Archive for: July 2008

To learn how to read the guitar notes you will need a chart with the notes on the guitar fretboard, a music theory book and some free time every day for a while.

Here is a picture of the basic notes on the guitar. This is from the website of Steve Nelson which has other free downloads too.

Here is the Guitar Alliance fretboard chart.

The easiest way of getting the guitar notes to make sense is to learn the names of the notes of the open guitar strings first. If you hold the guitar in playing position, the string closest to the top side of the guitar - the thickest of the six strings - is the E. The next string, the fifth is the A string, the fourth is D, the third G, the second is B, and the thinnest string is E again, only one octave higher than the E on the sixth string.

If you look at your guitar fretboard chart you will see how the notes go up in steps. You will see that some notes have a whole fret between them. Your music theory book will tell you that these spaces hold notes called “sharps” and “flats”, collectively known as “accidentals”. The note at the first fret on the sixth string is F, the next note is not G as you might expect, but F sharp which is written as F#. The note can also be called G flat or Gb, because it is the note BELOW G as well as being the note ABOVE F. You will see that there are no accidentals between the notes B and C or E and F.

So you can see the notes progressing in scales along each of the guitar strings and also between the strings. For instance you can play the notes on the sixth string and instead of going from the G at the third fret to A on the fifth fret, you can go from the G at the third fret to the A played on the open fifth string. As you learn to play the guitar you will hear the difference in sound you can get from playing the same notes at different places on the guitar.

You can learn the notes on the fretboard while you are playing the notes you can see on your fretboard chart. Learning which notes are which on the sheet music needs some book learning. If you find the notes of the guitar on the ledger lines, you will see that each note looks different according to its position on the fretboard. The way to begin to learn which note is which is by using the word F A C E to remember the notes in the spaces between the leger lines and the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit to remember the notes E G B D F which are drawn directly on the lines. If the prospect of learning the guitar notes in this way gives you a feeling of rising panic, remember to take only small steps.

Here is a great primer on the guitar notes at ABC Learn Guitar.

Technorati Tags: how to read the guitar notes, guitar fretboard

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In our modern times most people do not feel like they need to learn to play a musical instrument like the guitar. But if you learn how to play the guitar you will be getting physical and emotional benefits in so many ways. Until you have begun guitar lessons you do not know what it is like to enagage with a musical instrument, learning how to interact with the guitar to make music.

The most common questions people ask before they learn how to play the guitar are usually, “How difficult is it to learn to play the guitar?” and “How long will it take before I start sounding like a guitar player?” To take the first question first, it is a little difficult right at the beginning when you have your guitar and some sheet music or guitar tab, and in that first moment as you begin, you realize how much you do not know. But from there it gets easier. You practice for half an hour or an hour a day, you get some callouses on your left hand fingertips and you get to enjoy the routine of learning easy guitar chords. Every day you practice you make some progress.

As for how long it takes before you start making music on the guitar, it varies, but probably around three months. If you practice regularly you can go from a guitar no-nothing to someone who can play a song all the way through, in time, without stopping three months from now. If you do not try, the three months still goes past but you still cannot play the guitar.

What do you learn in the first three months of learning how to play the guitar? Making music means learning guitar chords and learning how to read musical notes in the form of tab or sheet music. You will probably learn to play an acoustic guitar with nylon strings to start off, to give your fingers a chance to toughen up and to learn to play without the sound of an electric guitar covering up your mistakes.

A good thing about the acoustic guitar is quietness. When you first learn to play the guitar you do not need to upset friends and family as you begin your guitar practice. With an acoustic guitar you can also take it with you to practice in a quiet place or when you get a break from your work or studies.

A final point I should touch on is whether you should learn to read music. There is so much guitar tab on the internet these days anyone who wants to learn how to play the guitar should be able to get along quite well without sheet music. It would be hard to find a guitar course that relied on sheet music. If you feel some enthusiasm for learning music theory, you will probably get great benefits from taking the slightly longer road to learning guitar, but if it all seems like too much trouble, you can learn guitar without it.

The nest step for you now is to find some easy guitar songs and some advice on how to hold the guitar beginning to learn how to play.

Technorati Tags: learn how to play the guitar

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.

Technorati Tags: holding the guitar, tuning an acoustic guitar, acoustic guitar playing, YouTube video