. You can skip strings, slow your picking down to below your comfort level and concentrate on each note, vary your playing between alternate picking, up strokes or down strokes. And remember to relax at all times.

You can also learn new chord shapes or scale patterns. Adding new elements to your practice will keep it fresh. There are many chord shapes,and the taking the trouble to learn as many as you can will expand your knowledge of music. The same goes for scale patterns. The study of the patterns of notes in different positions on the guitar will give you a complete understanding of your instrument.

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Learn to play slide guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:47:06 +0000

Slide guitar is a facet of guitar playing that looks very sexy and sounds good with very little effort. In the early 1900′s dangerous looking dudes apparently loved to produce a wailing effect from their guitars by running a knife blade along the strings with their left hands instead of fretting the strings with their fingers. Some really outrageously dangerous dudes would break the neck off a bottle and slip it on their third or fourth fingers. If they were not careful how they placed the jagged end of the bottleneck, the guitar strings were not the only things doing the wailing.

One of the old-time bottleneck guitar players was Sylvester Weaver who in 1923 recorded a tune called “Guitar Rag”. Some years later Bob Willis And The Texas Playboys recorded the piece under the name “Steel Guitar Rag” which became a staple in the country music repertoire. Weaver’s version of the song was played on a guitjo – a guitar with a banjo sound, or a banjo with a guitar neck – and was the first recording of slide guitar playing. In the late nineteen sixties Duane Allman began playing slide guitar using a medicine bottle on his ring finger.

Anyhow, that’s how slide guitar started. So basically, instead of playing chords, you accompanied your blues song with a solo played by sliding your slide up and down the strings. If you wear your slide on your pinky you can lift it away from the strings so you can use your other fingers to fret chords between slide solos.

Slides for guitar playing are available at your local music store in metal which has strident sound or glass which is smoother. If you want people to think of use as really bluesy and old-timey, use a lipstick holder as a slide.

It is found by many slide guitarists to be a good idea to use open tunings for slide guitar. In case you do not know, an open tuning is where your guitar is tuned to sound a chord. Here are some of the more common open tunings used by slide guitar players:

Open D: d a d f# a d
Open G: d g d g b d
Open E: e b e g# b e
Open A: e a c# e a e OR e a e a c# e

When you are playing slide guitar you will need to damp strings as you go so you do not play unwanted notes. You can use the fingers of your left or right hand to do this but developing the technique will be your biggest challenge. Once you have developed some flair with the slide you might want to so some experimenting with some elctronic effects.

To play slide guitar, you place the slide above the fret. One technique you will need to work on for maximum expressiveness is vibrato. You play vibrato by moving the slide up and down the guitar neck in repeated small movements. Practice on long notes with your hand relaxed.

You will probably be wanting to head over to YouTube to check out some slide guitar videos, but I have included one here which gives you a lesson in basic slide guitar in standard tuning.

How To Play Cool Riffs On The Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 07:26:57 +0000

To many people cool riffs are what guitar playing is all about. I guess most people would like to pick up a guitar and casually play a riff that was part of the soundtrack to the life of at least one person in the room. Of course, learning to play riffs on the guitar is not the same as learning the guitar. If you have learned to actually play the guitar you have the knowledge and the expertise to write your own riffs and songs. But maybe that is too much trouble.

This brings us to the first condition necessary for impressing your friends and acquaintances with your guitar riff playing: do not try this in the presence of someone who can actually play the guitar. If you are seeking to be remembered as person who has interests other than your clothes and hair, and if you want to be seen as having hidden depths in your soul, playing your riffs in the presence of a real guitar player might not have the desired effect.

You see, if you attract the attention of a genuine guitarist he is going to want to see what else you can do. He is going to want to swap licks and riffs with you. He will start a conversation about amps and Strats, stomp boxes and coaxial cables. This is not a good conversation for you to hold your end of up. In fact no holding of ends should be attempted, just mutter something about being out of practice because of a skiing accident and back off.

So we have established that any guitars you find lying around should be the property of people who once wished to learn to play but stopped. Okay, no problem, there are many such guitars lying around. So now we know the ground rules, where do we learn the riffs? Assuming that you cannot read music, your choices lie in the directions of learning by ear and learning to read guitar tabs.

