What you will find here is a guide to guitar playing for beginners - for the absolute beginner, that is. This is for those poor souls who have been wanting to learn how to play that guitar since forever but just don't know where to start.
• Learn guitar anatomy.
Before you even pluck that first string, you have to know the parts of the guitar and where they are located. This would include: the head, tuners, nut, fret, neck, finger or fretboard, position markers, body, soundhole, saddle, and bridge. Practice holding the guitar while sitting and standing. Comfort is the utmost importance here but you also need to maintain your posture, so find that comfort zone.
• Choose your pick.
A pick is what you would use to strum the guitar and the choice of this depends entirely on your taste. However, for beginners, the standard sized pick would be a good start. Choose a pick that has a bit of texture to it so you can hold on to it better. Glossy picks may slide from you fingers, especially if you have sweaty hands.
• Get the tuning right.
After having that down to pat, we move on to tuning. Tuning is probably the most basic but yet most important part of guitar playing. The standard tuning is to the tune of E-A-D-G-E. As a novice, it is highly recommended that you buy yourself a guitar tuner instead of having to manually tune your guitar.
• Learn your chords.
Chords are notes to the tune as lyrics are to the song. These are the individual pieces of melody that when played together creates the tune. At this point, it is also best that you learn a few first. Chord diagrams are used to illustrate how you should play specific chords. A diagram has six strings and dots or numbers to represent the proper placement of your fingers. The numbers represent the following fingers: 1 for index, 2 for middle, 3 for ring, and 4 for pinky. A letter O represents Open and that means you play that sting without placing any finger on it. An X, on the other hand, means that you do not play the string at all.
The key to master this skill, or any skill for the matter, is practice. Half an hour or so every day is enough. Master the basic chords and to play with them. Becoming a musical prodigy overnight is near impossible, but with a few weeks of solid practice, you will definitely be past that "guitar playing for beginners" phase and be well your way to playing true blue music.
A Quick How-To on Guitar Playing For Beginners By Mike Darwin
Learn to Play Guitar Chords For Beginners By Cody John
The first and easiest skill to learn for a complete guitar beginner is to learn to play guitar chords. Once you have learned a set of 3 or 4 chords you can start playing simple songs. The right hand can be strumming the strings while you focus on your left hand and the fingering on the fretboard. The reason I recommend students learn on a steel string acoustic guitar is because it teaches you accuracy with your finger placement. Classical guitar is easier to play chords on because the fretboard is wider but you cannot hear the detail. Playing chords on an electric guitar hides all sorts of bad playing that will be revealed when you play and acoustic guitar.
So learn to play chords on an acoustic guitar in the first place and you will be able to play any other type of guitar. There are a number of skills to playing chords on the guitar that you need to follow
Do not press too hard on the strings
You should press the strings on the fretboard just enough to sound the notes clearly but without making the notes sound out of tune. A quality guitar will barely need more than a touch to make the note sound but most beginners will not have this advantage so you need to fret carefully.
Drop your left wrist
To make your fingers vertical on the guitar fretboard you need to drop your left wrist. When you do this you will get clear sounding notes. Many beginners find it hard to avoid the back of a finger touching and dampening the next string. By having the correct position you will place the fingers in the best possible way to avoid these buzzing strings.
Change chords with the minimum movement
You must plan your chord changes so that your fingers move as little as possible from the first chord to the second. You should look at how your fingers move from the position of your first chord and how they move to the second chord with the minimum amount of movement. Professional guitarists study this technique all the time. This is why they seem to be playing fast and yet their fingers do not move very much.
Practice with your eyes closed
You might feel a bit daft doing this but you should try to play without ever looking at your hands. To learn this close your eyes and play. You will find that very quickly your left hand will learn the relative positions of the strings and fret. Once you have mastered this for the left hand you can start work on improving your right hand strumming and plucking.
Learn How to Play a Guitar - Three Methods of Learning to Play the Guitar By Brian Bonsell
You have decided to learn how to play a guitar...excellent choice...now what?
The first thing to consider is how you are going to learn. There are three highly popular methods, not each is equal to the other. You could teach yourself, hire an instructor, or learn online. Read below and I will review each of these options for you.
The least expensive option is teach yourself, this is where the benefits end. This can be a very long task, it will take at the very minimum of a year to be comfortable playing the guitar and in that time you will most likely tech yourself bad habits that will hamper your continued growth.
Many have succeeded in teaching themselves to play guitar, most will tell you they wish they had taken a different more efficient route.
The most common method and most expensive method is to hire a private instructor. While being a very effective way to learn guitar it will be costly. On average, private instructors charge $30.00 per half hour and you are going to need 6 months of instruction before you can consider yourself a decent player.
