Master Playing With This Amazing Guitar Lesson Book

In order to quickly learn, guitar lessons should provide you with many basics. Like, for instance one of our students asked this question: when I play chords I always touch the strings that I should be playing open. How can I avoid this?

Well, touching the wrong strings when you play chords is a common
problem that many beginners face when learning the guitar. Here are some simple solutions.

1. Try and press your fingers straight down. Your finger should be
at a 90-degree angle with the string. This means that only the tip
of your finger should be connecting with string.

2. Are your fingernails short? If your fingernails are long, your
fingertip will not be able to sit on the string and your fingers
will touch the other strings on the guitar.

3. Place your thumb directly on the back of the neck of your
guitar. This puts your hand in a good position to keep your fingers
clear of the wrong strings.

4. Practice with chords you find easy. Look at how your hand sits
when you play these chords. Try to use the technique that you use
on easier chords with more difficult chords.

5. Using a capo at higher frets can make it easier on your fingers
as the frets are closer together. However for people with big hands
this can make it more difficult. So experiment with a capo to see
if it helps you.

Each person has different size hands, finger shape and flexibility.
For this reason there is no universal rule that will change your
playing to avoid touching the wrong strings when playing. You
should practice chords as much as you can until you feel confident
and comfortable with them.

So, while practice will help you learn, guitar lessons will  give you input for proper procedures. It is very important to learn right way from beginning because wrong habits often stay for a long time.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Technorati Tags: How To Play Chords, Learn Guitar Lessons

One of the most important things you’ll ever do in your music
career is buy a guitar. I’m often asked to give people advice about
how to find a good guitar.  The fact is that there is a LOT that
goes into buying a guitar, way too much to put in one Newsletter, so I’ll give you some basic tips in this issue and tell you about other things I think are important in coming editions.

When you’re buying a guitar you have to do your homework. As a beginning guitar player it’s easy to get confused with all the
information and advice that is available. There are a lot of places
you can get information and you should check them all. Guitar
magazines are a good place to find prices and reviews on different
models of guitars. You can also get information at your local music store.

Another great tool is the internet – you can get information on the manufacturers, search for other guitarist’s reviews and opinions and find the best prices online.

Remember that a lot of the information and opinions that you will
find will be biased. A salesman in a music store wants you to buy
the brand of guitar that HE SELLS, so make sure you read reviews and opinions from independent sources.

I am often asked about buying a guitar through an online auction
site like eBay. You can find auctions where guitars sell for
incredibly low prices; but I don’t recommend that you buy this way because you really need to play a guitar before you buy it,
particularly at this stage in your music career.

Once you’ve got the background knowledge that you need, you should make a short list of guitars that you are interested in and set a budget for yourself. THEN STICK WITH YOUR BUDGET! Don’t let salespeople talk you into spending more money than you planned.

Trying out the guitars you have short listed can be intimidating
for beginners. It is important to remember that you are not in a
guitar store to show everyone how good a guitar player you are -
you are there to decide whether the guitar on your list is right
for you.

One of the most important things about a guitar is how it “feels”
when you play it. There are also mechanical things to check. Check the frets for buzzing by playing each one. Make sure that the neck is not warped by looking down it as if you were sighting a gun. Check that all of the volume and tone controls work.

It is also a good idea to take an experienced guitarist along with
you when you are looking at guitars. Not only will they be able to
offer helpful advice, they will be good moral support when it’s
time to pick up the guitar and play it in public.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: buy guitar online, buying a guitar, tips for buying a guitar

Like any other start, beginning guitar lessons will give you answer to many questions that will make you more comfortable with learning process. So, first get familiar with theory and than start practicing.

One of the first questions people ask is: “I find it hard to change between chords and when I do it sounds bad. Because of this I can’t make my guitar sound good. What can I do?”

This is the most common problem for beginner guitarists. Don’t
worry, nearly every professional guitarist has had this problem!.

The best way to avoid this is to start with the easiest chord
changes for your fingers. Also, there is a lot to be said for
slowing down everything that you are trying to learn.

Before you try playing along with your favorite band, practice the chords and chords changes by yourself until they are flowing nicely.

Play things slowly to get accuracy and once you have that you can start speeding up. Playing things at full speed without first learning
them properly will make your chord changes sound muddy and unclear.

If you start slowly and build your chord changes progressively you
will find that you can improve your playing by staying motivated and beginning guitar lessons will give you solid foundation for that.

