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.

Beginner Guitar Lessons

Posted on | November 30, 2008 |

I am going to take another look at the basics you should look for in beginner guitar lessons. This subject needs to be revisited once in a while because beginner guitarists can be les astray by bad advice and sales hype.

One of the first things you think of if you contemplate beginner guitar lessons is the cost. What is a fair price to pay for guitar lessons? If you are thinking about taking lessons from a local guitar teacher, then the first thing you should know is that this has become the most expensive way of taking lessons on the guitar. Prices charged by guitar teachers vary widely so you are likely to be charged more in Sydney, London or New York than you are in a small town in Outer Slobovia. And we have not even started to talk about how teachers vary in quality and experience.

If you are not confident about learning guitar from a book or an online course, then you will need to make some kind of value judgement about whatever guitar teachers are available and sign up for whatever the minimum number of lessons is. Once you have gotten the basics from your teacher, try learning from books or online courses. If it does not work out, you can always go back to your teacher. The cost of guitar tutor books will depend on whether you buy new or secondhand. Chords, scales and songs are just as good in the books you pick up at the local garage sale or markets. If you find a book that has the material you want to learn, then buy it and work on it for a while.

How you choose your book or online course depends on how good your teacher has been at guiding you in your choice of musical style, and your understanding of how far you need to go as a beginner guitar student. During your first few lessons with a teacher you will probably have decided whether you are going to learn to read musical notation or guitar tablature. You will probably also have an idea about how to tune your guitar even if you are not good at it yet. If you do not know these things then you will need to go investigating online.

An ongoing concern should be keeping your guitar in tune. If your guitar is not kept in tune then your friends will not want to hear you play. In fact your playing might make them want to hurt you. You can find guitar tuners online. You can even find tuners that you can save on your computer. A metronome is also essential, so find and download yourself a free metronome and get into the habit of using it as you practice. You can set the metronome for very slow speeds to begin with and increase the speed as your technique gets better.

Warming up is as important for a beginner guitar player as it is for an athlete. You can do serious damage to yourself by holding your guitar in a way that puts too much strain on your back, plus the way you make chord shapes or use the plectrum could also be leaving you open to repetitive strain injury. If you do not know anybody who can give you advice on this subject, do an internet search. The principals are the same for typists, musicians or anybody who does fine, repetitive work, so read up on it wherever you can. This leads onto the subject of guitar strumming patterns. Once you have learnt a few chords you will need some strumming patterns to practice. This is as much to keep your learning chord changes fresh as for learning strumming itself.

As guitar strumming is not as simple as it seems, here is a video that should help you out:


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