For somebody who just wants to play along with the singing around a campfire, it must look like a fairly easy job to play the guitar. Lots of people can do it and many of them are idiots. But when you look at a piece of guitar tab it looks kind of scary. Well, look again. It is just a picture of a guitar. Visualize it in your imagination. The tuning end of the guitar is to your left, the body of the guitar is to your right. The thinnest string is on the top, the thickest string is on the bottom. Nothing scary about that.

Moving on, we see numbers on the guitar tab. What are they? The numbers running down the left side are the notes sounded when you play the open strings, the numbers that run along the strings represent frets. Frets are the metal strips on the neck of the guitar. You put your fingers a fraction behind the frets to alter the length of the string, so that when it is plucked, strummed or picked the sound is higher or lower depending on how far up the fingerboard you are. So the number one, for example, indicates that one of your fingers must be placed behind the first fret of the guitar. This is the fret closest to the tuning gear on the end of the neck.

Now let us look at a section of guitar tab. This is a short riff from a piece of music called Peter Gunn. It was written by Henry Mancini who probably wrote most of the orchestral music that most of us have ever heard, and it has been recorded by many artists, notably The Blues Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Emerson, Lake And Palmer. The first recording of it was a hit for electric guitar pioneer, Duane Eddy.

All the notes are played on the sixth string - the thickest string, remember? If you play the piano, try it out, the notes are E E F# E G E A G# played as one bar in 4/4 time.

e—————————
B—————————
G—————————
D—————————
A—————————
E–0–0–2–0–3–0–5–4–

To play the tabs use down strokes with the pick or your thumb. Once you have played the notes once, go back to the start and play them again until you are tired. Congratulations, now you know first hand that it is easy to learn guitar tabs. Really you have all you need to go on and learn your favorite songs. Not many songs have not been put into tab form, so it is just a matter or searching on the net. As your technique gets better, you will find that there are symbols that represent any left hand guitar technique you will learn. If you find tabs for a song that you like, and it contains symbols you do not understand, the tab often has an explanatory key at the top or the bottom. Or you can just look on the popular tab sites for explanations of any symbols you do not know.

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Left hand guitar techniques can pretty much be moved from one musical genre to another. One exception I can think of is the technique of fretting bass notes by wrapping your thumb around the guitar neck. This technique is not used in all genres even though you are welcome to try it out in whatever you are playing, but it is downright frowned upon in classical guitar playing.

One technique that is used in classical and rock guitar playing is the use of the right hand to damp the sound of the strings. You put the side of your hand over all six strings and then pluck with your fingers or use up and down strokes with the pick. If you try it on your electric guitar you will instantly recognize the sound from numerous punk or metal tracks. A variation on this technique is to have your hand “floating” above the strings and bring it down to damp your notes just after you have played them.

Common to all kinds of plectrum guitar styles is the invention and use of strumming patterns. The “pattern” is varied by whether you use up or down strokes with your pick and in what order. A basic pattern is made by just alternating up and down strokes across all six strings in time with the music. Once you are comfortable with this technique you can vary it by using two up strokes together or two downstrokes followed by upstrokes, or you can just play the three bass or treble strings.

Whether or not you are exclusively a plectrum or finger-style guitar player you should at least experiment with the flamenco strumming technique known as rasqueado. With this style of strumming you are making use of each of your four fingers alternately to produce a completely different effect from plectrum strumming. To start you can rest the thumb on the sixth string and just strum the fourth, third, second and first strings. Begin by having all the fingers curled up, then drag each one across the strings in succession starting with the pinky. Play slowly at first and just use downstrokes.

Once you are used to playing down strokes using this flamenco guitar technique, you can stop resting your thumb on the sixth string and follow your fingers down with it. So now you are playing five down strokes in succession. You can play a series of these rasqueado and join them up by performing an upstroke with the thumb. To summarize, you do downstrokes with the pinky, ring finger, middle finger, first finger and thumb. This gives you a long continuous strum. Then to begin another rasqueado, you bring your thumb up across the strings and start again with the pinky.

So now you have some details about some common guitar techniques plus some info on how to play flamenco style strumming. That should keep you busy for a while. Remember to search YouTube for any of the techniques I have mentioned so you can watch a guitarist performing these techniques.

