There can be more than one reason why a student may struggle when trying to change chords smoothly. So the first thing to do when dealing with this challenge is to diagnose why the problem exists. You need to determine if your student has one of the following problems:

• A. A physical coordination problem
• B. He/she has not been practicing
• C. A lack of understanding of what needs to be done
• D. A mental processing problem

Most guitar teachers assume the reason is either A. (a physical coordination problem) or B. (little or no practice). Fact is, most of the time this is wrong. The majority of students actually do attempt to practice. And true physical coordination problems are rare.

For most guitar students almost all guitar playing problems are caused by their brains, not by their hands! This is why many efforts to help them may not work well.

As I mentioned before, there can many reasons why a student is struggling with this (or any other issue) so it is not possible to give a one-size-fits-all solution in an article. There are however three powerful guitar teaching tips that can help solve this problem with beginning guitar students.

1. Get your students to keep their strumming hand moving in correct rhythm no matter how far behind the fretting hand may be in forming the next chord. In other words, tell your students (when practicing this way) to not allow the strumming hand to wait on the fretting hand! Practicing in this way will solve a lot of other rhythm and timing problems in the future for this student! The student should practice this way about one third of their practice time until the problem is resolved.
2. Get your student to not use the strumming hand at all and simply change chords with the fretting hand quickly (rapid fire, one after another). The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.
3. Make your student play a chord he/she needs to master. Tell him/her to grip the strings hard when playing the chord, then to relax totally (without taking fingers away from the strings/chord), then tell the student to squeeze again all fingers at the same time! Then relax.

The goal here is to train his/her brain to make all fingers move and relax together and not one finger at a time (which is how beginning guitar students make chords on their own – big mistake)… Repeat this exercise until the student can do it well.

Next, have the student move fingers off the strings but maintain the basic chord shape while hovering over the strings…. Then press down on the strings and make the chord… repeat this many times and then gradually move further and further away from the strings before making the chord again. Eventually from an open hand the student should be able to form the chord easily… but in each case you must be sure all fingers are moving and relaxing at the same time, not one finger at a time! The student should practice this way about a third of the time until the problem is resolved.

Notice that these solutions of the problem are all ‘physical’, but they are designed to overcome the student’s “mental processing problem” because the student has not learned to separate and isolate each motion. The beginning guitar student’s brain is overloaded with too much information to apply at the same time, this is why we work on method #1 and #2 above to free the brain from too much processing at once. The last method (#3) is designed in order to break the student’s mental processing habit of sending separate and linear messages to each finger of the hand. What we want is to train the brain to process and send one message to all fingers involved.

To get more help on teaching guitar and building a successful guitar teaching business, check out these fifteen free guitar teaching tips.

About the author: Tom Hess is a highly successful guitar teacher, professional touring guitarist and recording artist. He coaches other guitar teachers on how to teach guitar.

The main focus of this lesson is to instruct on how to play the simplest of chords on a keyboard while showing how to obtain them with some small amount of understanding. Hopefully, this will help the guitarist understand how chords are played on the guitar easier than using the guitar alone. It will also provide the guitarist with a quick introduction to the keyboard. By using the information provided below, the guitarist can more easily figure out what notes are being played with particular chords.

Having some small amount of musical training while I was young, I can say where things usually begin when a new student is being taught piano. It starts at middle C.

Middle C – The Starting Point

So, where is middle C? The placement of middle C on a musical staff can be researched on the person’s own time. I am sure it is found in a number of other places on the Internet. This lesson will show how to finger all the major chords, minor chords, and dominant 7th chords, hopefully without overwhelming you with music theory. So, let us have a look at a diagram of the some keyboards.

Note that middle C is off centre and not the middle note in the keyboard. This is because this and many other keyboards as well as full-size pianos are not symmetrical about middle C. The reasoning behind that is for some other topic of research that goes into the development of music as a whole. What is important is that you can learn how to locate middle C with a little practice.

Other common sizes for keyboards are 73 keys, 76 keys, and 88 keys. These can be seen below in Figure 3, Figure 4 and Figure 5, respectively.

While middle C is not usually (see Figure 3) in the middle of the keyboard, it is almost there. It makes a practical place to start in terms of range of musical sounds. It also makes a very good place to start when studying music theory.

The C Major Scale

The notes of the C major scale are:

Each note in the C major scale can be numbered using regular numerals and Roman numerals:

Note that I listed the next C in the scale while showing an octave instead of stopping at B as shown in Figure 2. This has to do with showing the formula for a major scale. This will make learning how to apply the formula to other notes easier later.

Notice that when the C major scale is numbered using Roman numerals, some are numbered with capital letters and some are numbered with lower case letters. (Jumping a little bit ahead, all chords in the C major family are built using only notes from the C major scale.)

When playing chords in the C major family, very little thinking has to be done because only the white keys are played. When each finger of the right hand assigned to one key, everything falls into place. If you place the thumb of the right hand on middle C, the rest of the fingers will each fall on one key naturally. Refer to Figure 6 below as an example.

So, start by playing the C major chord, commonly referred to as C. Place the thumb of the right hand on middle C (or any C), skip using the index finger, place the middle finger on E, skip the ring finger, and place the little finger on G. That is the simplest C chord you can make. To play the D minor (commonly shown as Dm) chord, just move the hand to the right one white key so the thumb plays D, the middle finger plays F, and the little finger plays A. To play the E minor chord (commonly shown as Em), move the hand to the right one white key. This is the same for all successive chords for the C major scale.

Now go back to the C major scale where it is numbered with Roman numerals. Those notes numbered with capital Roman numerals have chords that are major chords. Those numbered with lower case Roman numerals have chords that are minor chords. The exception to this last statement is the vii° chord. The vii° chord is a diminished chord. (It is a chord with a minor 3rd and a 5th that is lowered by a half a step. This information can be left for later exploration of knowledge of music theory.)

So:

Chord Names

When it comes to playing chords an octave higher, it is easy using a piano or other keyboard instrument. When playing guitar it is different because you can form different version of the same chord in different places on the fingerboard. If playing an electric guitar it is easier to play chords one octave higher because the fingers can be placed that high on the fretboard (fingerboard) more easily due to the way the guitar is built.

For the C major scale, the chords are shown for the respective note below:

Difference between Major Chords and Minor Chords

A full chord must be constructed of at least three notes. Any chord in the family of the C major scale (and any major scale for that matter) begins with the note which is the name of the chord, the third note up from that note and the fifth note up from the note of the name of the chord. For a C chord, that means the chord is made up of the notes C (I), E (iii), and G (V) of the C major scale.

What makes a minor chord minor? The answer is that the 2nd note in the chord (the major 3rd) is made a minor 3rd. This means that the 2nd note is reduced by a half-step. Example: D notes: D, F#, A – note that F# is not a note in the C major scale. Now it can be seen that the D chord is not a chord in the C major chord family. Dm note: D, F, A – note that the major 3rd (F#) is reduced to F.

I once saw a musical play about a couple of piano students that made humorous the stories their careers starting from their early days. The piano teacher asked the question of the students “What makes a minor chord sound minor?” The answer was that a minor chord sounds sad whereas a major chord sounds happy. When you play a minor chord in comparison this generally sounds true.

Just using the knowledge associated with the C major scale we know where the major chords are for the notes: C, F and G. We the know the minor chords are for the notes D, E, A, and the diminished chord is associated with the note B. Remember, the method for playing all of the chords in the C major scale is provided in the paragraph below Figure 6. All chords in the C major chord family can be played by using the thumb, the middle finger and the little finger. Actually, for later use and knowledge, the same holds true for playing the chords to the left of the right hand but starting with the little finger and moving to the right. The fingers used on the left hand are the little finger, the middle finger and the thumb.

Extending the Knowledge of Minor Chords to Find the Rest of the Major Chords on the Keyboard

Figure 7 shows an octave of keys from the notes C to C. The top of the figure shows how an octave normally looks while the bottom of the figure shows the octave as if the black keys in the octave were extended to the full length of the white keys. The extension of the black keys is done to show that there is movement of one half-step between all keys, black or white even though some white keys have no black keys between them. Note that there is no sharp (#) or flat (b) between the notes E and F and B and C.

Aside: However, the movement from the notes E to F and B to C or the movement of F to E and C to B is still only one half-step. This is important to understand because using this knowledge along with of what notes are in the C major scale allows us to figure out for ourselves the formula for the major scale if we so wish. More importantly, with this knowledge, if we forget the formula for the major scale, we can refer to the C major scale to figure out the formula.

Because we know what makes a minor chord minor, we can extend that knowledge to figure out what the major chords are for the notes D, E and A by using the chords Dm, Em and Am. Place the right-hand fingers on a keyboard for one of the minor chords mentioned. Just move the middle finger (the one on the 2nd note of the chord) up a half-step. To moved up a half-step is to move up by one key – black or white. Refer to Figure 7 above for reference.

Using Dm to find D: Using the notes D, F and A => move the middle finger up by one half-step gives the notes D, F# and A. Refer to Figure 8 as an example. Imagine moving the fingers from the notes indicated on the bottom chord of Figure 8, Dm to the top chord of Figure 8, D.

Using Em to find E: Using the notes E, G and B => move the middle finger up by one half-step gives the notes E, G# and B.

Using Am to find A: Using the notes A, C and E => move the middle finger up by one half-step gives the notes A, C# and E.

Using Bdim to find B: Using the notes B, D and F => move the middle finger up by one half-step and the little finger up by one half-step gives the notes B, D# and F#.

We can also use the above knowledge to figure out what the minor chords are what the minor chords are for C, F and G. To do this, simply finger the chord and move the middle finger down one half-step. Cm has the notes C, Eb and G. Fm has the notes F, Ab and C. Gm has the notes G, Bb and D.

