Guitar Noise

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Here’s a habit that doesn’t relate directly to playing guitar, but can have a great impact on your practice and playing: Keep a journal.

We’ve all seen people with acoustic guitars playing for spare change. Obviously it’s not possible to give money to every musician we meet, but we can certainly make the connection that there’s a real person playing music – someone that might be in need of a little help.

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.

To celebrate the arrival of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Rock Guitar in stores Tuesday, March 2, we’re giving away fifteen copies of it between now and the end of May.

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.