Remember, like anything, playing the guitar takes time and effort.
You can’t expect to wake up and play like a pro. If you keep
working on it you will improve your playing and achieve what you
want on the guitar.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: Beginning Guitar Lessons, change between chords

Any professional guitarist will tell you: Discipline is very
important when it comes to practicing the guitar. Learning to play
the guitar is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done in
my life but it was also one of the hardest. The reason that I
became good with my instrument is simple. I practiced! Not only did
I practice, I practiced a lot; every day in my bedroom.

I spent most of my time practicing the fundamentals. Things like
running up and down scales, changing between chords and trying to improve my repertoire of songs. Sometimes it was easy to make time to practice because I was in a good mood and I really wanted to play.

At those times I could spend hours just listening to how cool it sounded when I changed from the chord D to the chord G. But on other days, when my mood wasn’t so good, it was my discipline and desire to play and improve that made me practice and develop as a player.

There are two main factors when it comes to discipline in practice.
They are practicing regularly, and practicing well. Both of these
are important points.

Practicing regularly is the most obvious and easy thing to do.
Basically, you should play the guitar every day. These don’t need
to be mammoth, three hour long sessions, 30 minutes will generally be fine if you are focused during that time. Doing regular, small amounts of practice throughout the week is far better than doing one or two long sessions.

I know that in a busy life it can be hard to make the time to
practice but to be honest, 30 minutes a day is achievable for
anyone. There is no set time that is best for practice but I prefer
to do it in the evening simply because I find that playing the
guitar is a relaxing way to wind down after a stressful day.

Practicing well is a much harder thing to do and there are many
reasons for why this is the case. Before I go on, I just want to
say that bad practice affects even the most experienced player but
it can be overcome with some help. Here are some of the problems that you may have when practicing and some useable solutions:

1) Problem: Getting stuck in a rut. This is a very common problem that affects nearly all guitarists at some point in time. You end up playing the same thing over and over every time you play and you can’t seem to move on to anything new.

Solution: I am a firm believer that you should aspire to play
everything perfectly. But, if you are stuck on this one thing and
you feel like practice is getting a little stale, you should really
move on to something else that inspires you. It is so important to
be inspired in your practice and you can always come back to
something later when you are in the right mood.

2)  Problem: Moving on to new skills too quickly. Also a very
common problem, moving on too quickly will ultimately turn you into a “jack of all trades and a master of none”.

Solution: This problem is the opposite of the last problem we
looked at. You can now see that there is a balance between too much and not enough emphasis on perfecting a song. My suggestion is that you should master each thing before you go on to the next, but if you are finding a particular skill impossible to master and you are dying of boredom trying, maybe that skill is a little out of your reach. In this case, it is best to go back and learn something less  difficult.

3)  Problem: Becoming narrow minded in relation to the different
areas of learning within musicianship. Some people get into the
situation where they are practicing only one style and neglecting
everything else.

Solution: Try splitting your playing into parts. For example, I
might spend 5 minutes practicing new scales or chords, 10 minutes working on writing new music for myself and maybe 15 minutes learning a new song or part of a song. This way, your practice never gets boring and you can achieve a lot more.

4)  Problem: Playing things too fast when learning them. This can
cause you to become disillusioned with your playing when you are
trying to learn a new song.

Solution: A fairly obvious solution here – Slow down. Most
guitarists, including myself try playing a song or new skill at a
slow speed before trying it at a fast pace.

Practicing properly and regularly is the best way to become good at anything including playing the guitar. This requires discipline;
not only discipline to practice regularly, but also discipline to
stay focused and on track when you are practicing. If you stay
disciplined with your playing you will develop in to an excellent
player.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: Learning To Play The Guitar, practicing the guitar

A musical scale is basically a group of notes with well-defined intervals between them. A musical scale could consist of the notes A, B, C, D, E, F, and G (this is, in fact, a C major scale). Or a musical scale could consist of the notes A, A#, C, C#, D#, E, F#, G. A scale can be any group of notes. However, there are common scales that are used in Western music. These scales are the ones that are familiar to most musicians.

A major scale is defined to have intervals of a whole step, another whole step, a half step, and then three whole steps followed by a half step back to the root. Ok, so what does all that mean? A half step is just a single interval between notes (for example F to F# is a half step, so is B to C).

A whole step is two half steps, so it is two intervals between notes (from F to G, or from B to C#). On the guitar, then, a half step is equivalent to one fret, and a whole step is equivalent to two frets.

