Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Free Online Guitar Lessons, Tools And Resources
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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 To Play Bar Chords On The Guitar

Posted on | November 23, 2008 |

Bar chords are the first advanced step for the guitar player and the easiest way to play bar chords on the guitar is to not look for an easy way. You have some kind of understanding of how to play open guitar chords and you have practiced till your fingertips are hardened enough not to hurt any more. So the next step is to learn the basic open chord shapes that move up the guitar neck to make bar chords and to start on the next stage of educating your left hand and arm in the art of guitar playing.

When you learn bar chords you will see that there are some basic chords that you have already learnt how to play that can be moved up the fretboard to form chords in more keys. The way we move open chords up the fretboard is by placing the first finger on the left hand across the guitar’s neck and using the other fingers to complete the chord shape.

When you first try to play bar chords you will notice the change in sound. You have made all the guitar strings shorter, so they do not have the same amount of sustain and reverberation. The next thing you notice is that bar chords are painful. The pain should lessen as you practice but if it doesn’t there are some things about your guitar playing you will need to look at.

First, if there is any adjustment needed to the way you press down on the strings with your left hand, you will need to relax your hand and experiment a little. Hold the chord shape but do not exert the pressure needed to make a clean sound. Now see if there is any tension in your arm. Just check to see if you can feel it. Go all the way up and down the arm fro the shoulder to the fingertips and relax any little areas of tension. This might result in some change in how you are holding your hand on the strings. As you try this checking for tension, also take note of if you hold your breath and clench your jaw. If you do either of those things, let the tension drop away in those areas.

Other areas that might need attention when you are looking for the easiest way to play bar chords are the height of your guitar’s action and the need for hand exercises. You can do an online search for balls or other gizmos that you can use to help build finger strength, or for hand and finger strengthening exercises. But before you get too far into exercises, if your guitar’s action is high you will need to press hard to make bar chords. Acoustic guitars have a relatively high action so the strings do not buzz. If you feel that your action might be too high you can adjust it by filing down the slots in your bridge so that the strings sit lower. If you make the strings too low you will need to buy another bridge bone.

If you are able to switch between acoustic and electric guitars you can clear up the question about your guitar’s action because electric guitars have a lower action than acoustics. There are also tricks that you can use to avoid the pain of guitar chords, like using the open D fingering to move up the frets instead of using the open E shape to make a bar chord. This limits your chords to the top three strings. Also you can try loosening the tension on your strings or fooling around with open tunings, but do not go meddling with your guitar unless you are really sure you have some medical condition that stops you from playing bar chords. For now just assume that your hand will stop hurting once you have practiced enough.

Today’s video is an introduction to bar chords:


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Category: Chords

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