Now it is possible to figure out all of the major and minor chords for all the notes on the keyboard. It is good to note that this method is easiest to use for the white keys. The only chord that has not be explicitly discussed is Bdim. Bdim has a minor 3rd and a minor 5th. You should be able to figure out or research what the notes are for the chords B and a Bm. You could also use the major scale formula to obtain the B major scale and work from there.

NOTE: It is important to reference the keyboard (a real one or the diagrams) when studying this material to have a visual aid.

The Major Scale Formula

The major scale (as well as every other scale) has a set formula. However, if you know the C major scale and the key spacing, you can figure out the formula every time. Again, it is important to know that there are no black keys between the keys B and C, and E and F.

Half-Steps and Whole-Steps:

A half-step is a movement (up or down) form one key to the one immediately next to it. (Refer to Figure 7). Examples: C to C#, G# to A, E to F, B to C, A# to A, C to B or G to
F#.

A whole-step is a movement of 2 half-steps. Examples: C to D, E to F#, A# to C or F to D#.

C Major Scale Formula:

• W = Whole-step
• H = Half-step

By using the major scale formula you can figure out all the major scales. This information can be used in many ways. Such as figuring out all of the major chords on the keyboard. However, because a major chord is made up of the 1st note of the chord, the major 3rd from the 1st note of the chord, and the major 5th from the 1st note of the chord the major scale formula will provide you with the major chords in the root note chord family for the root (I) note, the fourth (IV) and the fifth (V) notes of the major scales. Again, remember that you have already been provided with the method of figuring out all the major and minor chords for all the keys on the keyboard. Stick with the white keys for now.

Notes Aside

By figuring out all of the major scales and putting them in ascending order you end up with half of the Cycle of Fifths. This is information used for chord progressions in many songs. The numbering of the notes in the chord family (originally presented in the scale) is also often used in chord progressions of songs.

When figuring out a major scale, it is a good indication that it is correct if the 7th note is a half-step below the 8th note.

If the chords in the music you are playing are contained within the major scale, you can use that scale to solo.

Dominant Seventh Chords

Dominant 7th chords are often associated with a bluesy sound. To figure out how to play a dominant 7th chord, reduce the (major) 7th by a half-step and fit it into the chord fingering. Dominant 7th chords are written as follows: A7, B7, C7, etc.

The 7th of the C major scale is B. The dominant 7th is A#/Bb. A# and Bb are the same note. They are called equivalent harmonics. The notes of the C7 chord are C, E, G, and A# or C, E, G, and Bb.

Applying This Knowledge to the Guitar

One of the main advantages to learning about music theory using a keyboard is that the keyboard is a much more linear instrument than the guitar. One key follows directly after another. On the guitar, when you get to the last fret on one string, the next note on the next string is not the next note as it is on the keyboard. The same note of the same pitch appears at more than one place on the guitar.

To take this theory and apply it to guitar remember that standard tuning on a 6 string guitar is (low to high): E A D G B e. You can remember this by using the letters of standard tuning as an acronym for

Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye
Eddie.

Another piece of information that is important to know about the guitar is that a movement of 1 fret (up or down) is a movement of a half-step. A movement of 2 frets is a whole-step. Now you can pick out scales and chords on the guitar as well as the keyboard.

The rest is for you to explore.

• I’m new to the guitar. Where should I start out?
• What are the notes on a guitar?
• What are the notes on a bass guitar?
• Which chords should I begin learning?
• Is there an easy way to learn barre chords?
• How do I play guitar standing up?
• How much time should I spend practicing?
• How do I get the most out of my practice time?
• Should I bother learning songs?
• What are some easy songs for a beginner?
• Should I learn to read music?
• Should I learn to play on acoustic or electric?
• What is the best way to learn guitar?
• What pitfalls should I avoid as a beginning student?
• Will I ever succeed at guitar?
• How do I find time to play guitar?

I’m new to the guitar. Where should I start out?

The greatest learning you can get is from a teacher. One on one lessons really allow you to grasp the concepts of learning at a faster rate and allow you to understand more effectively. If you are low on money and can’t afford a teacher then the internet is the next best thing. This, though, is going to mean that you will be learning ‘on your own’.

There are many sites out there today that deal quite well with teaching you how to play:

Some places to start on Guitar Noise include:

• Beginner Lessons
• Absolute Beginner Part 1: Chords
• Guitar Basics
• Buying a Guitar
• Easy Songs for Beginners
• Chords
• Theory

Some other sites that can help you get started include:

• Cyberfret.com – Your Source For Free Online Guitar Lessons
• Guitar Lesson World
• About Guitar

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Getting started on guitar and select edit to make improvements.

What are the notes on a guitar?

Learning all the notes on your guitar’s fretboard is an important early step for the beginning guitarist. Knowing where all the notes are will help you with forming chords, playing scales, as well as soloing and improvising.

This chart shows all the notes on your guitar’s fretboard up to the twelfth fret. After the twelfth fret the notes repeat in the same order.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to fretboard map and select edit to make improvements.

What are the notes on a bass guitar?

Learning all the notes on your bass fretboard is an important early step for the beginning bassist. Knowing where all the notes are will help you while playing along with others and improvising.

This chart shows all the notes on your bass’ fretboard up to the twelfth fret. After the twelfth fret the notes repeat in the same order.

Here are the bass notes (from the bass clef) and their TAB counterparts.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to reading bass tabs and notes and select edit to make improvements.

Which chords should I begin learning?

For someone starting out, the inability to get a full sounding chord can lead to much frustration which, in turn, can lead to deciding that maybe the guitar is just too much trouble and not worth learning. For younger students, and also for some adults, the confidence gained by playing some single notes on various strings is all they need to make the next “step” into chord playing. I’d like to make a quick point that learning chords is not always the best way to start out, particularly for younger children.

To read the full answer check out Which chords should I begin learning? Also worth a read is the article Absolute Beginners Part 1: Chords.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Beginner chords and select edit to make improvements.

Is there an easy way to learn barre chords?

Whenever I teach barre chords to a student, I tell them before hand that they are going to be hard to learn. They are like riding a bike, though. Once you get them, you’ll never forget them. No capo in the world can do what the barre chords do for music. If you look at your index finger, it has a slight bend to it. This leaves the center of the barre hard to press down. Now rotate the finger ever so slightly backwards so the knuckle is facing toward the nut of the guitar. This flattens the finger. Sure it still has a bend to it, but it is no longer a factor because the side of the finger, which is now flattened against the fretboard, is holding down the strings.

The other factor to remember is that we have been used to grabbing things with our hands and curling the fingers inward toward the palm. Now, with barre chords, we have to develop muscles we almost never use to flatten out the finger. As with all muscles, it takes time for strength and size to come about. Even though the technique may be perfect, you may have to keep at it and wait it out for these reasons. But it will come to you.

The last thing I want to say about this is this, look at the barre chord. Are there other fingers doing work in the center of the fretboard? If so then you don’t have to concentrate you barring efforts behind them. Watch what you are doing and what is needed.

How do I play guitar standing up?

The first thing that I would ask is where is the guitar (should I assume it’s an electric?) in relationship to your body? Most people tend to play their guitars really low because that how they see it in videos and I guess it’s really cool but it’s harder than anything to play well like that. Worse, you can develop serious wrist problems by doing that for long periods of time.

If you will watch the really good guitarists (those more interested in playing well rather than showing off) you will notice that they tend to have their guitars strapped higher on their bodies. Ideally you want your hand that’s fretting the neck to be about the same height as your chest.

Secondly, if you’re playing and singing at the same time, don’t be surprised if you find yourself taking a look every now and then to see where your fingers are. EVERYONE does this and if you carefully watch people playing on stage you will catch them doing it. This is especially true the higher up on the fretboard you go.I hope this helps.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Playing guitar standing up and select edit to make improvements.

How much time should I spend practicing?

Whenever someone asks “how much time,” a teacher is going to respond “as much time as you can.” That’s almost a pure reaction. The reality, however, relies on two separate things: the amount of free time you truly have and the physical condition of your hands.

To read the full answer check out How much time should I spend practicing? Guitar Noise also has an entire section devoted to practice tips where you’ll find all sorts of articles on this subject. A few highly recommended ones are Getting The Most Out Of Your Practice and A Question of Balance.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Practicing and select edit to make improvements.

How do I get the most out of my practice time?

If you know some chords and where the notes are on the fingerboard, then you have to ask yourself, what you want to do? You already know enough to strum a lot of songs and even play song simple leads and riffs. You also know enough to start writing and playing some of your own songs. So there are a lot of choices and it’s really up to you. When my students reach a point where they have a lot of the basics down, I am often surprised by their next choices. One student of mine has recently decided that the next step is to learn how to read music so she can play classical and Spanish pieces. Another has decided to specifically target in on soloing while yet another is working on incorporating riffs into his rhythm playing.

I know that this may not be the answer that you seek, but without knowing what your purpose for playing is, I truly can’t tell you what to play next. I can tell you that there are TONS of things to learn! Take some time and think about what you want to do.

And then you might want to check out our articles on practice and focusing, such as Jimmy Hudson’s Getting The Most of Your Practice, my own piece, A Question of Balance on the Guitar Columns page and the new article coming out this week by Jamie Andreas, Guitar Practice Organization and Procedure.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to practicing and select edit to make improvements.

Should I bother learning songs?

Something to keep in mind is that songs are pretty much what you’ll find yourself playing as a guitarist. When you perform in front of people, they’re not going to ask, “Would you please play the first two measures of Stairway To Heaven?” or “How about the middle part of Comfortably Numb?” They want to hear a complete song. And even if you just know the strumming part, that’s usually more than fine by them.

To read the full answer check out Should I bother learning songs? Also get a head start on learning songs by reading some of our Easy Songs for Beginners and Songs for Intermediates lessons.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to easy guitar songs and select edit to make improvements.

What are some easy songs for a beginner?

