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 The Acoustic Guitar

Posted on | December 1, 2008 |

If you want to learn to play the acoustic guitar you should be working towards being a versatile musician. There are around a dozen alternative ways to finger any open chord that you know. You can buy a chord book or download some chord charts from the internet and then you can experiment with different chord fingerings. Listen to how they sound with other chords. See how they sound as a backing to your singing. Once you start fooling around with chord shapes you will open up a new side to your musicianship, making you a better accompanist and pave the way to your being able to write your own songs.

Practice is important with the acoustic guitar. If you are rusty it shows more readily than with the electric guitar. For your own progress as a guitarist you would benefit by practicing for at least half an hour a day, seven days a week. Aim for that amount, and if you have to because of other commitments, make do with a little less. Regular practice not only keeps your fingers in playing condition but it also trains your ear, even if you do not intentionally work on it. As your ear for music develops you will be more able to pick up new music you hear on the radio, and your ability to improvise will start to grow.

As an acoustic guitar player you can easily carry your instrument around from place to place, so why not practice while you are watching TV or doing something else that leaves your hands free? Muscle memory needs very little attention from the thinking part of the brain once you have your chord shapes memorized. You can practice chord changes on the acoustic guitar just using one hand. Imagine how many times you could go through the changes for a three chord song during the course of a movie. The fact that you are not using both hands does not let you off your obligation to your back and arms, though. You must always practice in a position that does not strain your body.

While we are talking about chords, let us take a look at how you handle bar chords. On the acoustic guitar bar chords require some practice. There are ways of putting off the practice needed to execute bar chords, for instance you could use power chords or simplified chords on the treble strings. Or you could learn bar chords right from the beginning and eliminate all the stress and worry and procrastination involved in delaying something that is, after all, an important part of learning to play the acoustic guitar. So when you learn your basic open chords like E major, G7 and A minor, start to practice the F major chord. This gives you one of the basic chord shapes that can be moved up the fretboard to play more chords. Not only that, the initial effort to learn bar chords can be put in learning the F shape alone. When it comes time for you to move the A major shape up the fretboard, you will find the effort is nowhere near as great.

To get your juices flowing, here is a video on learning and understanding bar chords on the acoustic guitar:


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Category: Acoustic Guitars

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