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Guitar Tricks - The Learning Guitar Player's Resource

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.
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.
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.

Choosing acoustic guitar lessons

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So you have an acoustic guitar and you want to take lessons. The question of which style of acoustic guitar to learn can be a bit of a conundrum for the newbie guitar player. For a start you have two basic kinds of acoustic guitar – steel string and nylon string. Then there are several basic genres you could choose to learn.

Let us begin with making the most glaring distinction in acoustic guitar music: there is classical guitar music and there is the rest. Classical guitar has grown up in the past hundred years or so. It was originally a poor relation in the classical music family with few players and very small audiences. Over the years with the appearance of virtuoso classical guitar players and composers with a high level of sophistication and enthusiasm audiences have come to know something about what to expect from a classical guitarist.

If you are interested in classical guitar music then this will probably be your first choice. If you choose to learn classical guitar you are laying the foundation for a wide musical education. You will also be trained in how to play to produce expressive tone and color in your guitar playing, not to mention your technique will be on a higher level than guitarists in other genres.

There are some skills that most serious rock or jazz guitarists have that classical guitar players do not have, Classical guitarists are not trained in improvisation. No matter how much musical theory and advanced technique he has, in a situation where improvisation is needed a classical guitarist may as well be a sculptor. Neither will classical guitar lessons give you a good ear. All your music will be learnt from the printed page, and there will be no opportunity to develop an ear.

So if you pick classical as your acoustic guitar style, the musical training you receive will give you a great background in music and the kind of technique which will enable you to move easily between genres as long as you can rely on sheet music.

If you have a steel string acoustic guitar and want to take lessons then you will be taught to play using a plectrum. The music you are taught depends on the teacher but it can range from pop to folk to country so you will need to make sure your teacher’s tastes are the same as yours. This kind of musical education can possibly give you the chance to develop skills in improvisation and playing by ear but you will most likely taught to accompany songs by strumming chords. From there you can branch out to playing electric guitar, country flatpicking or learning to play using fingerpicking techniques such as Travis picking but you will at least have a basic knowledge of guitar playing.

If you own a nylon string acoustic guitar you could begin right off with fingerstyle guitar lessons. This entails learning fingerpicking techniques developed by folk guitarists and Travis pickers. This kind of playing is nowhere near as demanding as classical guitar but it does give you a little more technical versatility than playing using a plectrum.

This survey of the kinds of acoustic guitar lessons you could take is nowhere near exhaustive but I have given you some idea of the basic differences between the acoustic guitar styles.

To add to your confusion here is a video from Youtube featuring fingerpicking on a steel string acoustic guitar.


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Category: Acoustic Guitars
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