If you already have a grasp of guitar basics (holding your guitar, tuning it) then the next step is to start building a repertoire of songs. Unfortunately most guitar courses or teachers don’t allow you to learn the songs that made you want to play in the first place.

David Hodge has written a very successful series of lessons called Easy Songs for Beginners that will get you playing in a very short amount of time. This series of lessons will teach you a bit of music theory and technique while you learn to play some pretty well known songs. For best results you really should begin with the first lesson and work your way up.

After working your way through these lessons you may be ready to graduate to the next level: Songs for Intermediates. These lessons take the next logical step moving from being a strict beginner to being a well-rounded guitarist.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to easy guitar songs and select edit to make improvements.

Should I learn to read music?

Basically the decision whether or not to learn to read music has to be in an honest manner by the person making the choice. And the easiest way to do that is to, again honestly, list all the pros and cons about being able to read music. No lie! Get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle and list all the good things about being able to read music in one column and all the bad things in the other.

To read the full answer check out Should I learn to read music? Also get a head start on reading music by reading the part one of Standard Notation and some of the other lessons in our reading music section.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Reading music and select edit to make improvements.

Should I learn to play on acoustic or electric?

We get this question a lot at Guitar Noise and I think that everyone who answers it has different opinions.

There are a lot of similarities between the electric and acoustic guitar; they each have advantages and disadvantages to the beginner. It is easier to learn to finger pick on an acoustic. Barre chords and power chords are easier to learn on an electric. Because of the nature of the acoustic guitar, most people learn how to strum them but rarely take the time to explore the many styles and sounds that it is capable of. Because of the nature of the electric guitar, many beginners learn power chords and then little else. And when the acoustic player gets his first electric, he tends to play it like an acoustic. And vice versa.

Which is “better?” If you say right off the bat that you want to learn electric, I would tell you that electric is better for you. Is this necessarily true? No. But since this is where your interests currently lie, it is true for you.

What you learn from the guitar, or anything, is usually a combination of what you want and whether or not what you discover on the way interests you enough to take a detour. If you really want to learn a riff or a solo and you learn it, will you also take the time to figure out how you can use what you learn in another song or in a different style? Only if it interests you to do so.

It used to be that people started out with acoustic guitars mostly because it was expensive to get an electric guitar (and an amplifier and everything else that you’d need). That is not the case these days. If you want to play electric and you can get yourself a good set up, then by all means do so.

Because here’s the fun thing – if you choose the electric guitar now, there’s no reason why you won’t find yourself with an acoustic guitar somewhere down the road. I’d almost guarantee that this will happen.

Guitar Noise has a lot of information on buying equipment. An entire section on how to buy equipment has more than a months worth of articles. You should definitely check that out first if you are not sure about what to buy.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Acoustic or electric guitar and select edit to make improvements.

What is the best way to learn guitar?

Confronted with so many choices, deciding where to begin learning the guitar can be a difficult decision. Every journey begins with a single step, and while this may seem like a carefully planned plug, you would do well to spend a few hours familiarizing yourself with Guitar Noise.

On your very first day you’ll need to tune your guitar. From their you’ll probably want to learn some chords, figure out how to read tab and perhaps get an understanding of standard musical notation. It is really up to you where you go from there. You might even want to learn a little music theory, but I doubt it. At this point you’ll probably be ready to jump in and start learning your first song if you haven’t already.

A lot of music books start you off with some simple strumming patterns on some rather old songs. Guitar Noise has a section entitled Easy Songs for Beginners that takes a few easy and well known songs and presents them in the form of a lesson. Not only do you learn to play the song so you can impress other people, you also learn a bit of theory and technique that will come in useful later. The series begins with some very basic two chord songs so you don’t have to learn a lot of chords first. Some of our easy songs for beginners include Riders On the Storm, I Shot the Sheriff, Before You Accuse Me, House of the Rising Sun and more. When you have mastered some of the songs in this section you may want to try out some Songs for Intermediates page. These lessons are great examples, not only because they get you playing recognizable songs right away, but because they teach you all sorts of techniques you can apply to other songs you learn by yourself.

After working hard through these lessons you probably won’t need to learn specific songs from us anymore. You can either follow our lessons on Ear Training so you can figure out your own favorite songs by yourself, or you can settle in a read a different column each week.

Guitar Noise has several hundred lesson. It can be easy to let yourself become overwhelmed by all this free information. My advice is set up a practice routine. Then choose an area of interest and do one lesson each week. To do it properly you need to practice all the exercises and absorb all the principles. It is best to do one lesson and week so everything is made permanent.

To keep up to date and stay informed you should subscribe to our newsletter. This will let you know about new lessons as well as give you regular tips and advice.

After you’ve been here for a while we have a lot of other resources to keep you interested and busy. You can also learn about bass, amps and songwriting. We have a section entitled The Other Side especially for girls and women who want to learn. We also have discussion forums where you can ask questions and receive answers. We have reviews of CDs, DVDs, software and products too. We also have some interviews with various artists to help you further if you wish to start a career in music.

Your success with the guitar is going to depend entirely on what you put into it. Don’t believe that beacause you spend $30 on a book you will get anywhere faster or easier than if you lock yourself in a room with your guitar and computer for 2 hours a day.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Best way to learn guitar and select edit to make improvements.

What pitfalls should I avoid as a beginning student?

As I wrote down the usual list of items that teachers tend to discuss when asked this question, I realized that most of them, if not all, could be lumped into a single category: Impatience. Perhaps this is a bit of my trying to lump a lot of stuff into a small and neat package, but I think that it is impatience, however it might be disguised, is at the root of a lot of frustration, for guitarists and many other people as well.

To read the full answer check out What pitfalls should I avoid as a beginning student? Also worth reading is the article If I Only Had…

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Pitfalls for beginning students and select edit to begin making improvements.

Will I ever succeed at guitar?

Here’s my secret: I’m just a beginner myself. OK, I’ve been playing 5 years relatively steadily (as much as you can with a full time job, two kids, a husband and a cockatiel…) but I get just as frustrated in progressing. It seems like I can put hours in, and not much happens. Then sometimes I walk away for a few weeks, and pick up my guitar again, and Voila! great sounds come out! It’s part of the mystery of the instrument. I think your fingers need time to input all the learning into your creative brain, or something like that. I’m terrible about practicing scales (regular or chromatic!) and stuff like that. I know I need to spend more time with the basics. I find that learning songs that I’m passionate about is the best way for me to learn. And sometimes I work so hard on a piece, and then give up, because it sounds like dog doo. I find coming back to it later, my fingers have somehow adjusted and it flows much more easily. I too, love the sound of classical style, but I despair of ever being able to play that easily. I know if I keep working on it, it will eventually come to me. Remember that the neck is different than your acoustic, and your fingers will take a while to adjust to it.

Take a look at Jamie Andreas’ stuff on Guitar Noise. She’s got some good theories for practice and I know she plays classical style. She had a nice article about feeling stuck in a certain place in developing your guitar skills, and how to get around that. It’s on Guitar Noise: Thinking: What a Concept!

I find that the guitar is the master, not me!

How do I find time to play guitar?

Time is one of those things that we approach differently depending what we want to do with it. We find that we make time for things when we need to or want to but don’t always see where that time comes from.

I started playing when I was seventeen. I was a junior in high school and basically between classes and working I didn’t get home until seven. Then homework. Then it’s time for bed already.

When you’re this busy you have to make time somewhere and you also have to make the best use of your time. As a beginner, the thing I worked on most was changing chords so I could play smoothly. I did this by learning songs. So on the weekends, I would take an hour or two that I might normally not be doing much of anything (sleeping late, watching television – no computers back then or I’m sure I’d be doing that as well) and learn one or two songs. Then during the week, whenever I had a moment – perhaps before dinner or waiting for my turn at the shower (four kids in the family) or (most usually) as a reward to myself for getting through one subject’s homework – I’d play what I learned over the weekend. Sometimes only once through, but usually, when you added it up, I got to play a half hour to an hour every day.

The thing is that I was always learning something. When refining a song during the week I might hit upon a technique that I’d try to remember to work into another song that I might learn the following weekend.

Time adds up. Even if you manage to find fifteen or thirty minutes a day, it adds up. And if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll FIND that time and then MAKE it your guitar time.

We have received a lot of good advice concerning how to find (or make) time to learn from our readers. One email, from Dave Brunat, I’d really like to share with you:

Buy a guitar stand. When I first started playing, it seemed like a lot of work to take the guitar from the case, make sure it’s tuned then make bad sounds. Then I bought a guitar stand and placed the guitar in my living room. It serves as a monument to remind me that I am not playing the guitar with the 15 minutes I’m wasting on the couch. It catches my eye when I’m surfing the channels and says “play me instead”. The instant access of the guitar allows me to get that 10 or 15 minutes in (which often turns into an hour) while I’m waiting for something else. Also, you have to practice your chords and chord changes until you master the skill. However, learn some 2 chord songs (G7 and C) or simple 3 chord songs so that you can have some feeling of accomplishment while learning. You can make “music” with these simple sings and see your progress.

You might want to check out an article I wrote a while back on the subject: A Question Of Balance.

When we first learn to improvise, it’s magic. Melodies struggle to emerge, but emerge they do, and boy, we know we’re on the way to being a Rock Star.

Now, since we’ve jammed on the exercises presented in “A beginner’s guide to soloing,” a few questions start to surface:

Where next?

There are a few things you should learn. I don’t usually say “should,” but I mean it this time. You should learn:

1. The major scale and its seven variations, called modes.
2. The pentatonic scale and its five variations.

While there are many other scales that are useful to our purposes, these are the perfect starting point. Modes often confuse even veteran players, and while their theory and application requires more than a few lines, here’s a brief explanation.

If we play a major scale starting on a note other than its root note, that resulting shape is a mode. For example, if we play C major starting on C, that’s a C major scale. But if we play the same notes in the key of C, but we start on D, the pattern would be called the second mode of C major, or D Dorian to be exact.

