Guitar Noise

Putting chords to a melody is one of the most rewarding aspects of making music. Even if you can’t play chords on your guitar, you still can play arpeggios.

You’ll want to have a large repertoire of different kinds of songs to help you grow as a musician. Here are some thoughts about which songs to learn.

If you’re more comfortable thinking with fret numbers than note names, the chart in this tip will help. Use it the next time you learn a tune’s chords from sheet music.

When you learn a chord progression, try doing so in a way that helps you understand and apply it effectively, and helps you understand better how music works. That way involves learning the root movements between the chords.

How do some guitarists seem to barely move their hand when they change chords? The answer is inversions. Learning how they work can give you a “slowhand.”

This tip has to do with a key aspect of learning, enjoying and understanding guitar that I think is mostly absent from both schools and private studios.

In this lesson we’ll see that going up is sometimes the same as going down on the fretboard. We’ll need this knowledge of inversions when we start deciphering chord charts.

Let’s return to the one-finger lesson series. The chord we’re learning today actually uses two fingers. It’s a minor chord, which means it feels kind of sad or final.

Here’s a tip on hearing and playing with key centers. This could help players who can already play a few songs. They can even be three-chord songs.

Someone who can successfully transcribe fast melodies is someone who uses everything he knows about music to make educated guesses at what he’s hearing. In other words, the more theory you know – especially theory related to the genre of the music you’re transcribing – the better.

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. In this lesson we have a play-along to go with the two-finger chord shape we recently learned.

We’ve been digging into the “One Finger Method,” but we’re going to take a break from that to do a bit of playing by ear. This new tip is a quick one. The idea behind this tip is to use just one finger on one string to play a simple melody. The melody we’ll use is from “The First Noel.”

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. In this lesson we’ll learn another two-finger chord shape. As always, take the time to experiment and practice the shapes and chord progressions in the previous lessons of this series.

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. In this lesson we’ll learn another two-finger chord shape, and use it to play along with the classic Greensleeves.

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. We’re going to learn a new tune in this lesson, Aura Lee, which is much better known as Love Me Tender. Aura Lee is going to teach us a new chord form. It’s our first that uses two fingers.

Welcome back to the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer. We’re going to look at some serious playing around this time out. And we’re going to focus on learning this lesson mostly through sound, through listening. When it comes to learning music, aural explanations are often more effective than textual ones.
The sound file works through several [...]

Welcome back to the one-finger guitar chord primer. Last time, we used the one-finger foundation shape to play a simple chord progression. We’re going to do the same basic thing this time, except we’re going use the one-finger shape to make a new type of chord.
I’ll give a brief explanation of the shape, which is [...]

Welcome back to the one finger chord guitar primer. Last time, we introduced the single, foundation shape you need to start playing chords on the guitar. Please refer to the Guitar Noise newsletter archives for that lesson. I’ll summarize the lesson here: press the first finger of your left hand onto strings 2, 3, and [...]

Welcome back to the One Finger chord method. We’re going to learn the one foundation chord shape that will get us making music as fast as possible. That one shape will make it easier to learn more complex shapes later on.
To make this lesson as easy to read as it is to do, I think [...]

We’re going to take a little break from the Playing By Ear series to get into some very basic basics. This is going to be for newbies, total guitar neophytes just starting out. Let’s call this the One Finger Guitar Chord Primer series. Here’s a tentative outline of the start of this series:

the One shape
tuning [...]