Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

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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.

Easy Guitar Techniques For Beginners

Posted on | December 14, 2008 |

Guitar techniques do not need to be difficult for beginners, in fact it is a great boost for your enthusiasm when you start to master one or two easy guitar techniques. As the left hand and the right hand both need attention when you are a guitar beginner, I thought we could examine some easy guitar chords and techniques a beginner can use to play and practice them, plus an easy technique to get the beginner guitar player’s right hand moving. As you progress with your guitar playing you will often feel that you are working more on one hand than the other. Which hand you favor is different for different people. This is okay as long as you become aware of what you are doing and go back to engaging both hands.

When you are learning the various guitar techniques you will find that the fingers of each hand are given numbers. This system is used when describing finger picking techniques and left hand chord fingering. Your index finger is 1, your middle finger is 2 and the ring finger is 3. The pinky is number 4 and it is very important to work on using this finger for left hand guitar techniques. For the right hand, it is only used for Flamenco style strumming techniques. So when you see tabs for guitar chords with finger numbers on them it is very important to follow this numbering because the writer of the tab has included the numbers to make it easier for the beginner to finger the chords and change from one chord to another.

If you have not yet bought a guitar chord manual or downloaded some chord charts from the internet, now is a good time to do it. You will need to look up the chords D major A major and G7. These are easy guitar chords that beginners often start off with. For the D chord you will playing the first four strings on the guitar. The first string is the thinnest string which is designated with a lower case e, and the thickest string is known as the sixth string. This string also sounds the note E but on tab the note is written using a capital E. They are always referred to this way. So below is the tab for the D chord. The left hand fingering numbers are on the right hand ends of the tabs.

e———2————|2

B———3————|3

G———2————|1

D———0————|

A———————-|

E———————-|

This is the G7 chord:

e———1————|1

B———0————|

G———0————|

D———0————|

A———2————|2

E———3————|3

This is the A chord:

e———0————|

B———2————|4

G———2————|3

D———2————|2

A———0————|

E———————-|

Now for the right hand technique. The simplest guitar technique for the right hand is strumming with a plectrum. You hold the plectrum between the thumb and first finger of the right hand with the point facing towards you. Hold the plectrum lightly and gently use up and down strokes across the strings that are marked with fret numbers. Alternate your up and down strokes trying to keep the rhythm even. Once you have got the hang of it, try changing chords. Use the chord sequence D A G7 A. Do not stress over making the chord changes fast, take all the time you need.

Now that you have a couple of easy guitar techniques start using a metronome as you play. Again, do not get uptight about strumming and changing chords quickly. The idea of using the metronome is to get yourself used to keeping an even beat. As you are a beginner you could not be expected to keep time, strum with the right hand and change chords all at once. Give yourself a few weeks to get it all to flow together, and keep yourself from going stale by learning new strumming patterns and chords.


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Category: Guitar Techniques

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