To help visualize this, picture a piano. Playing the white keys, starting on C, we automatically sound a C major scale. Now, instead of starting on C, we start on the next key, D. From D to D, still playing the white keys, we end up with a D Dorian mode, the second mode of C Major.

Since there are seven notes in the Major scale, there are seven possible starting places to play our variations. Hence, we end up with seven distinct patterns to play on the guitar.

Carrying this to a different application, we arrive at pentatonic scales. As the pentatonic scale contains five notes, logic has it that we have five patterns built from that scale.

5 Pentatonics +7 modes = 12 shapes.

Twelve shapes. Learn them. Now.
(See chart at the end of the article.)

Also, check out some of the other articles here at Guitar Noise, such as Scaling the Heights and A la Modal for more discussion on the topic of Pentatonic Scales and the various modes of the Major Scale.

I don’t want to sound like a classic rock band – What should I do?

Some folks want to sound jazzy, metal, or hardcore. They may be wondering if learning a scale such as the Pentatonic Minor, will inhibit their inherent “punkiness.” And perhaps major scales are too happy sounding? Well, my grandmother uses the same words that I do, but we don’t sound alike. While we both use the same words, our inflections, tone, and sentence construction are vastly different. Both Metallica and Mozart use the same notes, but style is what sets them apart. Using a certain scale will not always make you sound a certain way. Sure, some scales are bluesy by nature, but style is what truly defines genre.

This runs the other way, too. I use the same scales as Stevie Ray Vaughan, but much to my dismay, I sure don’t sound like him!

However, there are common applications. Blues musicians have generally favored the pentatonic sound, while the shredders of the 80’s made frequent use of the modes, as well as exotic scales.

The answer? There are only twelve shapes presented in this lesson. Learn them, and decide for yourself. It certainly won’t hurt you.

I’m just a rock ‘n roll rebel, I don’t need no scales

Actually, you’re right! (And that’s a great Ozzy song.)

Check this out: There’s only twelve notes in the system of Western music.

A scale is seven of those twelve notes. It’s a sonic recipe that we just happen to accept.

So, chances are, if you’re not consciously using scales as of now, you might just be stumbling into them on your own.

The last thing I want to do is to stifle your creativity, and stomp out your musical spark.

No, sir! I’m offering you a shortcut. Yep. These shapes can actually help you be more creative, free, and rocking by not having to guess! Why “reinvent the Strat” when it can be understood in a few hours?

If you want to be truly rebellious, you need to know the rules in order to break them. And the ability to solo over the entire neck is a maverick goal, indeed. You’ll surely kick butt and take names with your newfound fretboard skills…Well, maybe.

Scales are just the beginning.

They’re the rules, and musical rules should never be taken too seriously!

While it is important to internalize and digest the shapes, I think Charlie Parker put it best when he was quoted saying “Learn the changes, and then forget them.”

Our goal is to know the shapes so well that we don’t have to think when we improvise. Mental effort generally doesn’t sound good.

There’s only twelve notes, so don’t get bogged down in them. Remember, while there’s a limited number of tones, there’s an infinite way to express them. After all, we’re trying to express music, not scales.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve gotten the hang of expressing with a minor pentatonic scale, have fun learning to talk with these new shapes. The patterns below will grant you freedom over the entire guitar neck, not just a position.

Don’t get stuck in the shapes, and feel free to add chromatic, or passing, tones to the scale. These are fancy words for “wrong” notes, or notes outside of the scale.

Beware: You may find that you can’t express with the Major Scale shapes as easily. That’s okay, and natural at first. They’re harder to digest, and contain several notes that aren’t as user-friendly as the pentatonic scale. Technically speaking, the fourth and seventh degrees of the Major Scale don’t sound too hot when you end a line on them. But, that’s the subject of another article. Experiment, get the sounds under your fingers, and keep at it.

Rock on! And don’t forget my blog!

The Major Scale and it’s Seven Modes

Note: These examples are written in the key of F major. Due to the layout of the guitar, I find this key easiest to visualize. Of course, all shapes are movable. To transpose to a different key, simply move the scales up or down.

The Minor Pentatonic Scale and it’s five modes, Key of A Minor

Also check out… A Beginner’s Guide to Soloing – Part 1

Step 1. The map

The map for this lesson’s quest is the A minor Pentatonic scale, outlined in Example 1. This is a handy little scale with a big name. Breaking it down, Penta means “five” and tonic refers to tones. So, we have a five-tone minor scale. Nothing too hard about that, right?

Play this scale a few times to get it under your fingers. The eventual goal is to know it so well that you can play it without conscious thought. If you can do so and carry on a conversation at the same time, good job.

Step 2 (optional.) The rhythm

To paint sonic art, we need a canvas on which to do so. This platform is the rhythm guitar’s part. The A minor Pentatonic scale, and its parent scale, A natural minor, contain the notes to build several chords. The A minor chord that is found among the scale is an ideal candidate for our foundation of future greatness in improvisation! We’ll choose this chord for our exercise. By the way, this chord is constructed of the notes A, C, and E.

Get a buddy, keyboard, or backing track to hold down a steady rhythm of just an A minor chord. The idea is to provide a backdrop for you to solo over.

Step 3. Show time

Armed with your scale, a sense of adventure and trusty friend or backing track, it’s time to conquer soloing!

A: Play your scale in order, ascending, and then descending. Listen to how it sounds against the A minor chord.
B: Play your scale in the same order, but hold some notes longer than others. Play a few fast, then some slow, and see what sounds you get.
C: Repeat step B, and this time, repeat some of the notes.
D: Start to mix up the order of the notes. Skip a few, repeat some, and jump around.Be creative! Approach the scale as a skateboarder would look at a flight of stairs – don’t just walk up and down ‘em!
E: Add seasonings. Bends, slides, pull-offs and hammer-ons are to be tried. Picture the solo as a salad, and these articulations are the bacon bits. See Example 2. for further ideas.

Breakdown

OK, so what just happened? Hopefully, you will have taken the scale, listened to it in its basic form, and then started to spin some melodies from its framework. At the end of the day, the goal is to play music, not scales. I’ll often see students playing scales very well, but not knowing what to do with them. Simple steps such as these can be very helpful. Remember, it’s not magic. You can do it, and before you know it, you’ll be soloing like an old pro.

If any of these concepts don’t click, or if you’re having trouble getting the hang of it, drop me an email! I’ll be glad to help you out.

And don’t forget there are lots of lessons here at Guitar Noise on soloing and improvising. You’ll also find many lessons of scales themselves.

Rock on! And for more ideas, don’t forget to check out my blog!

Also check out… A Beginner’s Guide to Soloing – Part 2

Sound familiar? Read on…

Enter the split personality of your hands. Your left hand, who we’ll call Sam, is your classic musician, easy going, no sweat, “I’ll get there when I get there” personality. But he’s also a perfectionist, and he won’t go on until he’s got it right.

Joe, on the other hand (pun intended), is your uptight right hand. Joe believes that you’ve got to beat the crowds, or they’ll beat you. He needs stuff now, and forget about those pills for hypertension, because he hears that drowsiness is a side effect. And the key to remember about Joe is this: He doesn’t care if things are done right, just as long as they’re done.

A curious contrast: Sam, the left hand, relaxed, but a perfectionist, and Joe, the right, blustering full speed ahead, and who cares about those torpedoes?

As a lot of you play guitar for a hobby, you might try to avoid this “Joe syndrome.” Hey, music should be relaxing, right? But check this out: When we’re trying to learn a piece involving chords, if we let Sam (the left hand from the sixties) have his way, we’ll end up fretting the chord when Saturn is in conjunction with Pluto, and when the tides of the moon cycle are in harmony with the wolves. And due to his perfectionist nature, we won’t strum the chord until every finger is in place. And most of the time, this will be too late. The song will have moved on by the time everything’s right.

We’ll let Joe, our over achieving right hand, take over for a minute. We’ll set out strumming the strings with our right hand to the beat of the song (or whatever is keeping time at the moment.) For example, if we set a metronome at 120 beats per minute, we will strum strict quarter notes to this tempo. We’ll then add the left hand, and hence, the chords.

We’ll do our best to finger the correct chord at the correct time, but we’ll hit the strings no matter what. Even if we don’t have all of our fingers in the proper position for the chord. Hit those strings when the metronome dictates, even if your left hand isn’t even in the same room.

At first, some cacophonous noises may result. Missed notes, dead strings, and perhaps a few nasty looks from the other members of your household. But at least you’ll be in beat.

Keep this up, and pretty soon Sam, the left hand that’s stuck in the 60’s, will be on board, too. I’ve found that your left hand will develop faster this way, forced into moving outside its comfort zone.

I’ve shown this method to many of my students, and noticed an almost instantaneous improvement in their ability to fret, and play, chords in beat, and to keep up with the song.

A brief recap:

• Your left hand is a hippie.
• Your right hand is a stock broker.
• Strum the strings to the beat of the song, and force the hippie to meet the “deadline” of the rhythm. Don’t worry if the chord is incomplete. Strum it anyway.
• Even if it doesn’t sound to snazzy, it’ll be in beat.
• You’ll get better after a few times of doing this.
• Far out, bro.

Enjoy learning about the duality of your hands. This is just the beginning.

In this lesson we just add a couple of notes on String 3. Here they are:

We are adding the notes “G” (3rd string – open) and “A” (3rd string – 2nd fret). Be sure to use your middle finger to play the “A” note. As you can see, you will now have a total of 8 notes to work with:

• String #1 = 3 notes (E,F,G)
• String #2 = 3 notes (B,C,D)
• String #3 = 2 notes (G, A)

The first question many of my students ask is: Why are there two “G” notes and why do they sound different? Our musical system (there are different kinds of musical systems) provides us with seven natural notes A,B,C,D,E,F, and G. If one were to play these notes on the piano (white keys), the note to the right of G (next natural note pitch higher and also the next white key) would be called “A” again. Except it would be one “octave” higher. We perceive this with our ears. It is also perceived with an oscilloscope. The waves double, and every other wave matches when it peaks and dips.