Let's do the math:
6 months is 24 weeks @ $30.00 a lesson and 1 lesson per week = $720.00.....OUCH
The third option is to learn online. This method overcomes both major flaws in the previous 2 methods. Most online course are a one time very affordable fee for unlimited access to the course material. The fees for these programs are usually less than the cost of 2 months of private lessons. As these lessons are recorded with professionals you will not learn the bad habits that come with teaching yourself.
As you can see, to learn how to play a guitar can happen in numerous ways. You must decide which option is going to work best for yourself. I personally prefer the online lessons as they allow me to work at my own pace and still afford to purchase the Gibson I saw in the window the other week.
Learn Guitar Notes - Tips on How to Easily Learn to Play the Guitar By Brian Bonsell
When trying to learn guitar notes one must figure out where to start. Interest in learning guitar has been drastically increased by the popularity of such games like rock band and guitar hero. As fun as these games are, they will not teach you how to play a real guitar. Below I have listed two huge tips that are not covered in the video games.
One of the one of the biggest tips I would give is to build hand strength. This plays heavily into learning to play the guitar. You especially want to work the hand that plays the chords; it is not uncommon for ones fingers to bleed when they haven't worked them enough and they go for a long play session.
Secondly, learn your chords and scales. As much as you could learn to play by ear you would be limiting your opportunities to play with others and limit the growth you can have. Quite often others will call out chords when playing in a group, if you don't know how to play by chord you will not be able to join in. Knowing your scales will allow you to more effectively play solos and will happen more often if you known them.
To learn guitar notes you need to take into account the above two tips, practice, preserver and above all have fun. Whether you try to teach yourself, take expensive private lessons or use a more affordable online course you are in for a very rewarding hobby...and who knows...maybe we'll see you backstage.
How to Play Harmonica With the Guitar By Gyorgy Huba
This article will give you a start on learning how to play harmonica with the guitar. It's not difficult but it does have a knack that the guitar player must develop to play both instruments at the same time.
It seems to be part of the education of a versatile acoustic guitarist to learn how to play the harmonica with the guitar. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and others have made mixing the harmonica with the guitar a musical style all of its own. Instead of instrumental breaks played on the guitar during a song, harmonica solos are easy to compose and play after relatively little practice.
To play harmonica with the guitar you will need a harmonica rack, sometimes known as a harp rack. Not all harmonicas fit into a rack - there are many different types - but your average ten hole harmonica will fit without problems.
The rack goes around your neck and the harmonica snaps right into place with the low notes on the left hand side, just like a piano. To play the guitar and the harmonica at the same time just needs practice. Start by strumming the guitar slowly and evenly as you are getting used to wearing the harmonica and playing it while you strum. Instead of moving the harmonica across your mouth with your hands you have the harmonica in a fixed position and you move your head to get your mouth where you want it to be.
As for buying a harmonica, a ten hole blues harp would be the one for most beginners to start off with. Practically all musical material is available to be played in the key of C, so your first harmonica should be a C. If you want a more bluesy feel in that key, use a G harmonica or play in the second position.
The technique of playing the harmonica with the guitar involves relaxing while your body gets used to the feeling of having the rack around your neck and the harmonica in your mouth. Start playing the harmonica without the guitar at first so you can get the knack of breathing the music rather than sucking and blowing. Don't try second position playing at the beginning, just get the feel of the whole "breathing the music" thing.
The harmonica is a very simple instrument to play but as you get more experienced with it, you will find the instrument, like all musical instruments, increases its demands on the player. So don't imagine that learning to play the harmonica with the guitar will be a walk in the park.
Learn Practical Guitar Playing Tips With Learn and Master Guitar By Jason C Diggs
Guitar playing is an art and not everyone is a gifted guitarist. This article is devoted to all those guitar lovers who have at some point of their life or the other, experienced a deep desire to learn playing guitar. Well, guitar learning is not as difficult as people say it is. At least with the DVD series of the Learn and Master Guitar program, the challenging task of learning to play the guitar becomes much more easy and uncomplicated.
This program has such a wide range of guitar concepts, techniques and styles to teach, that any person who follows this program is sure to learn the guitar quite fluently, confidently, flawlessly and with a reasonably high degree of versatility within a few months of starting with this program. This best part about this program is that apart from the rich knowledge that it provides through the video lessons, it also provides an unlimited amount of practical tips, which add a lot of life to your guitar playing skills, in addition to making guitar playing very effortless and simple for you.
