Archive for: October 2008

People often express a wish to take basic guitar lessons. This wish indicates that people want to know more about the guitar so let us take a look at where the quest for basic guitar lessons takes us. First we need a definition of what basic guitar lessons are. I think they give you the ability to strum chords with a plectrum on an acoustic or electric guitar. So let us see if we can go a little deeper into what potential guitar students want and what they can get.

One thing novice guitarists ask about is whether they can learn to play the guitar without paying for lessons. This is possible, especially now that we can see many guitarists in action close up on video. This goes some way towards making up for the lack of a real, live guitar teacher. There are also free lessons on the internet that are aimed at the beginner guitarist. Make use of Google - do a search for free guitar lessons. Buying a guitar tutor book would also help.

The request for basic guitar lessons carries the assumption that if I learn the basic principles of playing the guitar I am now equipped to progress further. So what are the basics that we need? First, you need the ability to hold the guitar in an effective playing position. From there you can learn to play chords. There is plenty of information on chord families and how to learn them on the net, and in fact you do not need to know very much music theory to take care of learning chords. Guitar lesson videos on YouTube and similar video sites are also a great help with chords.

In order to learn chords you need to learn to read chord charts which is quite easy, but you could consider learning to read sheet music or tab. The ability to read some kind of musical notation is not necessary to learn to play chords but it is the way forward for you future progress in music. If you want to learn blues for instance, you will need to find out about the blues scale, the pentatonic scale and movable chords.

Learning to play chords should be done on an acoustic guitar so that your left hand finger tips get the callouses needed to withstand hours of practice. Once you have the callouses you can start working on learning how to play the electric guitar. So for a student of the electric guitar basic lessons would include some tuition on how to set up the electric guitar, how a whammy bar works, what vibrato is and fooling around with distortion and other effects.

Another way to approach the question of teaching yourself basic guitar is to simply learn songs that you enjoy listening to. If you learn in this way you are not learning music theory and you may be giving yourself physical problems in later life because of practicing using too much tension. Also you could very well miss out on getting paid gigs because you cannot read sheet music. It happens. The other side of that coin is Jimmy Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and many other successful guitar players never had lessons. Guitar lessons impose a mode of thinking and working on us and if you think struggling on without lessons will help you keep your creative juices intact, then use all the tools the internet can provide to get the basic guitar lessons you need for to be YOUR kind of guitar player.

If you want to take a look at what basic guitar lessons look like, zentao.com is a good example.

And here is a video showing what a novice guitar player can learn from other guitarists on YouTube.

Technorati Tags: basic guitar lessons, Guitar lesson videos, YouTube

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So you have an acoustic guitar and you want to take lessons. The question of which style of acoustic guitar to learn can be a bit of a conundrum for the newbie guitar player. For a start you have two basic kinds of acoustic guitar - steel string and nylon string. Then there are several basic genres you could choose to learn.

Let us begin with making the most glaring distinction in acoustic guitar music: there is classical guitar music and there is the rest. Classical guitar has grown up in the past hundred years or so. It was originally a poor relation in the classical music family with few players and very small audiences. Over the years with the appearance of virtuoso classical guitar players and composers with a high level of sophistication and enthusiasm audiences have come to know something about what to expect from a classical guitarist.

If you are interested in classical guitar music then this will probably be your first choice. If you choose to learn classical guitar you are laying the foundation for a wide musical education. You will also be trained in how to play to produce expressive tone and color in your guitar playing, not to mention your technique will be on a higher level than guitarists in other genres.

There are some skills that most serious rock or jazz guitarists have that classical guitar players do not have, Classical guitarists are not trained in improvisation. No matter how much musical theory and advanced technique he has, in a situation where improvisation is needed a classical guitarist may as well be a sculptor. Neither will classical guitar lessons give you a good ear. All your music will be learnt from the printed page, and there will be no opportunity to develop an ear.

So if you pick classical as your acoustic guitar style, the musical training you receive will give you a great background in music and the kind of technique which will enable you to move easily between genres as long as you can rely on sheet music.