For an example, let’s listen to the two “G” notes. Place your ring finger on the 3rd fret of the 1st string (the “G” note on the 1st string). Pluck the 3rd string open (the “G” on string 3) and then pluck the 1st string 3rd fret (the “G” on string 1) and listen to them ring together. You should notice that they have a kind of “unity” sound. Pluck your 3rd string open and match it to other strings or notes. When you match it to another “G” note, you will get that unity kind of sound again. At this point in our series, this is all you need to know. We will be dealing with seven notes and their octaves. Later, we will discus the sharps and flats (the black keys on the piano and the notes in between notes on our guitar [ex: fret 2 on string 1]).

But let’s leave that alone for the moment. Time to PLAY! Download both exercises (from the links). Work on ” Notes on String 3″ first, and be able to play the examples with rhythm. Then work on “Notes on Strings 1-3″ next. There are midi links that will play you the two exercise sheets. Between this latest lesson and the first two, you will now have mastered eight notes! Okay, go practice and have some fun!

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

If you have questions or would like an extra work out sheet, email me at: peter@petersimms.com.

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2

In part #2 we are going to address String 2 (the B string). Now that you made it through the opening lesson, it should be rather easy to add 3 notes that are on the 2nd String. These notes are B, C, and D. See the chart below:

As you can see above, we have extended the range of the notes. We have our new notes B, C, and D on the 2nd string, and we also have E, F, and G (from the opening lesson) on the 1st string.

Your goals this lesson are:

1. learn how to “play” the notes on the 2nd string – rhythm included.
2. learn how to “play” the notes on the 1st and 2nd string together – rhythm included.

If you can obtain these goals, you’ve doubled your capacity! Now you not only know where 6 notes are on the guitar, but you can “play” them when you see them. Yahoo!

Remember that rhythm is IMPORTANT. You could say it is more important than pitch. If you played the wrong note in the correct rhythmical spot, you made “1” mistake. If you played the correct note in the wrong rhythmical spot, you made “2” mistakes = not playing the correct note in the rhythmical spot where it was supposed to be played, and playing a note where there wasn’t supposed to be a note.

Here are two exercises for you:

• Exercise 1 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)

The first one is a set of exercises only using the notes B, C, and D. The other one is using the combination of all 6 notes B, C, D, E, F, and G. Below are also midi examples of these various exercises:

• Exercise 1 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Exercise 2 Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Now that you made it through the opening lesson. I’m not going to be using TAB anymore. Yikes! It’s very difficult not to look at the TAB when it is just under the notes. Your goal is to learn how to read music. Therefore, TAB will just mess this up… Yes, you can say it now… OH NO!

This lesson should be very attainable for you to accomplish. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to learn how to read music. If you’re having problems, email me and, based on your level, I can make some suggestions.

I also have additional practice sheets with midi examples available for your studies. Just email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be more than happy to send them your way.

Have Fun!

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 1
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

I tell my students: “the only obstacle is that reading music takes a while to learn.” Therefore, if you want it, you need to be patient and have consistent practicing with it.

The “BIG MYTH” is that it’s difficult to do. However you obtained this idea, it’s wrong! There are many study guides and books that approach reading music in multiple ways. I found that the common problem they have is a proper learning curve in their method. Many of the books start out nice and easy. The student becomes confident, but not long after the first couple of lessons the learning curve inclines at an angle to which the student runs into major problems with the lessons. Most of this is due to the fact the student has not had a chance to get comfortable with the material he or she had just learned.

This year I’m taking an extra effort to help my students overcome the fear of learning to read music, plus find out how interesting and doable it is. I also plan on passing some of this information to you in a series rightly called “how to read music on the guitar” on the Guitar Noise website. I will present a step-by-step approach (lesson at a time) from the very beginning to intermediate linear (playing single notes) “PLAYING”. I like to use the word playing, because I have had many new students tell me they already know how to “read” music. Therefore, I write out a very easy composition for them to perform. Afterwards, they tell me that they “know” how to read music, but they can’t “play” it on their instrument. It’s music, so what’s the use of knowing it if you can’t perform it? Therefore, I teach “how” and then help you to “play” it. It’s a lot more fun that way!

For some of you, this course will be moving too slowly (it is suppose to be slow and easy to accomplish). Tom Serb has put together a two-part series (at the moment) that moves over a lot material rather quickly. I suggest you check it out Standard Notation. And you also have David Hodge’s guide Your very own Rosetta Stone.

I’m looking forward to the responses of the Guitar Noise readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I like teaching it. When we finish this series, maybe we can forge forward in harmonic playing and theory, using the same learning approach. Let’s first learn how to read and PLAY!

This lesson will cover some music basics and “playing 3 notes” on the 1st string. I will be assuming that you can read TAB already. Therefore, I will have TAB underneath the notes as a guide for you. In order to really understand and use music notation, you will need music that doesn’t have TAB underneath the notes. Having the TAB under the notes is similar to having training wheels for a bicycle. Until the training wheels come off, you’re not quite riding on two wheels. I will be offering music without TAB. Including more practice material will make this article too long. You will just need to email me at peter@petersimms.com and I will be happen to send you some with audio.

Let’s start with the diagram below. I try and teach what you will only need to know for the moment. Therefore, there will be things not explained until later. Glance over the diagram now and then let’s move on to the explanations.

As you can see, there are a few things to learn. The staff is are the 5 lines that we write music on. It looks like TAB, but there are only 5 lines and the lines do not represent the strings. They represent “pitch”. The higher the pitch, the closer the note is to the top of the staff. Thus, the note on the top line of the staff sounds a lot higher than the note on the bottom line of the staff. The Measure is basically a representation of a group of beats. When the drummer of a band counts “1-2-3-4″, he is counting a blank measure. You can hear these groups. When you hear a Waltz (similar to the dance), you are counting in groups of “3″. The top number of the Time Signature tells you how many counts are in a measure. Therefore, a waltz is in 3/4;. We will leave the bottom number alone for now. Notes also represent Rhythm. If the note looks like a Whole Note, when you pluck that note, count to 4 and start counting the moment you pluck the note. (Dotted Half Note = 3, Half Note = 2, Quarter Note = 1).

I tend to teach my students to just count the values of each note. They will add up properly in each measure. Some teachers (most) have you count as the notes fall within the beat of the measure. The choice is yours at the beginning. Eventually it will work out anyway in the end. As for now the Time Signature is the symbol we use to indicate the pitch values of the notes, and this is the symbol we use for the guitar (plus many other instruments.

Now that we have enough information to move on, let’s look at the notes we are going to learn today. (see below).

Try and play these notes before attempting to play the exercises below. Listen to the midi examples and pay attention to the rhythm.

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

• Notes on the 1st String Part 1
• Notes on the 1st String Part 2

Focus on 1 line at a time (4 measures). The audio example plays from the beginning straight to the end. This is your goal. If you have any questions, please email me. I will be more than happy to answer you. You can also request some extra exercises “without TAB” from me. My email: peter@petersimms.com

Until next time … Have Fun! …

Also in this Series

• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2
• How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 3

Sadly, there’s only one way – practice, but there are exercises that will help you. This is an exercise that came to me whilst I was trying to master a particular chord change. I still use it regularly, both to work on a new chord and as a general chord changing exercise.

Firstly, it is important to realize that this is not meant to be musical – you’re learning how to change from one chord to another, not invent chord progressions. You can strum one chord as often as you like (it doesn’t matter if you strum it five times or five hundred – it’s not important) and you can use whatever strum pattern you prefer. One word of advice, though, don’t make it complicated, you have other things to think about.

The key to making this work is being able to imprint an image of the next chord change, in your mind, before you actually carry it out. Let’s call the chord that you’re trying to master, the “target” chord.

Start off by fingering the target chord and begin strumming. You can strum at any speed and use any pattern that is comfortable for you. To start with, I’d strongly recommend a simple down-strum at about 60 beats-per-minute. Continue to strum, whilst, at the same time, creating an image in your mind of an “A” chord – see where each finger is placed on the fretboard. Concentrate on that image and “see”, in your mind’s eye, the movement of your fingers, from the target chord to the “A” chord – and, all the time, continuing to strum the target chord. Once you have that little “film” firmly imprinted into your mind, make the change on the fretboard, to the A chord – don’t stop strumming and don’t worry if you fluff the change (if the images are strong enough, you probably won’t, though).

I find that, if I burst the bubble and look at the fretboard, it doesn’t work. As long as the image is there, in my mind, I can make the change, without actually having to watch myself physically do it.

Now that you’re strumming an A chord, it’s time to think of going back to the target chord. So, create the image of your fingers on the fretboard, in the shape of the target chord – really burn the image into your mind. See yourself, mentally, changing from the A to the target chord – the stronger the image, the better the chance that you’ll get it right. When you’re ready, make the change.

At about this point, you begin to start appreciating a slow, simple strum pattern (I did say you’d have other things to think about, didn’t I?)!

OK, we’re back at the target chord, now it’s time to go somewhere else – this time, we’ll go to a “B” chord. An open B is not the easiest chord to fret, so I usually use a B7. Go through the same routine as before – image thoroughly burnt into your mind, mentally see the fingers moving from the target to the B(7). When you’re really confident, that you’ve got it fixed in your mind, do it on the fretboard, for real. After that, we’ll use the same routine to go back, from the B(7), to the target chord.

Go throught the same procedure with the C, D, E, F and G chords.