Here is a video lesson on guitar strumming:

More Links For Learning How To Play Guitar
I am giving you a link to a page of links for guitarists. Do not go to that page unless you have some time to spare. There are links to guitar-related sites of all kinds and once you start surfing them you will be unable to stop. You have been warned. Here it is, a Categorized Directory of Websites for Guitarists

Technorati Tags: guitar techniques, strumming patterns, flamenco guitar

If you are a country music fan and want to learn how to play country songs on your guitar, you could start with this list of country standards as a beginning for your repertoire:

Achey Breaky Heart
Am I That Easy To Forget?
Deep In The Heart Of Texas
Bonaparte’s Retreat
Folsom Prison Blues
Coward Of The County
Jambalaya
King Of The Road
Green, Green Grass Of Home
You Are My Sunshine
Wabash Cannonball

Cowboy Lyrics is a site that has lyrics for country songs, guitar tablature for popular country songs, chord and sheet music. You can search through the genres of western swing, traditional country, progressive and outlaw songs, folk music, bluegrass, country gospel and, of course, cowboy songs.

The free country guitar tabs section at Love To Know.com has all the material you need to become a country guitar player. Their free country guitar tablature will have you playing your favorite songs in no time.

About.com is a huge repository of information and tutorials on any subject under the internet sun. In the country music archive you will find a range of guitar tabs, chords and lyrics sorted according to the artist’s name. There is also a list of the top five hundred country songs and the top two hundred most influential albums.

There is a large archive of guitar and bass tablature at Fretplay.com. There is also a comprehensive guide telling you how to read tabs. Visitors can also submit tabs that are not included in the collection.

Country-Tabs.net boasts that it is the best music resource for tabs, lyrics and chords for your favorite country artist.

Tab Country.com is another site with a collection of free country guitar tablature. This site offers you the latest and hottest country guitar tabs without moving from your seat. You can read the tabs online or download them to keep. The tabs are filed under the name of the artist and by the titles of songs. Another feature is the lists available that show top rated country guitar tablature and the latest tabs added to the site. If all this is not enough, Tab Country is an online community where you can meet other country guitar players, share your knowledge and ask for advice.

Getting a practice routine
There is an interesting post at learnguitarfree.com on how to develop a guitar practice routine. I love finding this kind of stuff because we need as much input we can to keep our own motivation going.

Technorati Tags: free country guitar tablature, country music

If you know music theory, you will have encountered the circle of fifths. It is one of the basic elements of music theory. It is a picture of the chromatic scale and how the twelve tones relate to each other. Look at the letters on the circle, you will see that each number is the fifth note of the scale before it. Take the scale starting with the note G. The fifth note of the scale is D, which is the note after G on the circle of fifths.

So, you now have an idea of what you are looking at if you have a picture of the circle of fifths in front of you. If you write it out as a straight line, it goes: F C G D A E B Gb Ab Eb Bb. You may or may not know that Gb (G flat) is the same as F# (F sharp), Db is the same as C#, and so on.

Look at G in the circle. Do you know the chords in the key of G? They are C - the subdominant situated before the note G and D - the dominant, after G.

Around the nineteen twenties composers of popular music found that if you start with any tonic chord and jump forward along the circle of fifths as many steps as you like, then follow the circle backwards, you end up with a nice chord sequence. So, if you take C as the tonic fir the key you are working in and jump forward to, for example, A, then work your way back to C, you get C A D G C.

There are two things to remember. When you are working your way backwards to the tonic, you are actually doing it in fourths, not fifths, also, the notes of any of the chords you use might not be in the key you are using, but you will find that they still work well as accompaniment to tunes in that key.

Okay, so working between C and A you can have a chord progression that looks like:
C A7 D7 G7 C or instead of using sevenths to work back to C you can have minor chords: C Am Dm Gm C.

Let us try another example, this time going ahead by a rather large five steps: C B7 E7 A7 D7 G7 C.

You can take as may steps ahead as you like, just do some experimenting to see what chord sequences you come up with. After a little practice with this method of chord generation, you will be able to work out the chord progression of songs you hear, just by listening to them.

This Youtube guitar lesson video gives us more info on finding a song’s key by ear.

Technorati Tags: circle of fifths, chord progressions, Youtube guitar lesson video

We often associate the guitar and the ukulele with Hawaii but they are fairly recent imports into the Hawaiian culture. The way the guitar was introduced into the country is a matter of whose version of the story you like best. One version says that American and Spanish cowboys were invited to work in Hawaii in the mid-1830’s to help with the newly imported cattle population. Another story is that Hawaiians were helping the Argentine navy with something or other in Monterey, California. Whatever the truth is, the Hawaiians took to the stringed instruments and adapted them to their own culture and ways of expressing their feelings.

