Category: More Lessons

If you want to find the best way to learn to play the guitar you need to consider two ways of approaching the instrument. The first way is ruled by the attitude that you need to learn musical theory and to read conventional music notation, usually called sheet music. People who teach guitar this way are giving you the road with the most possibilities for the widest range of people. If you have learnt to read music and know your theory, then it does not matter how talented or otherwise you are, you have what it takes to go get a job in a band or as a session musician or a guitar teacher. The thing about this way of learning guitar is that it needs to be started in childhood or early teens when you are more teachable.

Alot of people do not think about learning to play the guitar until they get into their late teens or even into their twenties, thirties or beyond. Once you start to get more mature the prospect of learning musical theory and sheet music can be too much to think about. This is where the other way of learning how to play the guitar comes in. You begin with the genre of music or the work of the particular artist you enjoy listening to, and just do what it takes to learn this narrow niche of music. You probably will not need to learn to read music because most songs are available in the form of tablature. Guitar tablature, or tabs, is a simpler system of writing down music than regular sheet music, and it can be learnt in a few minutes even though it might take a beginner guitar player a day or two to get the hang of it. With the help of chord diagrams to show you where to put your fingers to make chords, tab is all you need to learn how to play songs on the guitar as long as you already know what the music sounds like.

So we have two basic approaches to how to play the guitar. Can either one be said to be the best? Actually it is a little more complex than that. If you want to learn to compose music or to improvise on the guitar, if you have already learnt music, then you can take a course at a college in guitar improvisation or jazz or composition. But composition and improvisation are still available to the guitarist who has not learnt music in the conventional way. You see, if you have been playing the guitar for some hours every day for a year or two, and you have worked on learning new material, something happens that the music college teachers do not tell you about. You develop an instinctive familiarity with the guitar. If you have allowed your love of the guitar to develop, you will find that you have the same control over the fretboard that music readers have, but you have achieved it in a different way.

So what is the best way to learn how to play the guitar? The way that involves you taking advantage of every opportunity to learn, whatever form it is in. Take advantage of the hours in the day, the free tabs and guitar forums on the internet and the joy that you feel when you experience yourself becoming a real musician.

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Here is an announcement some guitar students will be interested in:
“InfamousGuitar.com announces JamPlay as yet another sponsor for its $5,000 Online Guitar Solo Contest. Joining companies such as GuitarPartsCentral.com and Dry Hill Studios as contest sponsors, JamPlay offers budding guitar players as well as experienced shredders an opportunity to improve their chops through easy-to-use online video guitar lessons.
InfamousGuitar.com’s $5,000 Online Guitar Solo contest began in May of 2008, and has already attracted hundreds of members to the site. Players of all skill levels, from beginner to semi-pro, are entering their 60-second guitar solos online for a chance to win the monthly $100 cash prize, and the annual $5,000 Grand Prize. Players and fans can participate in member forums, create “player profiles”, and upload original music for the world to hear. Interested parties may visit http://www.InfamousGuitar.com for more details, or email press infamousguitar.com.”
The complete story is at emailwire.com

Some regular readers will have visited Jamplay’s free lesson page, but for those who don’t know, JamPlay.com locates qualified guitar teachers from all over the world, videos their guitar lessons, and shares them with guitar players over the Internet. Thousands of guitar players every day use their services, and their testimonial page is filled with accolades from their subscribers.

Technorati Tags: InfamousGuitar.com, Online Guitar Solo Contest, guitar solos

With all the excitement generated by thinking about signing up for guitar lessons it is easy to become bedazzled with the array of guitar lessons advertised online and in the real world. You might feel that you just want to sign up for your guitar lessons, go to sleep and wake up being able to play the guitar. Well, it is not quite as easy as that. Having to decide which guitar lessons suit your needs best takes a little contemplation. Take a good look at what is available to you in the realm of guitar lessons.

First, there is one-on-one lessons. You have a guitar player sitting in front of you trying to find some way to help you become a guitar player. This guitar teacher will charge you by the hour or the term, and give you some material to learn, and maybe some sharing of personal experience mixed with an effort to pass on some of the wisdom he has gained over his years playing music. This guitar teacher is engaged in teaching to put money in his pocket. He wants to teach the largest number of students that he can handle with the least trouble.

This kind of guitar teacher used to be the only kind you could get, but now that guitar lessons can be packaged and transmitted over the internet, things are different. With online lessons you have some guy who knows something about the guitar who wants to get rich by marketing guitar lessons. He has a few thousand bucks at his disposal so he can put together some guitar lessons on video, back it up with some printed tabs and sheet music and sell it on the internet. Your online guitar lesson guy can afford to charge you much less than your local guitar teacher because he is not constrained by the number of students he can fit into his schedule - he can get thousands of people with guitar websites or blogs to sell his lessons for him.

Not only can you get a high quality set of guitar lesson videos but you will get some kind of feedback system where you can ask questions or make suggestions to your teacher and get a reply back by email or video. On top of that when you are browsing online guitar lesson packages, you will be seeing guitar teachers picked from anywhere in the world for their enthusiasm and ability, not for their location.

Okay, now that I have inadvertently given away my prejudice towards online guitar lessons, let us talk about specialization. You can get acoustic guitar lessons which will lean more towards acoustic guitar stuff like strumming patterns, open tunings and muting. Electric guitar lessons teach all that stuff too but with different emphasis plus lessons on note bending, sliding and fret board tapping.

After looking at the variety of guitar lesson choices available to the novice guitarist I hope that I have not left you more confused than ever. My final suggestion is when in doubt about which is the best guitar lesson package just jump in and go for whichever appeals to you and remember that you get a money back guarantee.

Technorati Tags: guitar lessons, guitar teacher, online guitar lesson