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.

Les Paul - the man and the guitar

Posted on | June 12, 2008 |

The Les Paul guitar has remained at the top of the range of solid body electric guitars ever since its inception in the early nineteen fifties. Two major contributing factors were the personality of Les Paul, a popular pop and jazz guitarist as well as an inventor, plus the involvement of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, a company always devoted to innovation and quality.

Many people give Les Paul credit for inventing the solid body electric guitar and comment that the Gibson company was lucky to get his endorsement for their new guitar at the right time. When Les Paul was in his teens he was a guitarist struggling to be heard by his audience. Amplifying an acoustic guitar produced alot of feedback, so he came up with the idea of attaching a guitar neck to a block of wood. This soved the problem of feedback but audiences could not seriously listen to a musician playing such a strange looking instrument. With some modifications to the body to make it look more like a conventional guitar shape, Les had his prototype solid body electric guitar.

The eventual financial and musical triumph of the Les Paul guitar was motivated by the gibson Guitar Corporation’s wish to market its version of Leo Fender’s solid body guitar under the name of its inventor, Les Paul. This was 1952 and Les was the most popular electric guitar player in the world. The Gibson company eventually secured the Les Paul name after Les recommended some changes to the design.

There some basic features of the Gibson Les Paul design that have always set it apart from the models of other guitar manufacturers. One feature is the mounting of the strings on the top of the body of Les Paul guitars as opposed to passing them through the guitar body as is common on competing models. But the main feature of all Les Paul model guitars is their warm, individual sounding tone. This is attributed to the kinds of wood used by Gibson to make Les Paul guitars. Les Paul’s first attempt at designing a guitar using a piece of wood and an Epiphone guitar neck was called “the log.” In keeping with this solid tradition, the Gibson Les Paul guitars have always been thicker and heavier than other solid body electric guitars.

One thing Les Paul and the people at the Gibson Guitar Corporation have always agreed on is the need for their guitars to look as good as they sound. Consequently stylish inlays in the neck and headstock have always been a feature of almost all the Les Paul models.

You will find quite an array of different models in the Les Paul range of guitars. Featuring names like Classic, Supreme, Standard, Studio Baritone, Studio, Goddess, Menace, New Century, Vixen, Special, Doublecuts and Melody Maker, each one has its own individual sound. Between 1969 and 1979 Gibson even tried to market a range of Les Paul bass guitars. The Gibson Les Paul guitars have also been imitated by other companies such as Ibanez and Tokai. The legal wrangles surrounding these attempts at copying Les Paul guitars have only added to their collectibility.

And the Les Paul guitar is fitted out with Gibson’s newest automatic tuning gadget:


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Category: Electric Guitars

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