Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Free Online Guitar Lessons, Tools And Resources
Join our quest for free guitar lessons, videos and info on guitar playing!



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.

How To Learn Guitar Chords Online - The Key Ingredients

Posted on | December 15, 2008 |

Whatever musical genre you are into, you will need to learn how to play guitar chords. There are varying degrees of focus on learning chords. In rock, country and blues you can get away with learning a few chord shapes to play the I IV V chord progression in all the keys you need to play in. In classical guitar you learn to read written musical notation by starting with simple pieces of music. There is little or no separate learning of chords. In jazz you learn many different exotic chords in your quest for the ability to express yourself in all keys and modes.

The general idea for anyone starting an online guitar course is that you will be learning to play guitar chords as you progress through your guitar lessons. If you examine guitar theory you will see that learning about scales and the circle of fifths will give you an understanding of how chords are created. You will have the power to understand why chords sound good together and you will be able to make your own chords as and when you need them according to your understanding of music. You can let go of chord charts and make the music you play your own.

For beginners, chord charts are the way they get their introduction to playing music. No sheet music or tabs to learn, just get your head around the idea that chord charts are pictures of the guitar neck, and away you go. This is when reality can bite. Making chord shapes can be painful, and learning to make chord changes can be slow and discouraging. This is where repeated practice comes to the rescue like dude on a white horse. Practicing chord changes is the magical element that turns you into a guitar player instead of a guitar fan.

So let’s go online to find the tools to learn chords. The first step in learning guitar chords is to find some free [tag]guitar chord charts online. They are not hard to find. Then you will need to get tabs or sheet music for some songs that you enjoy. It is not a good idea to just learn chords without also learning some songs to use the chords in. That is just too boring. The next step is to watch videos on YouTube or a similar site where people have uploaded clips of themselves explaining how to play basic guitar chords. You will possibly be able to find someone teaching how to play your favorite song.

To learn to play chords you make use of your body’s talent for remembering movements. If you watch somebody in a sandwich shop or some other line of work that involves repeated small movements, you will see that they move very fast, just like a guitar player does. Typing is a good example. You learn the location of the letters, you get a basic understanding of how to hold you hands and arms. And then you type. You type until you do not have to think about where the letters are. Your body knows. This is referred to in guitar playing as “muscle memory”.

If you are going to learn guitar chords online without the benefit of a teacher, then the idea of muscle memory is your friend. If you understand that you supply the time, say half an hour to two hours a day, practice time, then your body has the ability to learn how to make fast chord changes all by itself. You just need to give it time.

There is a degree of discomfort in learning guitar chords. Your left hand finger tips will hurt until you develop callouses, your back will complain about long hours of holding the guitar and your fingers are not enthusiastic at all about stretching to make chords and scales. Just remember that no matter what it looks like when you watch a professional guitar player at work, he had to go through what you are going through. And you can come out the other side playing chords, just like he can.


Bookmark and Share

Technorati Tags: , ,

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Category: Chords

Comments

Comments are closed.

Subscribe in a reader

  

Privacy Policy