Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Free Online Guitar Lessons, Tools And Resources
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As a guitar player you have probably trawled the internet looking for guitar lessons. Whether or not you want to learn to play guitar for free, your vision probably involved learning songs form tabs as well as getting as much theory and technique exercises you can handle.

Ten years ago a guy named Jon Broderick went looking for websites featuring high quality guitar lessons and, the legend goes, he had so little success, he went and made his own. The outcome was Guitar Tricks, another site that gives you access to their lessons in return for a monthly subscription. Not unlike Jamplay, but Guitar Tricks has been collecting guitar lessons for ten years, plus they have a collection of twenty-four free guitar lessons that you can try. Your free lessons are of the same quality as the lessons you get with your monthly subscription, taught by the same teachers who conduct the lessons for subscribers to Guitar Tricks.



These days four-hundred thousand guitarists take advantage of Guitar Tricks' lessons each month. And no wonder, because there are lessons in any genre you could name - acoustic, rock, metal, country, classical, jazz . . . and you can take lessons in special areas like chords, sound effects, harmonics, bottleneck, popping and guitar tricks. If you are not clear on whether your favorite guitar style has a name, you can simply request lessons based on the music of particular guitar players like Chet Atkins, Duane Allman, Stanley Jordan, Andres Segovia or Jimmy Page.

Your membership of Guitar Tricks gets you full access to a buttload of tutorials, sheet music, video lessons and backing tracks. Not only do you get the benefit of the Guitar Tricks guys' years of archiving guitar lessons but their content is updated every day.

One resource for beginner guitar players I'm always recommending is the collective expertise that you can find in guitar forums. Guitar Tricks has a forum that holds the records of questions and answers between thousands of guitarists. Would you believe there's over two-hundred thousand posts? And not only that, you can also have feedback from the Guitar Tricks teachers on any nagging question your brain can formulate.

Learning Scales

Posted on | July 2, 2009 | No Comments

Our audiences only keep coming back to our gigs if they feel that we have more to give them, so we need to be ahead of their expectations.

One of the ways we can do this is to add another scale or mode to our repertoire. Once we have a collection of techniques we can use when we do our solos, scales gives us more material that we can make our own with the way we play our hammer-ons, string skipping, note bending and our other lead guitar tricks.

A basic plan for learning scales is to be master of the minor pentatonic in its five shapes. This gives you two octaves you can use as your playground for your improvisation. It will take some time to really be able to move around the minor pentatonic scale without thinking too much, and after that, you have the rest of your life to acquire more scales, and then move onto some of the modes.

When you are learning a new scale or mode, repetition is your friend. Play the scale up, then play it down with alternate picking. Over and over again. Start with a relaxed left hand, make sure only the tips of your fingers are pressing on the strings to get a clear sound. Have your fingers in position over the frets you are playing at, and assign one fret to a finger.

During the day, if you have the time you will probably be picking up your guitar and playing whatever you have been working on lately. Add a scale to this routine. So you are only playing for a few minutes each time but you might find that you are picking up the guitar ten, twenty or fifty times a day!

Here’s Will Fly playing some scales:

This link takes you to the video on YouTube so you can get more info from Will’s site and visit his forum.


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Category: Free Lessons

Learning guitar by ear

Posted on | July 1, 2009 | No Comments

A little-known fact about playing guitar by ear is that anybody can do it. It’s like a lot of artistic ability, half of it is in your perception of yourself. If you think you can’t draw, then you never will. If you think you can’t play by ear, you will always be dependent on learning music from notation or tabs.

So, why not just set aside some time to try to play guitar by ear? The first step is to become familiar with the music your guitar makes. A few months’ practice and learning songs will give you some empathy with the guitar’s sound. But if you want to start trying to play by ear right from the beginning of your career as a guitar player, then you’re quite free to do so.

You will have a greater chance of succeeding in playing guitar by ear if you try to learn relatively simple songs at first. The scales are simpler and have less sharps and flats and there are a lesser number of chords to choose from.

Pick the song you want to learn and play it on a CD. Next, without giving the matter any thought, try to play it on your guitar. You could be way off, or you might surprise yourself how accurate your rendition is. Of course, you are not completely free styling here, you need to be reasonably sure of the note values. If you can give the notes their correct value, that will help you hear where you are going wrong.

If you find that you are having any success with playing guitar by ear, then do not try to analyze it. Lots of people have theories about how they can play by ear, the same as lots of old people have ideas on how they stayed alive so long. Most of these theories are just stabs in the dark, so forget thinking, and just keep trying to do it.

It will help if you try to find the song’s key. If you can identify the first or last chord, you are on your way. Look for the root note first. Just start with the fifth or sixth string open and then on the third fret, till you feel you are close. Once you have the note you want, you might need to adjust your tuning to match the CD. With your root note as your guide you can then try the major or the minor chord, then other chords that usually are played together with your root chord.

Here’s Aaron from Aaron’s Guitar Lessons the first of a series of lessons on playing by ear:

And hear is the link to the second lesson on playing by ear so you can also watch the other eight or so videos.


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Category: Guitar Practice Tips

Learn To Play Country Guitar

Posted on | June 30, 2009 | No Comments

Many guitar players are attracted to country music even though it may not be their first choice of guitar style. Country is a completely different way of playing guitar which gives your overall musicianship a big boost.

Let’s look at which country guitar players are regarded as the ones to listen to. There are many country artists who are not technical virtuosos, so if you have been watching Brad Paisley and Brent Mason, take comfort in the fact that you do not need to play up a storm. There are the originators of the chicken pickin technique, Don Rich and Roy Nichols, and don’t forget to check out Chet Atkins and Hank Williams.

Here is Don Rich at work with The Buckaroos:

As for country guitar techniques, chicken pickin is a good one to put on the top of your list. Hammer-ons and pull-offs are standard techniques in country music. You also need to get your string bending up to speed to get that pedal-steel sound. Probably you would be well advised to work on your sound before getting too deeply into country guitar technique. Your picking is near the bridge and you will need to be able to use your string muting to good effect.


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