Archive for: April 2008

Like all burning questions, the answer to this is both “yes” and “no”. Guitar playing is what people these days call a “journey”. What that means is that you will have times when the job ahead is too hard, too tiring, too boring and too much. Then if you persist, you will be rewarded by a sudden insight or upgrading of physical skills. Anybody who has learnt touch typing knows what I’m talking about. So the process of giving life and meaning to the little dots on the page will be off-putting at first followed by a feeling of having learnt something very valuable. What you need to begin this process of learning to read music is a good, concise tutorial. Something that says stuff like, “our notes are displayed upon what is called a “staff.” This is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces between each line. Don’t laugh, the spaces are important. It is where these notes are positioned in the staff, on which line or space they occupy, which determines what note you play. And here’s the beauty of it - the position will always be the same. If you want the note sounded by the open B string, for example, it will always occupy the place on the staff. Once you know where it is you will always know where it is.” Good basic info. David Hodge is the author of this tutorial, and it is called, A Guide To Reading Musical Notation

Technorati Tags: learning to read music, A Guide To Reading Musical Notation

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Most new guitar players are anxious to learn how to play chords. But which chords to learn first? Naturally you need to know the chords that will enable you to start playing songs as soon as possible.
Learn guitar chords that you will play in hundreds of songs! You might think, ‘Which chords should I learn first…which chords are used the most?’
If you are starting to learn guitar you will be learning major and minor chords in the first position. These are chords that you can play using two or three fingers to fret notes, and the rest of the notes in the chord are open strings.
Access Rock has tabs showing us open major, minor and seventh chords. This free guitar lesson also goes on to show us basic barre chords and progressions using the chords we have learned. And if you need to know what the chords sound like, there are sound files you can download.
Learning Songs at guitar.about.com gives us some songs to practice using the C, D and G chords plus a link to a tutorial on changing chords quickly.

Technorati Tags: how to play chords, Learn guitar chords, free guitar lesson, changing chords quickly

Today I present a valuable essay on learning guitar chords. If you are a guitar player maybe you can remember a time when you watched in awe as a guitarist’s hand moved up and down the guitar neck, making chord shapes with incredible speed. Now you can do it. There was no magic to it, just a lot of hard work, and in the end the skill you wanted so much just kind of sneaked up on you. But that same process is going on still. The hours of practice and the bleak self doubts. Well, here’s some quotes from the wisdom of someone who has been through the mill and emerged as a freshly baked guitar player. The essay is called “Learn guitar chords - Top 10 Mistakes”.
“The critical time is when you’re almost there, you know how to make the shape of the chord, and can sometimes strum it cleanly and you’ve been practising for the past 7 days but haven’t seen any improvement… well that’s the worst time to give up”
“You need to be able to form the chord without looking at it. Just think about it do you see guitarists staring at their guitars every time they need to change to another chord? No… it’s silly.”
“it is better to pick each note separately so you can quickly analyse what string is giving you the dead note. You can then apply more pressure or move the finger slightly to get it into a better position.”
Here’s the complete article

Technorati Tags: learning guitar chords