The instructor, Steve Krenz is a very experienced guitarist, an accomplished musician and a widely acclaimed guitar teacher. He seems to know what piece of advice or what tip to provide at the exact moment when it is needed. It is as if he can read you mind and can understand your requirement completely. Here are a few tips and suggestions from Steve, that are very simple and yet without them, you would be missing out on a lot of perfection and pleasure of playing the guitar.
Guitar Tips and Guitar Tricks
Very often, beginners complain that playing the guitar hurts their fingers. Steve suggests exercises for improving finger agility and strength in the initial part of this instructional program itself, so that nobody quits learning because of this problem. He clarifies that the problem can be solved through regular practice, which encourages callus building, when the finger tips press down hard on the strings. He also points out that barring a chord is very helpful for callus building and also improves finger strength and dexterity.
In addition to introducing you to the world of chords, chord families, chord progressions, chord formulas, smooth chord transitions, chord substitution, advanced chords and altered chords, Steve also equips you with several tips pertaining to chords. He tells you to teach yourself as many different ways of playing a chord as possible, because it adds greater flexibility during cord changing and is also going to be useful when you try to compose your own music. According to him, you should carry the guitar with you and practice playing chords as frequently as possible, while watching TV or talking to a friend, as this will refrain you from looking at the guitar and playing each not. As you continue with this practice, your fingers will get used to playing fluently and with greater confidence, even if you do not look constantly look at the fretboard each time you strike a note.
This program provides many such useful tips, which we can very well do without, but whose implementation can add an element of grace and perfection to your guitar playing skills. This program provides you with such a large variety of free guitar licks and songs that you can practice as often as you like. It helps polish your guitar playing skills and takes your guitar learning process to an entirely different level, wherein you know how to apply what you have learnt. Therefore, irrespective of whether you are a born guitarist or not, you can soon start playing the guitar like any of the professional guitarists.
Ten Tips to Effectively Use Your Guitar Practice Time By Priyankayog Bhatt
Guitar is a musical instrument that when played relaxes your body and gives a feeling of elation. Lets find the effective ways of practicing guitar.
1. Music is fun and should always be learned playfully. It should be felt while learning as well as while playing. To understand music you need to start learning it slowly. Playing an instrument involves complex movements and it simultaneously necessitates the brain to work.
2. You can learn guitar from various books, CDs and DVDs or even through net. But as you grow along to reach the pinnacle of fame as a guitarist, you need to pay attention to your career, to your family, to health, society etc. At such times it is always better to take lessons from teachers. There would surely be someone who is monitoring you in case you are not able to do so.
3. You should make a place for yourself so that nobody disturbs you at that time. The place where you practice needs to have all the necessary items ready.
4. Make a schedule for yourself. Stick to that schedule. It will help you to practice regularly and also make others leave you alone at that time.
5. You need to look into all matters like practice and do a little of reading.
6. In case if you have decided to practice for 15 minutes stop your practice exactly after 15 minutes so that you can concentrate on other things. Different plans need adjustments. It is very important that you stick to the plan.
7. See to it that you do not redo the things but cover all that is schedule for today or future. In case if you still get time then call it a bonus and do what you would feel like playing a lesson or even doing a bit of reading.
8. Your practice session should not be all work and no play else you would be bored too soon. Anything that is practiced needs to be done with a fun and it should be done for all by you.
9. When you practice your lessons do it with full concentration.
10. Last but not least during your idle time when you are away from guitar practice playing it mentally.
The Guitar For Beginners - How to Start Playing Guitar By Cody John
First things first - you need a guitar.
But make sure you get the right guitar. You should start by learning on an acoustic guitar and any respectable music store will have a good beginners guitar for around £100. Better still borrow one from a friend while you get started then you can invest in a better guitar once you know that your guitar playing isn't a new year resolution fad. You should start with an acoustic guitar because you can hear the strings clearly and you will know when you are playing the chords well. With an electric guitar you can sound good without actually playing accurately. On a classical guitar the notes always sound dead and lifeless in the hands of a beginner.
Secondly you need lessons
Well to be precise you need to learn a few chords and strumming patterns. Then while you are doing this you should follow a beginners guitar course. Doing these 2 activities together will introduce you to the wonderful world of guitar playing. The great thing about learning to play the guitar is that no one can ever take it away from you. You can pick up any guitar and just play. If you have an ounce of creativity you will be writing songs and making your own music just because you can play the guitar. To get to this point should only take a few months.
Thirdly - find someone else to practice with
Learning with someone else will make you learn a lot faster. You will have different strengths to your partner and will both improve by being a little competitive in learning new chords. If you know someone who can play well you could ask them for some tips. There is always something new to learn.