Usually learning guitar riffs by ear needs some practice with the guitar but if you have the time to spend a non music reading faker like yourself can to learn guitar riffs by ear using an electronic guitar tuner. The tuner you want has a visual interface that tells you the names of notes being played into your computer’s microphone. You can download these guitar tuners from the internet. Just do a search for free guitar tuners.

This is a way for a real musician to learn a small section of music quickly but I do not seriously believe a non-guitar player will really have any success with this method. The realistic course is to download the tabs to your riff and learn to read tabs. It is not difficult and it will help if you download one of the free tab editors like Powertab. These play the music and a cursor follows the music on the tab. Another good tab editor is Tabledit. Guitarists who make their own tabs publish their work for free on the net as files that can be played and read in Tabledit or Powertab. If you seriously just want to learn to play cool riffs this is your best option.

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How To Hold The Guitar Pick

gyorgy — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:14:01 +0000

Learning how to hold the guitar pick is just as important as learning how to hold the guitar. If you are just starting out as a guitar player, buy about a dozen plectrums of different thicknesses and shapes and sizes, and experiment till you feel comfortable.

How To Choose Guitar Software

gyorgy — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 07:12:54 +0000

The standard you should use when it is time to choose guitar software is how you feel about a particular program. The computer age has given us a whole range of software to be used in conjunction with acoustic or electric guitars. Now you have programs that help you learn how to play the guitar. There are programs that help you write songs and there is software that turns your computer into a guitar amp with a multitude of effects. There are also many computer chord dictionaries. Deciding which guitar software to buy can seem daunting given the range that is out there, but your own personal preference should be your guide. The advantages of one software over another are not important if you do not feel happy or confident using it.

If you want to play electric guitar in your home with all the effects you need plus some vintage guitar amps, many guitar players swear by “Guitar Rig” by Native Instruments. Guitar Rig is and amplifier and effects emulator that has a foot controller with an assignable expression pedal. It will give you distorted sounds and clean sounds with many modulation possibilities. Any enthusiastic electric guitar student should download the trial version of this software and fool around with it. You will learn alot. You can play your guitar using simulations of some classic amps with simulated cabinets and simulated distortion pedals to satisfy your curiosity about guitar software and the various effects available.

As for teaching software, Guitar Method Version 4 is supposed to be the most popular CD-ROM for novice guitarists in the world. It contains well over one hundred-and-fifty lessons including over fifty videos which cover the complete spectrum of learning how to play guitar. You will learn all the exciting stuff like power chords, strumming patterns, finger-picking and riffs. You can practice playing any song at any tempo using the variable speed MIDI tracks. If you want to learn to read sheet music you can, or you can take the course using tabs. You also get an automatic tuner, a metronome and a chord dictionary.

If you are interested in guitar teaching software compare Guitar Method 4 with Teach Yourself To Play Guitar and Interactive Guitar. Teach Yourself to Play Guitar by Alfred Publishing gives you the basics needed to become a real guitarist without taking expensive lessons. You get to learn chords and scales, how to read tabs and music from several different genres. Interactive Guitar by SOS Network claims it will teach you to “think musically”. You can compare your playing with some samples and with the program’s virtual fretboard you can see the names of the notes and fingering.

For chord software chordAlchemy by tonalAlchemy is the top of the range. It allows you to see what chord you are playing. You can generate variations on chords, add a bass note or eliminate the root note. As you make changes to chords the program generates the revised diagram. You can print or play any chord you generate. chordAlchemy combines sophisticated technology with ease of use for people who do not consider themselves computer-minded.

A long list of software with their various advantages will just wear you out so I have listed what many guitar players consider to be the top programs. Now that you have some idea of what guitar software contains you should be able to choose much more easily.

Learning How To Play Blues Guitar – The Basics

gyorgy — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 07:06:52 +0000

Nobody ever talks about this, but when you learn how to play blues guitar you only really ever learn to accompany one tune. We talk about our blues tradition and how blues players have to pay their dues and such, but the truth is all blues songs sound much the same. This relieves blues guitar players and singers of the burden of making up new, totally original blues music. If they did nobody would want to listen. But the simplicity of the blues is what makes it great.

With blues guitar music the keyword is tradition. Blues music was originally passed on between family members and friends, and the need for originality was not felt to any great extent, so a solid form was established for blues songs. This article is meant to be an introduction to the basic principles of blues guitar playing. These principles have more to do with letting go of ideas rather than taking more ideas on board.