Anyway, let us shed some light on the unusual name for this guitar style. The name “slack key” refers to the practice of changing the tuning of the guitar by turning the tuning keys so that the strings are loose, or “slack”. The end result of this adjustment is usually an open tuning. But apparently sometimes slack key guitar players play in standard tuning, so apart from the tuning, what distinguishes slack key from other fingerstyle guitar playing? Well, there is the repertoire. Slack key guitar playing usually accompanies songs whose themes are rooted in the Hawaiian country - the mountains, the palm trees, the sea - south sea island stuff.

The G major chord turned out to be a popular open tuning for the Hawaiian guitarists. This is D G D G B D, from lowest to highest, and they called it Taro Patch tuning. Another kind of tuning was called Wahine tuning and included a major seventh, for example D G D F# B D. Another slack key tuning is called “Gabby’s C” and is C G E G A E.

Another aspect that makes slack key special is the unique use of standard finger-picking techniques like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and harmonics. These guitar techniques are used in highly personal ways with the guitar player sometimes using different tunings and techniques for the same song according to how he feels at the moment. Slack key playing has a wide variety of modes of expression. Some players will stick to playing a melody with very little variation, others love to improvise on their basic themes. Other guitar players love the chime effect achieved by the use of harmonics.

If you are interested in listening to some Hawaiian slack key guitar playing, some names to look out for are Sonny Chillingworth, Leonard Kwan, Moses Kahumoku, George Kuo and Ray Kane. These are among some of the most prominent composers and players of slack key guitar. If you look on YouTube for slack key guitar videos you will find a handful uploaded by a few dedicated guitar players who are working on spreading the word about this beautiful art form.

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Once you have learnt the chords and can sing and play them at the same time, I advise you to practice until the song is second nature because you really should try doing some improvising or at least writing your own solo to go with this song.

There are many versions of Hotel California, including parodies, and I suggest you listen to them all. To move on and make Hotel California or any other song your own, you need to get over it. Get it out of your system. Listening to many different versions will help with this as will intensive practice. Three very differing examples are by The Gipsy Kings, The Cat Empire and a solo acoustic guitar version by Hank Marvin with some very nice licks.

The chords you are going to be using are:
B minor which is (from sixth string to first string) 2 2 4 4 3 2
B minor seventh 2 2 4 2 3 2
F sharp 2 4 4 3 2 2
A major 0 0 2 2 2 0
E major 0 2 2 1 0 0
G major 3 2 0 0 0 3
D major x 0 0 2 3 2
E minor 0 2 2 0 0 0
Bm, Bm7 and F# are all barre chords at the second fret.

(Bm) On a dark desert highway
(F#) cool wind in my hair
(A) Warm smell of colitas
(E) rising up through the air
(G) Up ahead in the distance
(D) I saw a shimmering light
(Em) My head grew heavy
and my sight grew dim
(F#) I had to stop for the night

(Bm) There she stood in the doorway;
(F#) I heard the mission bell

(A) And I was thinking to myself
this could be (E) heaven or this could be hell

(G) Then she lit up a candle
(D) and she showed me the way

(Em) There were voices down the corridor
(F#) I thought I heard them say

(G) Welcome to the Hotel Cali
for (D) nia
(Em) Such a lovely place
such a (Bm7) lovely face
(G) Plenty of room at the Hotel Cali
for (D) nia
Any (Em) time of year (any time of year)
you can (F#) find it here

(Bm) Her mind is Tiffany twisted
(F#) she got the Mercedes bends
(A) She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys
(E) that she calls friends
(G) How they dance in the courtyard
(D) sweet summer sweat
(Em) Some dance to remember
(F#) some dance to forget

(Bm) So I called up the captain
(F#) “Please bring me my wine.”
(A) “We haven’t had that spirit here since
(E) nineteen sixty-nine”
(G) And still those voices are calling
from (D) far away
(Em) Wake you up in the middle of the night
(F#) just to hear them say

(G) Welcome to the Hotel Cali
for (D) nia
(Em) Such a lovely place
such a (Bm7) lovely face
They (G) livin’ it up at the Hotel Cali
for (D) nia
What a (Em) nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
bring your (F#) alibis”

(Bm) Mirrors on the ceiling
(F#)the pink champagne on ice
And she said (A) “We are all just prisoners here
(E) of our own device
(G) “And in the master’s chambers
(D) they gathered for the feast
(Em) They stab it with their steely knives, but they
(F#)just can’t kill the beast

(Bm) Last thing I remember, I was
(F#)running for the door
(A) I had to find the passage back
to the (E) place I was before
(G) “Relax” said the night man
“We are (D) programmed to receive”
(Em) “You can check out anytime you like, but
(F#) you can never leave”

This YouTube video will help you with the chords for Hotel California:

Technorati Tags: Hotel California

With “Guitar Alchemist” you are able to get to know the chords of the major scale in all keys. According to the program’s website you will “easily find chords to play over any scale and vice-versa”. You can filter your chords by inversion or degree of difficulty. You can reconfigure the program for left-handed players.

