Archive for: July 2007

Memorising the guitar fretboard seems, at first, to be an impossible job and every guitar teacher has his own attempt at making it easier for his students. At Fretmaster a dude named JM Brown gives lengthy explanations and diagrams on fretboard organization and many other subjects:
“In case you haven’t realized it, the number 1 reason for fretboard organization is improvisation. If you have an organized way of instantly finding what you’re looking for, and just as importantly, know what to look for you’ll never run out of juice and ideas as what to play with your buddy’s / band’s improvisational jam sessions. After all, that’s what Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, and all of the other guitar greats have that sets them aside from guitarists who can “play fast” but don’t know what they’re playing. That and they have real heart and experience.”
Fretmaster Visit when you have plenty of time to explore!

. . . and if you haven’t done so already get this free tool for learning the fretboard.

Technorati Tags: guitar fretboard, fretboard organization, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, free tool for learning the fretboard

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Here is a news flash for beginner guitar players: armed with only about a dozen chords you’ll be able to play almost any song!
What you need to start with are the “open” fingerings of the basic chords. This means at least one of the notes in any of the chords will be an open string so you don’t need to use your first finger to make a barre.
The collection of basic guitar chords consists basically of the major and minor chords from the most commonly used musical keys: A,G,C, and D.
Here’s a list of basic chords to start off with:
A Major (A), A Minor (Am), C, D, Dm, E, Em, F, G

To make your learning easier, arrange the chords into groups like this:

Key of A: A, D, E
Key of D: D, Em, G, A
Key of G: G, Am, C, D, Em
Key of C: C, Dm, Em, F, G

To learn the chords and how they are used, you will need to find some songs or chord progression charts. Here is a free guitar lesson on chord progression with chord fingering charts to start you off!

Technorati Tags: beginner guitar players, basic chords, chord progression charts

Learning to read written music is a bit of a chore for someone who just wants to play the guitar for fun. It’s far easier to learn to read guitar tablature, or “guitar tabs”. Once it was almost impossible to get tabs for your favorite songs. A song was played on the radio and released as sheet music using conventional music notation. Tablature was usually found in guitar method books that taught you how to play, but if you wanted to learn a song you had to learn it by ear or from sheet music. Now you can find guitar tabs easily on the internet, and learning how to read tablature is really easy. Click here for a free tab lesson

Another tricky part of learning to play guitar is getting familiar with the positions of the notes on the fretboard. There’s info on a free program to help you learn the fretboard in about an hour at Learn The Guitar Fretboard In Sixty Minutes

Anybody interested in learning how to play lead guitar should drop into Lead Guitar Secrets at Squidoo to get links to all the free videos on offer from the Lead Guitar Secrets program which was only released on Saturday.

Technorati Tags: learn to read guitar tablature, guitar tabs, sheet music, conventional music notation, guitar method books