Free Acoustic Guitar Lessons

Today I thought I would post a permanent tutorial on holding the guitar and going through tuning an acoustic guitar.

You need to be aware of how you are holding the guitar in your arms and holding yourself in the chair. Keep your butt at the front edge of the chair, and while you are playing the guitar resist the temptation to move your butt back in the chair. Moving back puts your body into a posture where you resemble a sack of potatoes held to the ground by gravity. If you maintain a straight posture with a little discipline, you will have much greater freedom of movement while you are learning to play the guitar.

You must remember to not put too much tension into your left wrist, so before you start playing, check out how it feels to have your thumb held slightly above the center line of the guitar neck with the line of the fingers running parallel to the neck of the guitar. You should allow your fingers to go anywhere they want on the fretboard without straining your wrist. Your left fingernails need to be kept short so you can place the tips of the fingers squarely behind the frets.

If you rest your right hand on the top of the guitar body you are restricting its movement. It is much harder to move your hand from a state of inertia, so put up with any slight discomfort at the beginning, and later you will not even notice it.

As you learn more about acoustic guitar playing you will find out about guitar pitch pipes, tuning forks and electronic guitar tuners. These help you get your guitar to what is called concert pitch. This is just an agreed tuning so that when a bunch of musicians play together they know what pitch to tune their instruments to. Whether your guitar is at concert pitch or not you can still play it, so you need to learn how to tune the guitar to itself.

Tuning the guitar is a bit tricky to start with but practice will show you that your ear has its own intelligence and if you just relax and let your ear do its work tuning your acoustic guitar will not be the chore you think it is. Here is a detailed lesson on tuning the guitar.

Our YouTube video today is for acoustic guitar beginners just starting with some basic strumming.