So where do you begin to learn how to play blues guitar? If you do not already know how to read sheet music or tab, find a tutorial on guitar tabs. This is the fastest written guitar music to learn and any blues music you need will be found in tab. Also you need to know what chord charts are, and how to read them. Neither chord charts or tab is hard to learn. What will take some practice is developing your ear so that you can learn riffs and licks from records.

So, when you try learning other blues guitar players’ solos remember the art of blues guitar playing is in how you play the notes, not necessarily in which notes you play. This leaves you free to experiment and not to worry too much about getting the notes totally right the first time.

Along with developing your ear, you need to learn the minor pentatonic scale in the key of E. The notes are E G A B D. You will learn the scale in other keys, but start in E and that will give you some musical background to your learning blues guitar solos from records. Once you start playing the scale you will recognize where that bluesy feel comes from.

When you listen to blues records, pay attention to how blues guitar players make use of the pentatonic notes, and when you become familiar with the scale yourself, you will also hear when they do variations and departures from it. Blues guitar solos are often made up from a blend of the minor pentatonic and the major pentatonic scales.

If you combine the scales and add the “Devil’s note” – the flatted fifth, you will get these notes to play around with in the key of E: E F# G G# A Bb B C# D.

The other basic thing you need is an understanding of the I V IV chord progression. This chord progression is used in many, many modern songs. For blues guitar you will be using I V IV7 or I7 V7 IV7. The 7′s mean you will be using seventh chords.
If you stick to the key of E you will be playing E B A, E7 B7 A7 or E B A7.

Once you are comfortable with the chord progression, you will need to learn it in all keys.

How To Sing And Play Guitar At The Same Time

gyorgy — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 06:44:43 +0000

There are two elements to a guitar song. The chords and the lyrics. Each of these lyrics has to be inside you so that you can sing the words or play the chords without thinking. There is no trick to it – it is just a matter of knowing your stuff. Let’s start with the guitar chords. One thing that will help you know your guitar chords really well is to learn to play in time. Don’t be happy with just more or less knowing the fingerings for the chords, but work hard at getting your chords playing a steady four beats to the bar. Use a metronome, you can download them for free from the net. Don’t be easy on yourself with this, learn the fingerings and the beat simultaneously. Don’t spend too much time on learning the fingering alone. Having more than one element to learn and putting quality into the learning will speed up your chord learning rather than slowing it down.

Learning the words to the song is easier on the surface, but once again, quality is the key. Learn HOW to sing the song, work on your phrasing. This will help to burn the words into your soul.

How To Make Your Guitar Practice Time Effective

How To Decide Between The Acoustic Or Electric Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 06:35:13 +0000

A natural question for people new to the guitar is which is better to learn to play on – the electric or acoustic. Many people are impressed by electric guitar players and the effects they can produce, and the truth is the electric guitar is a little easier to play than the acoustic. When you are starting out it’s surprising how forgiving the electric guitar is of the beginner’s lack of expertise.

The acoustic guitar, whether steel string or nylon string, needs a surer touch. This means that the learner acoustic guitar player will need to practice slowly to find a way of hitting the note every time.

If you need to decide whether to learn on an acoustic or electric guitar the answer is, follow your own musical preferences. It’s true that if you start with an electric guitar you will find the acoustic a little tricky to play but if you have had a year or so playing the electric, learning the acoustic guitar will just be a labor of love.

This free guitar lesson shows you how to play open chords on the acoustic or electric guitar:

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Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:14:11 +0000

Photo by itzafineday
Fingerstyle guitar lends itself beautifully to playing Celtic music, even if you are not a guitar virtuoso. Before we get too far into “Celtic guitar” let us make it clear that until the nineteen fifties the guitar was not a Celtic musical instrument. What we know as Celtic music is another we have found of expressing our twenty-first century feelings using the scales and techniques of the past.

The traditional music of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and Wales is the broad source for modern Celtic music players with some taking an interest in music from Galicia and Asturias in Spain.

The rise of Celtic fingerstyle guitar music came with the popularity of English folk songs and the need felt by some musicians to present them to a modern audience. During the nineteen sixties future giants of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar like Martin Carthy and Davy Graham began to influence the folk music scene. These guitar players arranged Celtic tunes originally composed for bagpipes, harp or tin whistle. This interest in Celtic music led to the name of Irish composer Turlough O’Carolan becoming a familiar name to folk music fans.