“Advanced FretPro” is a free software designed to train guitar players to gain familiarity with the fretboard. A library of scales and chords comes with the program.

“TabPlayer” is the first guitar software which is able to play, edit, convert, format and export tabs as a text file. It has a chord dictionary that contains over a thousand chords. You just pick the chord you want and insert it into your music. The program plays your tablature, plays CD’s and mp3 files and searches for songs on the net.

“Power Tab Editor” is a software program for writing guitar tabs. The program includes a chord dictionary that you can use to display chords in standard music form or as tablature. You open the chord dictionary which displays chord diagrams. You select and insert the chord and you can see the notes and the fingering in tab form.

“Guitar Chords v 2.2″ is a no-frills guitar chord software. It has a library of forty thousand basic and not so basic chords which are displayed as guitar tab. Guitar Chords is the software you need if you want to never have to look for chords again and you want your chords displayed in an easy to read format.

Technorati Tags: Free guitar chord software, guitar chord software

There are two ways to learn bass online. One is to take advantage of the many free bass lessons on the web. These online bass guitar lessons will help you to understand how the place of the bass guitar in a band, music theory, reading sheet music and tabs as well as giving you basic rhythms to play. Some of the bass lessons you find will have some kind of interactive component where you can play along with riffs or a backing track. The other way is to look for bass guitar forums. If they are active they will have the kind of advice you will not get from lessons. talkbass is a good one, bassplayer.com is another, and basschat.co.uk will have answers to all kinds of questions on any aspect of bass guitar playing and associated gizmos.

Of course, many of the bass guitar lesson sites are offering paid courses, but there are also some good free lessons. If you do a search for “online bass guitar lessons” (without the quotes will give you more results) you will be able to compare the various paid lesson courses for bass guitarists, and you will get a chance to compare them with the free courses. If you decide to learn to play bass guitar for free you will probably need to find yourself some free bass guitar tabs on the internet. There are many places that offer bass tabs for popular songs. Another option for the bass guitar student on a budget is YouTube. If you go looking for online bass lessons on video you will probably find about a thousand clips, all offering something of value to the beginner.

As a bass player you must learn to play in time. A newbie guitar player can spend years playing guitar with the tempo and timing all over the place because he does not have to play with other musicians. The bass guitarist’s job is to play in a band so the sooner you get any little rhythmic or timing peccadillos ironed out, the better. For this you will need a metronome. Type “free metronome” into a search engine, find one you like and bookmark it if it is online, although there are metronomes you can download for free. The same goes for a tuner. There are quite good bass guitar tuners online. You will also be able to find free backing tracks for guitar online. Playing along to these is a great way to get the feel of playing in a band. You can tell the program what chords to play and the time signature, and you can play along to the looped backing track online or download it in mp3 format.

For more inspiration find video clips and mp3’s by leading bass guitar players like Jaco Pastorius, Stanley Clarke, Waylon Tisdale, John Pattitucci, Mike Mason or Miroslav Vitous. To finish off, here is a video featuring Les Claypool:

Technorati Tags: learning to play bass guitar, learn bass online

So onto some basic Flamenco guitar techniques. The most distinctive technique used in Flamenco is the tapping on the body of the guitar. This technique is called the golpe and is performed just below the sound hole. Flamenco guitars are made with a tapping plate to minimize damage to the guitar from constant hitting of the body. The golpe is often used in conjunction with downward strokes of the thumb and with continuous up and down strokes of the index finger used by guitarists playing the Flamenco musical form called Bulerias.

The rapid picking exhibited by Flamenco guitarists is called picado. This is also used in classical guitar but to nowhere near the same degree. It is a “rest” stroke which is played by striking a string with an upward stroke of the first or second finger which comes to rest on the string behind it. So if you play a rest stroke on the second string the finger comes into contact with the third string after it has struck the note. Flamenco scale passages are played as picado using rapid alternating strokes of the first and second fingers.

