Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Free Online Guitar Lessons, Tools And Resources
Join our quest for free guitar lessons, videos and info on guitar playing!



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.

Learn How To Play Jazz Guitar

Posted on | August 4, 2008 |

Jazz guitar music has evolved from generations of guitarists’ need to find ways to express musical ideas. Jazz began with African slaves mixing American song and dance forms with the music that came with them from Africa. Jazz musicians have, over many years, found ways of taking a musical genre and making it jazz by adding jazz chord substitution and improvising techniques to the music.

The aim of a jazz guitar player is to make new music using other musical genres or the music of composers from genres other than jazz. A jazz guitarist will have developed his own methods of improvising over a song or instrumental. Sometimes his improvisation will be rooted in the techniques of using the notes in the chord he is playing to give him the material for the solo, or just to use the notes he finds in the melody.

Whatever method the jazz guitar player uses he will always find his own direction away from the melodic structure of the musical work he is improvising over and use melodic figures or “licks” which he has composed or learned from other guitar players. A lick is a sequence of notes which can be utilized in improvising over music in any key. Not quite a melody, lick is like a short tune or fraction of a melody. Listen carefully to a jazz guitar solo that you enjoy. Try imitating some of the licks that you can make out. Imitate them and see how they fit with other licks to take the solo to its ending.

Other jazz guitar techniques consist of substituting chords with more interesting sounding chords, the use of walking bass to make a piece more interesting or changing the rhythm of a song. You can see examples of all these jazz guitar techniques when you listen to the music of jazz guitar players like Charlie Christian, one of the pioneers of jazz guitar, Charlie Byrd, an exponent of latin jazz guitar who developed a genre of his own using classical guitar techniques to play jazz, or Wes Montgomery, a very popular guitar player who ventured into many fields of music.

Anybody who wants to learn to play jazz guitar will be wondering what guitars give you that distinctive jazz sound. You can play jazz on any guitar but when musicians talk about a “jazz guitar” they mostly have in mind a guitar with a “f” holes in the body, an arched top and a piezoelectric pickup. This guitar provides that warm, jazz feeling that people associate with the jazz guitar which is expressed eloquently in the music of Wes Montgomery. Epiphone is the brand name most jazz players associate with this kind of guitar but they are also made by D’Angelico, Gibson and others.

Here is a YouTube video of a Jazz guitar harmony lesson:

To learn to play jazz guitar, even in a comparatively superficial sense entails listening to alot of jazz guitar music. As you listen you need to analyze what jazz guitarists do and what you, as a musician, WANT to do. Maybe you do not want to learn jazz as a genre but just to play in the style of a certain jazz guitar player. This will cut your work load considerably as you can find tabs for the work of many jazz guitar players on the internet.

And for newcomers to jazz here is a video of Joe Pass playing Summertime:


Bookmark and Share

Technorati Tags: , , ,

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Category: Jazz Guitar

Comments

Comments are closed.

Subscribe in a reader

  

Privacy Policy