No matter what the target chord, that you’re wanting to get to grips with is, the sequence is the same:

• Target to A and back
• Target to B(7) and back
• Target to C and back
• Target to D and back
• Target to E and back
• Target to F and back
• Target to G and back
• Target to A and back and so on…

Obviously, there’s no point in including the target itself in the sequence. If, for example, the target is D, then going from D to the target (D) and back to D is not going to do anything for you.

If you want to use other chords, such as sevenths and minor chords, that’s fine. You could change it to:

“Target, A7, target, B7, target, C7, target, D7, target, E7, target, F7, target, G7, target, etc….. ”

or

“Target, Am, target, Bm, target, Cm, target, Dm, target, Em, target, Fm, target, Gm, target, etc……”.

You can (and should) also use barre chords (if you’ve progressed to playing them) as part of your routine. Ultimately you’ll want to include every chord you know into your routine. And to continually add the new ones in as you master them.

Just to recap, the key to this routine is the strength of the image that you create, in your mind. The stronger the image, the better the chord change. You can even use this in learning/playing songs. Once you have the technique of creating the chord images, you’ll find a general improvement in your chord changes. There will come a time, though, when the image and the chord change are both simultaneous and automatic. At this point, you really only need to do the exercise to refresh your muscle memory.

Maybe this can help you as much as it has helped me – this was how I tackled with my demons, the C and the F chords.

We’ve used ledger lines for the notes low E through fifth string C… we can also add ledger lines on the other side, above the staff. Just like the lower ledger lines, these will extend the musical alphabet:

We’ll be needing those ledger lines as we move into higher positions – for right now, you just need to know it can be done at either end of the staff.

Standard notation isn’t just about notes, though – it conveys all sorts of other information through special symbols. In the last lesson, I mentioned that the end of a section is often marked with a double bar:

The end of a piece is also marked with a double bar, but the second bar is thicker:

There’s also a sign where an end-of-piece double bar has two dots in front of it – that’s called a repeat sign:

That’s sort of a traffic signal in standard notation – it’s going to send you on a detour to some other place in the music. If that’s the only repeat sign you’ve come across, it means at that point you’ll go back to the very beginning, and play all those measures a second time. The second time you get to the repeat sign, you ignore it and keep going.

Sometimes the composer won’t want you to go all the way back to the beginning. In that case, repeat signs come in pairs, like in this example:

Here you’d play measure 1, then measures 2 and 3… and then repeat measures 2 and 3… and finally play measure 4. It’s a nice, compact way to write music – 6 bars of sound take up only 4 bars on the page.

You’ll also notice the time signature is 2/4. There’s no real limit on the number of beats that can be in one measure – the minimum is just one; some time signatures will call for 15 or more per measure.

Sometimes you’ll see repeat signs with numbers and brackets over them, like this:

This one’s a little different. At the repeat sign, you return to the beginning (since there’s no repeat in the opposite direction)… but the next time through, you skip any measures under the ‘1′ bracket, and go right to the ‘2′ bracket. In this case, you’d play measures 1, 2, 1 again, and then 3. There’s no limit to the number of different endings you can have – I’ve seen music with five different repeat endings, and there are probably pieces written with even more.

There are a few other directional signals you’ll see often in standard notation. The first is D.C.:

In this example, you’ve got a measure, then two measures repeated once, then one more measure with a repeat sign – and the symbol D.C. written above it. The D.C. is an abbreviation for an Italian term, ‘da capo’, which means ‘from the head’. When you see that, you go back to the beginning of the piece.

Many guitarists mispronounce da capo, because it looks so much like capo. The D.C. term is dah-KAH-po; the thing you use to change keys is a KAY-po.

You’ll often see D.C. combined with the term ‘al fine’, which means ‘to the end’. When you see that, there will be the word ‘fine’ (pronounced fee-NAY or fih-NAY-ee, meaning end) somewhere above the staff, usually over a double bar. You’d then go from the instruction ‘D.C. al fine’ to the beginning (D.C.) and play until you reach the double bar marked ‘fine’.

By the way, Italian is the standard language of music. By the end of these lessons, you’ll know a whole bunch of Italian words!

A closely related symbol is D.S., which is an abbreviation for ‘dal segno’ (doll SAYN-yo, from the sign). That’s always combined with this symbol somewhere in the music:

When you see D.S. over a repeat sign, you find the symbol, and play from that point in the music.

You can actually have a double segno sign too – and the instruction for finding that would be D.S.S. – but it’s really rare.

Finally, there’s the coda (KO-duh), which is used pretty often. Coda is Italian for ‘tail’, so it’s a piece of music that will come at the tail end of a song. Somewhere in the music will be a coda symbol,

and somewhere else will be an instruction above a repeat sign – it’ll say “D.C. al coda” or “D.S. al coda”. When you reach that instruction, you’ll go back to the beginning (D.C.) or back to the sign (D.S.), and you’ll play until you reach the coda symbol – at that point, you’ll jump to the coda section, which is written at the end of the music. Most publishers will place a second coda sign over the beginning of the coda section to help you find it quickly, and most will separate it slightly from the main body of the music, or begin the coda on a new line.

Here’s the same music I used for the numbered ending example re-written to use the coda instead:

Like the segno, you can have a second coda – noted with

but like the double segno it’s extremely rare.

Now that you know some of the navigational symbols used, let’s get back to reading!

The letter-named notes leave some gaps in the fretboard. To fill those gaps, we use the symbols # (sharp) and b (flat). If you see a sharp, the note will be played one fret higher, and if you see a flat, the note will be played one fret lower.

The bar line between measures serves as a ‘reset’ button for sharps and flats. So when you see this:

The first measure is E-F-F#-G, played open-1-2-3 on the first string. In the second measure, the notes are E-F-G… because we’ve had a bar line, the F# note has been ‘reset’ to F.

At times, we’ll want to use a note like F#, and then use F without the sharp – which is called F natural – before we get to a bar line. To change a sharp or flat back to a natural before a measure is over, we use a natural sign, which looks like this:

Here’s a measure with F-F#-F#-F, and a second measure with B-Bb-B-Bb:

A couple things about this measure… in the first measure, the third note doesn’t have an accidental. It’s still an F# note, because the sharp for the second note keeps on working until the bar line – unless we use a natural sign, which doesn’t happen until beat four.

Next, the second measure… the B note is the open second string. Bb has to be one fret lower than that, so you’ll need to move to the third string, third fret to play it.

We usually use sharps going up and flats going down… that keeps the music clear by minimizing the number of naturals we might need. Here’s the entire chromatic scale in the first position going up:

And going down:

Accidentals are used often in minor keys, because the harmonic and melodic minor scales use notes ‘outside’ the key. Here’s the C major scale:

The A natural minor scale uses the same notes, but with A as the root:

The other two minor scales alter tones… the harmonic minor raises the seventh note:

And the melodic minor scale raises the sixth and seventh notes going up, but not going down (the natural signs aren’t required because the bar lines cancel the sharps, but I’ve included them as a reminder):

So far we’ve only done one note at a time. That’s fine for noting many solos, but it doesn’t do much for rhythm parts. The solution is to put more than one note head on a stem, like this:

The first beat includes a C note (first fret, second string) and an E note (open first string), so you’d play those two strings together. The next beat has the open B and E strings played together, and the third beat has a five-string open C major chord.

So notes can have one head for a single note, two for a double stop, or three to six for a chord. Beginning readers find it rather hard to navigate chords… but that’s because they try to read one note at a time. You don’t actually have to read each note in a chord – the real trick is to recognize what chords go with each key.

You’ll notice that C major chord doesn’t have any accidentals, so all of the notes must be in C. Working with just basic chords, each major key will have one 7th chord, two major chords, and three minor chords – here are the chords in the key of C major:

Now I’ll show you a trick for instantly (or at least quickly) recognizing the basic chords without accidentals. See how most of those chords have three notes grouped closely together – one in every space or line? Those three notes form a triad – the basis for the chord. When you see that, the lowest note of the three is the root of the triad. So when you see this:

You’re dealing with a C chord type – that’s the lowest note in the set of three. Now, if you know the basic chords in C, you can pretty quickly pick out the triads. The one to be careful of is the G/G7 chords – the top note will tell you the difference:

That means you’ve got most of the basic chords in C down ‘at sight’ – spend a little time working at remembering the Dm chord and you’re all set for this key in open position. I’ll show you more tricks as we get into higher positions and more complicated chords.

The key of A minor is really just as easy – chords in A minor, at least in simple songs, usually use only the G# accidental, and usually only in the E rooted chord. If you’re in Am, and you see a chord with a sharp and an E root, it’s usually E7.:

Chords are often combined with bass notes. The result is music with two voices – one is the melody created by the bass line, the other is the rhythmic accompaniment of the chord strums. To keep things clear, the music is written as two separate lines, typically with stems in opposite directions – when there is a bass note, there’s a rest in the chord strum, like this:

You’re probably wondering why the bass notes wouldn’t simply be written as quarter notes… if they were written that way, they’d only get one beat, so you’d need to dampen them at the second beat in each measure. Here we’re letting the bass notes ring, and if we didn’t use the rest to show it’s two separate lines, you’d end up with five beats worth of notes in each measure.

One last thing for this lesson – key signatures. If you’re going to apply a sharp or a flat to the same note throughout an entire piece of music, and that note will rarely appear without the accidental, it’s easiest to just write it once, in the beginning.

Let’s say you’re working in the key of G. The G major scale is G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G, so you’ll probably have almost all of the F notes in the piece raised to F#. In the very beginning – after the clef, but before the time signature – you write F# on the top line:

This sharp (or sharps, or flat or flats) is called a key signature. The advantage to using a key signature is that you won’t clutter up the music with a lot of accidentals – instead of writing this:

You’d have this:

Since all the F notes are now F#, some of the chords you’ve learned will be a little different… the main chords in the key of G are:

The really tricky one here is the D major – it’s written identically to the D minor chord in the key of C! With a bit of practice, though, you’ll recognize these odd chords right away, and the triad rule still holds for the open position key of G:

Reading in key signatures takes some practice, because you have to remember to sharp or flat all the indicated notes. We’ll take the keys one at a time, and I’ll put a practice piece at the end of each lesson for you to work on.

