Archive for: August 2008

This post is just a few thoughts on the state of the art of free guitar lessons.

Free guitar lessons are available on the internet so that beginner guitar players can get an idea of what is involved with learning to play the guitar. There is so much for people taking up the guitar to consider, like how hard is it to learn to read music and tablature, how long do you need to practice each day, and how long do you need to learn before you are able to play songs and instrumental pieces. The big question in all this is about how good an introduction to the guitar is a course of free lessons?

The principal function of free guitar lessons is to inflame the interest in the potential student. Once the beginner guitar player has learnt a few chords, discovered that learning to read music opens up all kinds of musical opportunities, and has found the thrill of strumming simple chords and playing simple melodies, he or she will want to explore their new hobby more deeply. If you have ever had the pleasure of learning to play a famous guitar riff from tabs, you will know how free guitar lessons work.

Learning licks and riffs is another simple way of awakening interest in the hearts and minds of potential guitarists. Most riffs are fairly easy to play. The beginner guitarist can usually pick up a riff like, for instance, Smoke On The Water in one sitting and, with a little daily practice, be playing it with some confidence inside a week. Some guitar teachers write tabs and mp3s for well-known guitar-based songs, and sell them as single guitar lessons. This ideally suits the guitarist who just wants to learn to play stuff instead of having to learn a bunch of musical theory first.

YouTube and similar sites feature many videos posted by guitar teachers showing the world how to play popular songs either as a way of introducing a paid guitar lesson course or simply to share their love of the guitar with as many guitar enthusiasts as possible. The quality of these video guitar lessons varies but some are excellent quality with the camera showing both the left and right hand parts, with some even supplying you with tabs for the tunes.

It is very easy to assume that beginner guitar players will not go very far by learning a few chords and riffs. It is natural to think that they will lose interest when they run out of easy material to learn. It is true that many people who start their musical studies with a conventional course of study quite often carry on their love of music for many years, but this phenomenon of free videos is too new to make a serious judgement. The moving picture medium has the power to excite interest and might conceivably be able to keep amateur guitarists’ interest alive long enough to carry them into the realms of serious guitar playing.

One of the major players in the world of guitar lessons is Justin Sandercoe, a fine guitar player dedicated to bringing quality guitar lessons to everyone with access to the internet.

For basic guitar lessons, beginners should check out the archive of free guitar lessons at about.com and web searches for free metal guitar lessons,free rock guitar lessons,free guitar scales, free guitar notes, guitar chords, guitar tuning and free guitar lessons for kids will give you more specialized results.

Technorati Tags: free guitar lessons, YouTube, justinguitar

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Christian worship music is the only genre that encourages a sense of people drawing together rather than an expression of individualism. I guess competitiveness still reigns supreme in Christian music with people secretly, or otherwise, trying to out-sing, out-play or out-praise each other, but if your music is carrying a Christian message, I guess it is a good start.

The forms of Christian music follow the other musical genres fairly closely. Even gospel singing, the original popular Christian music, shares roots with blues music. There is Christian music that has its musical basis in rock and roll, in country, metal, you name it. The music sounds the same as secular music, but the content of the lyrics is vastly different.

Broadly speaking, Christian songs express a person’s hope of salvation or faith in God. They can tell a story of an individual going on a downhill slide and getting the strength to reclaim their life through faith in God. Or a Christian song can be about how great heaven is going to be compared to how basically unrewarding this life on earth is. Whatever the message, it has its roots in the life of an individual and its musical basis in the local culture.

Of course, not all Christians go for the idea of expressing religious feelings through a music that is usually used to express sentimental love and sexual lust. The main argument in the case for using popular music to carry the Christian message is that it meets potential converts on their own ground.

Country music has a very strong Christian leaning. Historically country music has always been about the trials of life and love, and often refers to the fact that we are being watched by God. Christian country music is greatly influenced by Gospel music.

So where if we are interested in learning Christian songs are there Christian guitar tabs available for us to learn? If you go to the Christian Guitar Resources, you will find thousands of Christian songs by hundreds of different artists. You can even submit your own tab for a song. The difficulty with sorting out which songs you want to learn is that Christian music has divided into several different genres with different ways of expressing their Christianity through music and varying philosophical ideas on life and religion.

If you do not already have some kind of affiliation with a Christian group or organization, you can just do a web search for “Christian guitar tabs”. This will give you a large number of general tab archives with Christian tab collections or sites that collect Christian guitar tabs exclusively.

Here is a video guitar lesson devoted to Christian music on YouTube

Technorati Tags: worship music, Christian music, Christian guitar tabs, YouTube

Today we are going to behave more in keeping with a site devoted to free guitar lessons and present to you the chords and tabs for the Happy Birthday song.

All us creative types know that if you are going to compose music you are going to need to have a close relationship with a lawyer. You see, when you start composing songs, that’s your intellectual property and ain’t nobody goin’ to meddle with it. Nosiree Bob. If any other creative musical person publishes someting that distantly resembles your original composition, that is your cue to have their kneecaps removed by hired goons and then use the legal system to squeeze their money out of them until they look like those clergymen of days gone by in the catacombs of Rome.

Now, back in the 1800’s intellectual property was not recognized as the cash cow that it is today. So when two ladies named Mildred and Patty Hill wrote a pleasant little ditty called “Good Morning To All”, they stood by and watched as various random mangy varmints changed their song to “Happy Birthday To You”. They probably even thought it was a kind of sweet idea.

For those of you with a genuine thirst for music here are the tabs for a version of the Happy Birthday melody.

E ———|——|——–|——|———|3-0—|—-1-1-|0—–|—–

B ———|—-1-|0——-|—-3-|1——–|—-1-|0——-|–1-3-|1—-

G —–0-0-|2-0—|—-0-0-|2-0—|—–0-0-|——|–2—–|——|—–

D ———|——|——–|——|———|——|——–|——|—–

A ———|——|——–|——|———|——|——–|——|—–

E ———|——|——–|——|———|——|——–|——|—–

YouTube has many Happy Birthday videos, so here is one in more or less the same key as the one I posted. The language the guy in the video is speaking is a version of English spoken only in New Zealand.

Technorati Tags: Happy Birthday