If you have a steel string acoustic guitar and want to take lessons then you will be taught to play using a plectrum. The music you are taught depends on the teacher but it can range from pop to folk to country so you will need to make sure your teacher’s tastes are the same as yours. This kind of musical education can possibly give you the chance to develop skills in improvisation and playing by ear but you will most likely taught to accompany songs by strumming chords. From there you can branch out to playing electric guitar, country flatpicking or learning to play using fingerpicking techniques such as Travis picking but you will at least have a basic knowledge of guitar playing.

If you own a nylon string acoustic guitar you could begin right off with fingerstyle guitar lessons. This entails learning fingerpicking techniques developed by folk guitarists and Travis pickers. This kind of playing is nowhere near as demanding as classical guitar but it does give you a little more technical versatility than playing using a plectrum.

This survey of the kinds of acoustic guitar lessons you could take is nowhere near exhaustive but I have given you some idea of the basic differences between the acoustic guitar styles.

To add to your confusion here is a video from Youtube featuring fingerpicking on a steel string acoustic guitar.

Technorati Tags: acoustic guitar, classical guitar, acoustic guitar lessons, Youtube

Although guitar tab is not hard to read, many novice guitar players seem to be daunted by the prospect of learning to read something that looks like a new language. The real difficulty with learning how to read guitar tab is more of a mental block than a real challenge. Even though tablature has a history going back hundreds of years it is generally regarded as a special musical language for guitar players. The internet has further promoted this view of guitar tablature. Guitarists all over the world are writing tabs using Notepad or another basic text editor and sharing their work with other guitar players.

Guitar tab is nothing more or less than a picture of the guitar’s neck. You look at the tab on the page and you see the guitar strings. Of course for a newbie guitar player the strings on the guitar may be a bit scary. But there is no need to transpose this fear to the strings on the printed page. Rather than present challenges the one dimensional strings in the tab has information on them which tell you what to do to get the guitar to make music.

Here is tab for a few notes played on the guitar . . .

e———————-|
B———————-|
G———————-|
D—–1-2—–1-2—–|
A–2——-2———-|
E———————-|

The letters on the end of the strings are the names of the strings, or rather the names of the notes that sound when you play the open strings. You will notice that at the top is a lower case e and at the bottom is a capital E. The top e is the thinnest string on the guitar, also called the first string. The E at the bottom is the thickest string, also called the sixth string. Once you have absorbed this information you will realize that the tab is just a picture of the guitar fretboard as it looks when it is lying in front of you with the end of the neck pointing towards your left side. Why people feel the need to use a lowercase a for the top E and a capital for the bottom E, I will never know - how much easier can it get to tell them apart?

The strings with numbers on them are the A and D strings, and the tab is telling us to place a finger at the second fret on the A string and play that note. Next the tablature is telling us to place a finger at the first fret on the D string, play that note and then move the finger up to the second fret, or place another finger at the second fret and play that note. So using the language of music we know to play the notes B, E flat and E twice. It does not tell us which fingers to use to play the notes, nor does it tell us how long to hold the notes for. In this example we can assume the fingering and note values are up to us.

When we are learning a song the fingering is still usually left up to us but most of the musical notation software programs have the facility to show left hand fingering and/or the use of the right hand fingers when required. For manually produced tab it makes the tab very cluttered to include the fingerings. There are generally accepted abbreviations for left hand techniques which I have included here:

h - hammer on
p - pull off
b - bend string up
r - release bend
/ - slide up
\ - slide down
v - vibrato
t - right hand tap
x - damp the note

There is no way to show the note values in tab but if you are learning a song you are already familiar with this will not be too much of a problem. If you are learning a piece of music that you are not familiar with then guitar tab will not help you much, but there is an answer. If you have learnt to read tab you can download one of the guitar notation programs like Power Tab or TablEdit. It will import your ASCII tab or MIDI and play it for you as well as display it in standard musical notation in addition to tab.

Here is a video showing how to read guitar tab, and judging by the comments, it looks like maybe some people will never learn!

Technorati Tags: guitar tab