Since the holidays are drawing near, have fun with my little arrangement of Jingle Bells:

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 1

Power Chords and Double Stops

Doesn’t the term “power chords” sound impressive? Power chords and double stops are a simple idea – play 2 strings at the same time. They are also one of the best ways for a beginning player to make a powerful sound. Here are 3 examples – the good, the bad, and the peculiar:

When I started learning guitar, I spent weeks practicing single note scales. One fateful night, I decided to play 2 strings at once (the “good” one from above). The resulting sound convinced me that playing the guitar was for me – it sounded so powerful and I did it by accident. The “bad” one sounds really dreadful. If you want to know why, you should check out this article, A Study On Intervals , by Jimmy Hudson. The “peculiar” one is actually playing an “A” note on two different strings. If you want something extra peculiar, try adding another “A” note on the 4th string (D) at the 7th fret and then give all 3 strings a good yank. This sound has been known to give small children nightmares so be careful where you play it.

This series of double stops tells the whole world that you are ending whatever you were playing:

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Before You Accuse Me by David Hodge shows how to use double stops in a blues shuffle.

Scales can be fun

Some people have the idea that scales are no fun. As I mentioned in my first article, I started to learn guitar by practicing scales. It was a thrill to hear pleasant sounds coming from the guitar so I spend a lot of time investigating what I can do with scales. I read that lots of blues and rock songs use minor pentatonic scales and that the mixolydian scale is a very “bluesy” scale so I started off with these two. This is what they look like:

Let’s see what we can do with the minor pentatonic scale. I like to play around the 5th Fret but you can do this anywhere on the guitar. Look at the minor pentatonic scale picture, above, and fret any two notes on adjacent strings and play both strings with your pick. Then, find another two notes and play them. Remember the ones that sound good and in no time at all, you’ll have something like this:

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I have been fooling with this scale for 10 months and I’m still discovering new things.

Here are some interesting single note riffs I discovered while working with these scales. This one, played with the right rhythm, sounds like the guitar is actually talking to you (spooky!).

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When I discovered the following riff, I had to eventually force my fingers to stop playing it – it sounds so sweet. It takes place entirely within the A Mixolydian scale:

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I accidentally discovered the main riff of the Fats Domino song, I Want to Walk you Home while playing the A Mixolydian scale – like this:

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You might notice that a lot of the notes have little dots. This was the only way I could figure out how to make the riff sound right. If you want to find out more about reading music, I found this article, Timing is Everything, by David Hodge quite helpful.

If you want more information about scales, check out this article by David Hodge, Scaling the Heights. A Mixolydian Scale Blues Guitar Riff, by Darrin Koltow, shows how to use the mixolydian scale to play a blues song.

Changing chords

When you’re struggling to smoothly change chords between a C, F, and G, its easy to forget that the reason you change chords is because it sounds nice. There are 3 chords that seem to be specially made so you can switch chords easily. Here they are:

One of my favourite things is to start strumming and changing chords to see where my fingers take me. Its not always necessary to play other people’s songs. Make up one of your own. If you make up your own song, you can build in dramatic pauses that give you time to change chords – like this:

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Remember, you don’t have to play all 6 strings. Try experimenting with a full chord alternating with single notes. The easy song for beginners, Fire shows a really cool way to do this. Many interesting articles about chords can be found at Guitar Noise. The Power of Three by David Hodge is a “must-read”.

Mannish Boy

I found a riff in the style of Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters that is really easy to play. This is the only thing that you need to learn:

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You can perform the entire song by playing this riff, followed by a line of lyrics. You don’t even have to remember the lyrics because you can make up your own. For example,

I’m a man (play the riff)
A computer programming man (riff)
Way past 21 (riff)
Way past 41 (riff)
Uh huh, Uh huh (riff)

You could continue forever. By the way, Muddy Waters (and the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix) have way more complicated versions of this song.

Contest

To wrap things up, here is the intro from an obscure Canadian song from the early 1970’s. Its great fun to play. You can still get a good sound by just playing the notes on the 6th string (Low E). Anybody who emails me with the song title by December 31, 2005 will win a prize that will be delivered by return email.

Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

Thanks for listening
Allan Abbott

P.S. At the bottom of most Guitar Noise pages, you’ll find a link that lets you donate money to Guitar Noise. If you’re like me, a lot of your guitar knowledge came from this site so use the link. You’ll feel better – guaranteed.

Oh yeah – the illustrations are copyright 2002 by NoteBoat Inc. (my publishing company) because I’m basically just cropping artwork that appeared in my theory book… the ones labeled “Exercise #…” are created for this article, and are copyright Tom Serb 2005.

First a few preliminaries for those of you unfamiliar with standard notation…

Standard notation is written on a set of five horizontal lines called the staff:

Guitar music is usually written using a treble clef, which looks like this:

The purpose of a clef is to identify the names of the lines and spaces. Each line or space will represent one letter of the musical alphabet, which is the letters A through G. Using the treble clef, the lines are (from the bottom up): E-G-B-D-F, which you can remember using the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine. The spaces, from the bottom up, spell out the word F-A-C-E. Combining these two, we can write the notes from E through F on the staff:

Standard notation is very visual: the higher a note is on the staff, the higher it will sound.

Notes are symbols that indicate how long a sound lasts. Notes are made up of one or more of three basic parts: a head, a stem, and flags or beams.

The head of a note is a roughly circular shape:

If a note has ONLY a head, the head is always hollow (as shown), and the note is called a whole note.

A stem can be added to a note. When a stem is used, the head can be either hollow or solid:

Notes with stems and hollow heads are called half notes; notes with stems and solid heads are called quarter notes.

Notes with solid heads can have flags:

Notes with one flag are called eighth notes.

We can keep adding flags to a note, getting sixteenth notes, thirty-second notes, and so on:

The shapes of notes tell us how long the sounds last. A half note lasts for half the time of a whole note, a quarter note lasts for half the time of a half note, and so on.

Music isn’t just made up of sounds, though – it’s also made up of the silences between sounds. We need rhythmic symbols to indicate how long to NOT play, and we call these symbols rests.

Each note has a corresponding rest… the ones at the far left are double-whole note/rest, which is pretty rare in notation; at the far right is the 128^th note, which is also rare:

Since the shape of the notes tell us how long they last – at least relative to each other – we can now start worrying about pitch. We can put notes on, immediately above, or immediately below the staff:

But that only gives us notes from D (below the bottom E line) through G (above the top F line). That’s eleven notes… and we can play a lot more than eleven different notes on the guitar.

To handle the ‘extra’ notes, we’ll use temporary extensions of the staff called ledger lines, and keep going higher or lower as needed:

Ledger lines are identified as if the staff just kept going:

We’re almost done with the preliminaries… just a few more things…

We know that a half note is half as long as a whole note, and twice as long as a quarter note – but we need to know what note represents one beat in order to count time. That’s shown by two numbers called a time signature that appears right after the clef. It looks sort of like a fraction, and it can come in a lot of different varieties:

To begin with, we’ll use only these three time signatures:

In each case, the bottom number is 4 – that tells us that a quarter note will get one beat. The top number tells us how many beats will be in each measure.

Measures in music are the space between ‘one’ counts. We set vertical lines called bar lines between measures in music to help us keep our place:

Since the time signature here is 4/4, there are four beats in each measure, and a quarter note represents one beat. There are four sixteenth notes to a quarter note… here the sixteenth note flags are joined together into beams, with each beamed set being one beat. After every fourth set of beamed notes is a vertical bar line, which helps us keep track of the ‘one’ count.

It’s common to use a double bar to indicate the end of a section or piece of music:

One last thing and we’ll start to play… the time signature 4/4 is so common in music that it’s sometimes indicated by the letter C. Musicians refer to this as ‘common time’… it’s not really a letter C, but that’s a music history lesson for another article. If you see C instead of a time signature, count it as 4/4.

Ok, so we’re done with the basic tools – you know the note shapes, the letter names of staff positions, what note gets one beat, and how many beats are in a measure. Time to pick up your guitar!

We’ll start with the first position, and take one string at a time. The notes on the first string, first position are E (open), F (first fret), and G (third fret). These correspond to the top space of the staff, E; the top line of the staff, F, and the note immediately above the top line, G:

Get comfortable with the idea that these notes represent the sounds of the open, first, and third frets of the first string… then play this:

Exercise 1

Make sure you’re getting the count right – the first note takes four beats, the next two notes two beats each, etc. Go slow – this takes time to read ‘at sight’.

Now let’s look at the second string. The open second string is the B note on the middle line of the staff; the first fret is the C note on the second space from the top; and the third fret D is the second line from the top:

Ready to read? Let’s go!

Exercise 2

And now let’s try both strings:

Exercise 3

Now let’s try another time signature… in 3/4 time we have notes that represent two beats or four beats, but we don’t have a note for three beats (one full measure of 3/4 time). The solution is to put a dot after a half note:

Dots after notes mean the original note value is extended by one half – a dotted half note is a half note (two beats in 3/4) plus half the value of the original note (one more beat in 3/4) for a total of three beats.

Ready for a stab at waltz time?

Exercise 4

There’s one other way we can extend note values, by using another rhythmic symbol called the tie. Ties are curved lines that connect two notes of the same pitch (we’ll have other names for curved lines that connect different pitches later on). This is a way we can write a note that lasts for an odd amount of time, like five beats. When you encounter a tie, you play the first note, and hold it for the value of both. In this example, the last note of the third measure is held until the third beat of the last measure:

Exercise 5

If we’d used a whole note to represent this sound – a whole note is also four beats – the third measure would have ended up with six beats… two too many. The solution is to split the note into two parts and connect them with a tie.

