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.

Tapping Guitar

Posted on | December 2, 2008 |

As you surf through YouTube you have probably seen guitarists tapping guitar and wondered if you could learn to play like that. The sound you get from tapping guitar playing adds some variety and excitement to your range of techniques. You can use the first or second finger of your left hand to tap the fretboard at the fret your note is at instead of fretting the note and striking the string with your pick.

The basic technique is not difficult to pick up but if you decide to make start on your tapping guitar style, be prepared to put alot of practice time in. For many guitar players learning guitar tapping well takes around six months, so do not be sad if you cannot get it right away.

If you are interested in learning guitar tapping, buy or borrow CDs and watch YouTube clips of these guitar players: Stanley Jordan, Zack Kim, Steve Vai, Eddie Van Halen, Buckethead, Tom Morello, Yngwie Malmsteen, John Petrucci and Paul Gilbert. Some Metallica songs that feature tapping are Ride The Lightning, Blackened, …And Justice For All, One, The Frayed Ends Of Sanity, To Live Is To Die, Wherever I May Roam and Am I Evil. If you are a beginner guitarist or even at the intermediate stage, you might find that finger tapping is very difficult. This is because it is a whole new skill apart from playing guitar in the normal way.

Tapping guitars is a technique that alot of guitarists are inspired to try by watching guitar virtuosos like Van Halen or Steve Vai. While there is nothing wrong with getting enthusiasm about tapping from a role model remember that no matter how far you go with the guitar it is always best to be yourself. You can only emulate your idols, you cannot BE them.

One way to make use of the songs that have already been recorded is to download Guitar Pro or Powertab do a search for tabs for guitar tapping songs in those formats. The PowerTab trial version and Guitar Pro (free) do not have realistic sound but you can get the notes off the tab and slow the MIDI down to get a handle on how to do the tapping, so they are not totally useless.

When you first try guitar tapping you will want to set the gain on your amp really high. As high as you can handle. In fact better get a pedal so you can lower it again for parts of the music where you are not tapping. If you do not have a top of the range guitar with nice pickups, do your guitar tapping slow so you can hear what you are doing, but keep the beat regular.

As a first attempt at guitar tapping Eruption by Van Halen is not a bad choice. Eddie Van Halen uses three finger tapping which you can pick up by practicing. Hot For Teacher is another Van Halen song you could try. The intro has some nice tapping on the guitar. Just go through any Van Halen CDs to see if there is any tapping you want to try to imitate.

Here is a YouTube video tutorial on guitar tapping:


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Category: Guitar Techniques

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