A root of a scale is the note that the scale starts on. So how is it possible to determine what note a scale starts on? Let’s say there is a scale where the intervals between notes were defined as whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half (this is a major scale). Given the notes: A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G it can be determined that this is a D major scale by looking for the correct pattern:

There is a lot more that could be said about musical scales. (musical scales are quite mathematical — which the reader may or may not find interesting). But they are crucial part of the whole process and to properly learn guitar lessons, you have to, first master musical scales.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Technorati Tags: Learn Guitar Lessons, musical scales

This article will introduce some of the major chords.  As mentioned previously, it is very important to keep the practicing of a musical instrument interesting and fun. The way this section should be approached is as follows: to learn guitar lessons, first learn some of the basic chords and then either create a song from these or try and find a song that uses only a few of these simple chords (this will be much easier than you would imagine, as many popular songs are quite simple musically).

A great place to start looking for music is the Ultimate Band List Go to the main site and then click on the letter of the artist to search for (or enter a search text in the search box — this way is usually much slower) Once an artists “page” has been found look for links to places that advertise “sheet music” or “guitar tabulature.” You’ll be surprised how much is out there.

A musical chord is just a group of notes that is played at the same time. The intervals between these notes and how the frequencies of these notes react with each other determine what the chord will sound like. Chords are named by the notes in them and the relationships that these notes have to each other.

For, instance, a simple G major chord consists of the notes G, B, and D. A major chord consists of a root note, a third, and a fifth. In the previous example, the G would be the root note, the B would be the third and the D would be the fifth. All this means is that the note B is four half steps above the G, and the note D is seven half steps above the G A common chord is a major chord. A major chord is composed of a root, a third, and a fifth

The notation for the chord presentation must now be explained. The following notation:

means “fret the high and low E strings (the top and bottom strings) on the third fret and fret the A string (second from the top in this picture) on the second fret.” (incidently, this is a G major chord)

A black circle on a string means “fret this string on the fret shown”, a white circle means “play this string without fretting it anywhere.” An X on a string means “mute (don’t sound) this string.” To mute a string, a player can either not play the string at all, or lightly touch the string, in order to keep the string from ringing.

I have included numbers next to the black dots. These numbers correspond to the finger that should be used to play the chord. 1 means index finger, 2 means middle finger, 3 means ring finger, and 4 means pinky finger. So in the above example the pinky finger should be used to fret the high E string on the third fret, the ring finger should be used to fret the low E string on the third fret and the middle finger should be used to fret the A string on the second fret.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: chord basics, Learn Guitar Lessons

The modern western musical scale consists of 12 tones (the 13th tone is an “octave” of the first tone) These tones are denoted with the letters A through G as well as the symbols “sharp,” “flat,” and “natural.” For example the 12 tones could be written as:
A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#

The next tone in the preceding scale would be “A” again. This second “A” is called an “octave” of the first “A”. Mathematically, this means that the second “A” note is vibrating at twice the frequency as the first “A” note. The result of this is that the two notes sound the same except that the second one has a higher pitch. This will make more sense as the tutorial progresses. Music works in a very mathematical fashion. (as strange as that may seem) A “Note” with a “pitch” is simply a sound wave traveling through the air at a certain frequency. The way that these waves interact with each other lead us to what we call music.

The most important thing to understand is the fact that there are 12 tones and they repeat after the 12th tone. (after the G# comes the A). The study of musical theory is a vast and expansive subject matter; the purpose of this is to give you enough background to continue the tutorial.

The concept of “musical steps” is important as well. A half step in musical terms refers to one note that follows another note (or one fret difference on the guitar). A and A# are an example of a half step. A whole step in musical terms refers to a difference of two tones (two frets on the guitar). A and B are examples of a whole step. Be careful when figuring whole steps versus half steps. Some musical letter tones do not have these “sharp” tones in between them. For example A and B are a whole step apart, but B and C are only a half step apart (as are E and F). If this seems confusing, it will become clear shortly.

Even it is not as exiting, as learning to play, music theory lessons are vital part of educating process. You have to understand and learn to read music sheets if you are serious about playing.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: music theory lessons

First, we need to take some time to get to know the parts of the guitar. The guitar I will be referring to in the following sections is an acoustic 6-string guitar. If you are right handed, you hold the guitar so your right hand is the strumming hand (it rests on the strings above the hole on the body of the guitar). Your left hand is then the picking hand, which rests on the neck of the guitar. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: unranked [?]

Technorati Tags: Beginning Guitar Lessons