For anyone looking for CDs of Celtic fingerstyle guitar music, some artists to look for are Pat Kirtley, Steve Baughman, David Surrette, Alan Stivell and El McMeen. Some groups engaged in putting traditional music into a modern setting are English groups Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Steeleye Span, and Irish groups Planxty and Clannad. These groups began in the nineteen sixties to add electric instruments and a modern beat to ancient acoustic music with varying degrees of success.

The challenge for a modern fingerstyle guitar player to arrange Celtic music for the guitar is to somehow evoke the mood of Celtic music. The most obvious way to do this is to tune your sixth string down to D. If you do this and play a D minor chord you will feel already the new mood that the droning sound evokes. You can also go a step further and tune your guitar to the D-A-D-G-A-D tuning. Playing in this tuning emphasizes the droning effect with the strings ringing in sympathy with each other as you play. Using hammer-ons and pull-offs helps to create a similar feel to the trills in pipe and fiddle tunes.

Before you go looking for Celtic style music to play, let us think about what kind of technique you can use to make the most of the possibilities offered by the guitar. It is probably best to use the alternating bass style fingerpicking as a basis for working out arrangements of Celtic music. In this style your thumb keeps the rhythm going by playing alternating bass patterns on the lower strings, and your index and middle fingers play the melody and grace notes on the higher strings. The use of the D tunings often renders conventional pattern picking unnecessary because the ringing and droning strings often fill the “empty spaces” that bass and fill notes eliminate in blues or folk playing.

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Fingerstyle Guitar – A Brief Tutorial

Learn To Play Beatles Songs On The Acoustic Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 05:42:41 +0000

Back in the 1960s the Beatles were musical amateurs. They wanted to play rock ‘n roll, but the training that is available to us now was not available to them. Consequently they experimented a lot when they were writing their songs. So they did a lot of unmusicianly things like putting seven or eight chords in every song. Fortunately later generations preferred to learn the basics of blues and rock ‘n roll rather than imitate the Beatles’ songs were written.

The Beatles unique way of writing songs made it difficult for other people to produce cover versions. It’s understandable because the Beatles learnt to write songs mainly by exploring the possibilities of their guitars without much guidance. Another aspect of popular music that the Beatles pioneered was meaningless lyrics. Previously to the Beatles there was a kind of unwritten agreement that the words in songs had to make some kind of sense. The Beatles changed all that. This hasn’t proved a problem for future generations because we have no problem singing songs that have no meaning, we can just go ahead and do it.

Rather than dwell on the complexity of the Beatles songs, let’s find some songs that are easy to sing and easy to play on the acoustic guitar. Some easy Beatles songs are You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, Across the Universe, I’m A Loser, Eleanor Rigby and Please Please Me.

A few of the Beatles songs that have proved to be popular amongst acoustic guitar players are, Get Back, Norwegian Wood, With A Little Help From My Friends, Blackbird, Revolution, And I Love Her, Girl, Her Majesty, Here Comes The Sun, Hey Jude, I’m Looking Through You, I’ve Just Seen A Face, Julia, Long Long Long, Lovely Rita, Mother Nature’s Son, Rocky Raccoon, Till There Was You, Two Of Us, Yesterday, and I Will.

A lot of people wanting to learn to play the Beatles songs on acoustic guitar have trouble finding books of sheet music or tab that are both accurate and helpful. Hal Leonard’s Best of the Beatles For Acoustic Guitar goes some way towards fixing this problem by giving us accurate translations of the Beatles music with excerpts from the songs. The book not only gives us the acoustic guitar accompaniment to the songs but also George Harrison’s lead guitar, with both guitars played at normal speed and also slowed down. There is another book which might be helpful, it’s called The Beatles for Acoustic Guitar. It has guitar tab for thirty popular Beatles songs. If you are interested in these or any books of acoustic guitar arrangements of Beatles’ songs they are readily available from music stores or online from sites like ebay or amazon.

The video I’ve included is of a strongly-voiced dude singing a fine acoustic rendition of In My Life by The Beatles.

Technorati Tags: Beatles’ songs, acoustic guitar