Category: Acoustic Guitars

Folk music is one really simple and enjoyable musical style which can be easily taken up by the beginner guitar player. The folk songs are so easy you can enjoy playing them right away, and you will find this is a great way to express your own personality and get your audience involved in letting off some steam. Folk songs are focused on daily life - work, love, betrayal and death. Sometimes the theme of a folk song can be about social change like If I Had A Hammer.

When you start playing folk songs on the guitar, remember that in playing for an audience you are leading an event where a room full of people are letting off steam by expressing themselves musically. We all know about passing the time on a bus trip singing 99 Bottles Of Beer. Yankee Doodle, Shoo Fly, This Old Man, She’ll be Comin’ Round the Mountain, Three Blind Mice, Buffalo Gals, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Hush, Little Baby, Lazy Mary, Bingo, I’ve Been Working’ on the Railroad, On Top of Old Smokey, London Bridge, The Farmer in the Dell, The Crawdad Song, The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Rock-A-Bye Baby, The Riddle Song, Oh! Susanna, Mister Frog Went A-Courtin’ and Frere Jacques are all easy folk songs that invite audience participation and can be easily played on the guitar.

Another well-loved folk song is Banks Of The Ohio which is plaintive ballad concerning a young woman being killed by her rejected boyfriend. There are quite a few folk songs that are about murder and love gone wrong. Greensleeves is an old English folk song dating back to the sixteenth century and sung by people all over the world. It has a romantic mood but some folk music experts believe that it is a song sung to a lady of easy morals. Another immensely popular and easy folk song is House Of The Rising Sun which again, deals with a life wasted and ending in misery. In spite of its gloomy theme this song has great audience appeal. And it is very easy to play on the guitar.

To play these easy folk songs you might decide to use a plectrum to accompany your singing by strumming chords. But you can use easy fingerstyle guitar techniques that you will find to be quite effective. The easiest is to play the bass note of each chord followed by a down stroke with the first finger across the third, second and first strings. A variation on this technique is to pluck the treble strings instead of strumming them. In practice, you will probably find yourself employing a combination of these two methods. Here are some strumming patterns you can practice.

From here, with a little help from some internet research, you will find that you can expand your fingerstyle technique to using the thumb, first, second and third fingers to pick melodic accompaniment to your folk songs. A very popular and easy to play folk guitar style is called Clawhammer. In this technique your thumb plays a regular pattern while the fingers pluck a melody or accompaniment on the treble strings. Here is a tutorial on clawhammer technique

And here is a video tutorial on clawhammer:

To find more tabs and videos featuring these methods of playing folk songs, just try searching for “guitar finger picking” or “clawhammer guitar”.

For more inspiration for your search for easy folk songs to play on the guitar, try searching on the net for some famous folk artists like Burl Ives, The Weavers, Peter Paul And Mary, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Here is a nice little video tutorial on guitar fingerpicking.

Technorati Tags: Folk music, folk songs, folk songs on the guitar, easy folk songs, Clawhammer, guitar finger picking

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An acoustic guitar is not the instrument of choice for rock guitar players but it is the best choice for a beginner. I am talking about the nylon string acoustic guitar which is a little bit gentler on the fingertips than the steel strings of an electric guitar. So now you are a rock guitar player with his first guitar, let us talk about finding easy guitar tabs to start off your playing experience. Your technique will be restricted to strumming your guitar at first so the tabs you look for should be for songs that have interesting lyrics and do not rely on riffs and licks.

If you run an internet search for “most popular songs” you will get a mountain of song titles that people think are most popular, but a basic list of popular rock song should look something like this: Old Time Rock and Roll by Bob Seger, I’m a Believer by the Monkees, American Pie by Don McClean, Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf, Johnnie B. Goode by Chuck Berry, Angie by The Rolling Stones, Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, I Remember You by Skid Row, Come As You Are by Nirvana, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan, Horse With No Name by America, A Day In The Life, Here There And Everywhere and Hey Jude by The Beatles, I Walk The Line by Johnny Cash, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton, Gloria by Van Morrison, Hotel California by The Eagles, Behind Blue Eyes by The Who, White Room by Cream, Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin, Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival, Maggie Mae by Rod Stewart, Thank God I’m a Country Boy by John Denver, and Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix.

Keep this list for when your guitar technique improves so you can expand your repertoire, but now you can pull from this master list some songs that are easy to play. This list is: Angie by The Rolling Stones, Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan, Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, A Day In The Life, Here, There And Everywhere and Hey Jude by The Beatles, I Walk The Line by Johnny Cash, Tears In Heaven by Eric Clapton, Gloria by Van Morrison, Hotel California by The Eagles, Behind Blue Eyes by The Who I Remember You by Skid Row, Come As You Are by Nirvana, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door by Bob Dylan, Horse With No Name by America and White Room by Cream. According to some guitarists, Horse With No Name is THE easiest rock song to play, using only two chords.

For all these songs you only need to know the chords G, C, D, Am, Em and, for playing Horse With No Name, F#m7sus which is more difficult to write down than it is to play. So armed with your list of easy rock guitar songs and your list of basic chords, you can buy your tabs in a music store or take advantage of the wealth of free guitar tabs available on the internet.

Now here is a video clip of America playing the easiest rock song ever -

Technorati Tags: acoustic guitar, easy guitar tabs, easy rock guitar songs

It might be a surprise to some electric guitar players that there is a whole style of guitar playing where you pluck the guitar strings with your fingers without the benefit of a plectrum. It is called fingerstyle guitar. An alternative to using the tips of the fingers is the use of plectrums that attach to the fingers called fingerpicks. This style of guitar playing makes use of the thumb playing the bass notes on the sixth, fifth and fourth strings and the fingers keeping the rhythm going by playing a regular pattern of notes on the other strings.

This style was originally an attempt by guitarists to imitate the way piano players accompanies blues songs in the last years of the nineteenth century. Chet Atkins and Merle Travis were latter day champions of this interesting but easy to play guitar style.

Here is a simple fingerstyle blues instrumental which shows what one guy with a guitar can do armed with a finger picking pattern or two.

If you are looking to become a fingerstyle acoustic guitar player here is a video guitar lesson which shows you six simple picking patterns and a song to illustrate how to use them.

Technorati Tags: fingerstyle guitar, fingerstyle blues