Another Flamenco guitar technique is the use of rapid arpeggios. Arpeggios are played by placing the first, second and third fingers in position on the first, second and third strings as if you are going to pluck a chord. Instead of plucking all three strings you lift your whole hand slightly so that the fingers play the strings in rapid succession. The thumb and fingers of a guitarist who has practiced this technique can play some very fast arpeggio passages. The effect is similar to sweep picking used in rock guitar.

The thumb is uses almost exclusively in downstrokes. This is another rest stroke where the thumb plays, for example, the sixth string and comes to rest on the fifth string before starting the next stroke. It may seem strange to anybody who has not tried it to make the thumb and fingers “rest” between strokes, but this technique can produce some very fast thumb and picado playing.

Another technique used in Flamenco guitar is the tremolo. This is a technique for producing a long line of melody notes accompanied by the thumb playing bass notes. This technique was borrowed from classical guitar and differs in that Flamenco tremolo is played with four notes between each bass note whereas classical guitarists only play three melody notes between bass notes. In most guitar notation systems the thumb is shown as “p” (for the Spanish “pulgar”), the index finger is shown as “i” , the middle finger is designated “m” and the ring finger is “a” (for annular which is latin for ring).

To play a continuous E on the open first string of the guitar, use the fingers and thumb in this order:
Play a bass note on the open sixth string with your thumb using rest stroke.
On the open first string:
Play a free stroke with i
Play a free stroke with a
Play a free stroke with m
Play a free stroke with i
You have just played one bass note followed by four melody notes. To continue playing, make an E chord with your left hand and alternate the bass notes between the sixth, fifth and fourth strings.

As you can see these techniques are hard to explain in words. They are easier to understand if you use my written descriptions in conjunction with watching Flamenco guitarists on video. It will take some hard work to actually use these techniques, and I strongly suggest you take lessons from a guitar player who knows how to play Flamenco.

To help you out with the tremolo technique here is Sal Bonavita giving a video demo of what I have described above:

Technorati Tags: Flamenco guitar lessons, classical guitar, Flamenco guitar

The classical guitar is the original guitar in the form that is familiar to us. The electric guitar, the steel string acoustic, the resonator guitars all descended from the nylon string classical guitar. Classical guitar as a genre is simply classical music played on the guitar. It can get quite sophisticated and technically demanding but there are simple classical guitar pieces available on the net in musical notation or tabs that any guitar player with a basic fingerstyle technique could find very rewarding to play. Estudio in C by Dionisio Aguado and Gavotte En Rondeau - Lute Suite No 4 in E by J.S. Bach are two examples that I have seen in tab form.

If you are interested in listening to classical guitar music, John Williams and Julian Bream both have clips on YouTube and other video sites but do not restrict yourself to well-known names - there are many great acoustic instrumental clips by amateur guitarists.

You might be surprised to know that Flamenco guitar as a solo instrument is a fairly new arrival on the music scene. The guitar has been an accompaniment for singers and dancers for many years but solo guitarists have only been making their presence felt since the mid-twentieth century. The early Flamenco guitar players like Ramon Montoya produced music that would probably hold little interest for a modern non-Spanish audience but you will find video clips by masters of the 1950’s and ‘60′ like Sabicas and Diego Del Gastor as well as modern virtuoso guitarists like Paco De Lucia, Serranito, Paco Pena and Vincente Amigo.

We all like to listen to and explore the sounds of our guitars and the folk music boom of the nineteen sixties was a breeding ground for many new guitarists who loved to experiment with acoustic guitar instrumental solos. Possibly the most popular guitar solo from this genre was “Anji” by am extremely influential guitarist named Davy Graham. This piece was recorded by Paul Simon on an early Simon And Garfunkel album and Davy Graham’s “She moved thru’ the Bizarre/Blue Raga” was heavily adapted (or adopted) by Jimmy Page for the Led Zeppelin number, “White Summer”. Graham was responsible for the popularization of the DADGAD guitar tuning which introduced guitar players to the possibilities of playing bass accompaniment on open strings while improvising or composing tunes on the treble strings.

Well, I hope I the names I have given you will help you to find acoustic guitar solos and soloists you have never heard before. Remember if you any music you see played on one of the video sites is probably available somewhere in guitar tabs so do not be afraid to go hunting for them.

Here is a video of a very young Davy Graham playing “Cry Me A River”:

Technorati Tags: Acoustic guitar solos, acoustic guitar, classical guitar, Flamenco guitar