Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free

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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.

Learn The Guitar Fretboard

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You CAN learn the guitar fretboard but it will require some effort. The piano keyboard presents the musical notes in a simple pattern but the guitar notes are arranged in patterns that, because there are no guides like the black and white piano keys, are a little tricky to see.

Guitar beginners focus on learning the guitar fretboard as a complete job on its own. The idea is that once you know the notes in every position, you can start enjoying playing the guitar. Focusing on learning the guitar fretboard is not necessary. If you learn scales and chords in different keys in the first position, and then go onto learning barre chords and playing scales further up the fretboard, after some months you will have a working knowledge of the notes on the guitar. If you learn to play the guitar this way, you will learn the notes on the fretboard without thinking about it. And it probably won’t take any longer.

If you learn to play the piano, you learn the notes in the octave. You find that the C major scale is in the white keys, the incidentals are the black keys and the same rules apply to each octave on the keyboard. When you are learning the guitar fretboard there are no principles that you can apply to ALL the strings.

The C major scale CAN be found on the first and sixth strings on the guitar. Your guitar fretboard has dots at the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets. We rely on them to find the frets, even though classical and flamenco guitar players manage quite well without them. But they can help us learn the location of the C major scale. The first and sixth strings sound E when they are played open and the first fret is F, the third is G, the fifth is A and the seventh is B. That is where the dots run out, but you simply move up one fret to get C and to the tenth fret to get the note D. Then E sounds again at fret twelve.

You can make a start on learning the guitar fretboard by memorizing the C major scale on the E strings. To learn the notes on the other four guitar strings you will need to find more patterns but learning the C major scale and the work of playing notes will already be imprinted on your brain and in your fingers, so you will be surprised at how quickly learning the whole guitar fretboard will go.

We study the guitar as it is found in standard tuning. The notes in standard tuning are E A D G B E. If you change the tuning of your guitar in any way, the notes and their relationships are different, so learn the fretboard in standard tuning first, then go into other tunings later if you want to.

This video shows a way of learning the guitar fretboard using three patterns:

Here is an interesting blog post on learning scales that will hopefully get your fretboard-learning juices flowing.


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