Now let’s add the third string. It’s only got two first position notes, the open G (second line from the bottom) and second fret A (second space from the bottom):

And let’s introduce another concept, partial measures… sometimes you’ll see a piece of music that doesn’t start on the ‘one’ count. To save space, publishers will often have an incomplete measure (less than the required number of beats) at the start of a piece or section. It used to be convention that the last measure of a piece like that would also be a partial measure – the first and last measures would add up to one full measure – but lately I’ve been seeing pieces that don’t end in a partial measure, so some publishers are discarding that convention. When you see a partial measure, start from the appropriate count; the next example will start on beat ‘three’.

At any rate, we’ve now got a full octave to play with, so let’s play!

Exercise 6

On to the fourth string; we’ve got three notes: the open string D is the first note below the staff; the second fret E is the bottom line of the staff; and the third fret F is the bottom space of the staff:

Let’s put together everything so far:

Exercise 7

Of course, we can divide beats… in 4/4 time, an eighth note represents one half beat (two notes to the beat). Publishers usually beam notes in beats or sets of beats – two beats in 4/4 time – to keep it easy to read. Count these notes “one-and-two-and-” etc.:

Exercise 8

Now we’ve reached the note below the staff… to go any lower we need to start using ledger lines. All the open position notes on the fifth and sixth strings will need these temporary extensions to the staff.

On the fifth string, we have the open A note (two ledger lines below the staff), the second fret B note (the space below the first ledger line beneath the staff) and the third fret C note (the first ledger line below the staff):

Exercise 9

The sixth string has three more notes in first position: the open E (the note beneath the third ledger line under the staff), the first fret F (on the third ledger line beneath the staff), and the third fret G (under the second ledger line below the staff):

Now we’ll introduce one more rhythmic twist: if we dot a quarter note in 4/4, we get a note that represents one and one-half beats. The next example includes dotted-quarter/eighth pairs, which are counted ONE-and-two-AND-THREE-and-four-AND. Give this a try:

Exercise 10

Well, that completes the strings in first position. There’s still a lot more to discover about standard notation, though… find some music, practice in this position, and in the next article I’ll explore accidentals, double stops, chords, and key signatures; after that, we’ll start moving up the neck to other positions.

Also check out… Standard Notation Part 2

I am a credit manager from the UK, been playing the guitar about three years now, always wanted to but left it late, starting at age thirty-five. Generally I play folk / pop stuff, anything from Simon and Garfunkel to the Jam and I’m a big capo fan as still haven’t mastered barre chords. But I CAN strum!!!

This article is designed to help either a beginner, or someone who is fine at lead playing and useless at strumming. It is written as a series of basics, followed by exercises to try. They DO work, I assure you. It is also NOT written in any form of traditional notation, so no need to be put off if you don’t know a quaver from a crotchet!

So let’s kick right off with the building block that separates the good from the not so good guitarist – rhythm…

Rhythm

“You have either got it, or you haven’t!”

“It can’t be taught!”

Both these sentiments seem to creep up on the beginning guitarist as they learn to form their first few chords and their teacher, or the book they are learning from, or this (or any) Internet site, (you know where I am coming from) tells them to form a chord and then “strum it like this, Down, Down, Down Up Down…”

Most beginners have a go at this, but either:

Dig into the strings on the first down and it all goes wrong from there…

Can’t do an upstroke without bashing the whole guitar up in the air…..

Stumble blindly along, thrashing at the guitar with a stiff arm and wrist…

Can do something approaching the right action, but with no rhythm at all…

Or do something not listed above that has the same ending:

Frustration!

Why is that?

The main reason this is the case is nothing to do with your lack of rhythm or timing, and nothing to do with the guitar, the weather, the cold cup of coffee that is slowly forming a surface scum during the hours you practice and practice. It has to do with your…brain.

When you first start learning the guitar, what do you focus on? Where to put your fingers, how the strings are tuned, how to hold the pick, how to sit, how to do this, that and the other. It’s all mechanical, not feel. It’s all involving your brain, and no other senses at all. It’s like building up Lego bricks…I put this here, and that there, and I make a house called music!

So you get into this state where your brain is telling you there is a mechanical solution to the strumming thing. Only the thing is – there isn’t. At least, not to do it well. I’ll give you a great example. Got a biscuit tin? Or a table top? Right, put your guitar in its stand. Leave it alone. Really! OK, on the biscuit tin, bash out a steady rhythm with your preferred hand. It need not be complicated, just bash – bash – bash – bash

Easy. Nothing to it. Nothing to THINK ABOUT that’s why. You just go ahead and do it! OK, now after every third “bash” use your other hand to throw in a quick tap.

Bash – bash – bash tap bash.

Can you repeat that, over and over again? Nothing to it is there. Now, have you got a metronome handy? If not, go get one. Set it at 80 bpm, or a bit quicker, its up to you. Now do your biscuit tin bashing to that. Ignore the neighbours at the door, they’ll soon quit hammering. If they are hammering with rhythm, then who needs a metronome?

Can you do your bashing in time with the metronome, time after time? Can you clap in time with the metronome?

Can you stamp your feet in time with the metronome?

Almost certainly the answer to all of the above is YES.

So let’s get one thing straight right here and now – YOU HAVE RHYTHM. All you have to do now, is transfer these skills to the guitar.

A few things worth pointing out

A soft pick with be easier to strum with than a hard pick (generally). For absolute beginners, the really light white Dunlop picks are a good choice, they are really bendy and encourage a brushing, rather than digging action.

1. Try and keep the pick at right angles to the strings. This is because you want the strings to vibrate in an up-and-down motion, not side to side. A major cause of fret buzz when strumming is getting the strings vibrating in the wrong plane, so keep that pick nice and level.
2. Don’t hold the pick too hard. Hold it just firm enough to stop it slipping.
3. Strum near to, or over, the sound hole for most of the time.
4. RELAX – I have seen people look like they are chopping wood when strumming, with a rigid arm going up and down, and no wrist movement at all. Chill out! You want to feel like there is no tension in your arm at all, just a nice loose feeling

Essential Items

1. A metronome
2. A metronome
3. A metronome

Only joking, (no need to go and buy three!) but believe me, if you want to get really good at strumming, or even move from rubbish to average, you want to get yourself a metronome. It doesn’t matter if its and all singing, all dancing digital one that plays a myriad of different tempos, or a traditional wind up variety that just ticks its merry way at your chosen speed, just make sure you have one.

NOTE – On the thread I mentioned, there is a link to a free online metronome! Just use your favourite search engine and you’ll find it in a flash.

One thing that might be useful if you are a collector of tabs off the Internet – I quite often do my own “cheat sheet” as David Hodge calls them, with just the lyrics and chords changes for songs. Recently I have been getting a metronome and writing roughly what speed the song is on the cheat sheet. I can then set the metronome for practicing the song, knowing that I am somewhere near the original version’s pace. Also, if you do work out a strum pattern that works for the song, write that on it as well – it’s a lot easier than trying to remember later!

Use your ears!

Quite often, I find that its only by listening to the guitar and the sounds that I am making when strumming it, that lead me to the correct strum for any given song. It is important when trying to simulate someone else’s song that you know the time signature that it was written in – but before all you beginners start panicking and thinking “time signatures = theory, pass the razor blade so I can cut my throat now!” all that I mean by that, is how many beats are in each bar of the music. Fortunately, most popular music is in 4/4 time. You can clearly here this in most rock and pop music, a steady 1 -2 – 3 – 4, 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 in the background. You should be able to listen to a song and bang out the rough rhythm on your biscuit tin, or tabletop, to identify this. Failing that, buy the sheet music and find out.

Sometimes you’ll get a song in 3 / 4 time, this is three beats to a bar 1 – 2 – 3, 1 – 2 – 3, or occasionally in 6 / 8 time 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 with the one and four accentuated. What you are trying to do, particularly with acoustic guitar, is giving the music you are playing a feel for this time. Obviously there are several other lesser used timings, but for the benefit of this article, let’s stick to the basic two, 4 / 4 and 3 / 4.

Strumming exercises

Some of these have been pulled directly from the thread on the forum of this site that “Mikeandtheblues” posted in April called “strumming variations”. That thread inspired me to write this article, as the feedback from other forum users was very positive.

Exercise One

Set your metronome at 80 bmp. Do not fret a chord at all. Just tap your guitar in time with the clicks, on the guitar’s body. Do this for about a minute, or until you are completely bored! But don’t stop until you are RIGHT “On the beat” (this means you are tapping in exact time to the metronome click).

That’s a nice easy start. Why do it? To get that beat ingrained in your head, and more importantly, in your arms, and to make you realise still further that you CAN keep time!

Exercise Two

For this, you either want to form a basic chord (I find Em a good choice as its easy on the fingers for long periods) or tune to an open tuning (open D is a good choice from low to high – D A D F# A D as you are only tuning down, not up, on the strings, so there’s less chance of a breakage). If you are going to fret a chord and practice (like Em for instance) stop if your fretting hand gets too tired to finger that chord, or change to another.

For this, and all following exercises, C means Click, as in one click of the metronome. Listen to the click, and play a downstrum on each one. Get used to the feeling of the pick brushing the strings – you are not aiming for volume, you are aiming for repetition, the same sound, over and over. Em is a good chord choice because it means you can do a nice full strum on all 6 strings, by the way!

Notation for the purposes of this article is like this

Numbers indicate the beat, 1, 2, 3, 4, for instance

C indicates a metronome click

D – downstrum
U – Upstrum

So what time signature is this in? 4 / 4 time – see how there are 4 beats or clicks in each bar. You are playing 2 bars of music, 1 2 3 4 and repeat.

Now, take time to look at your strumming arm while you are playing this. It should be flowing up and down nice and steadily, no jerkiness, no tension – tension is the enemy of good strumming. Look at how the pick is working, keep it close to the strings on the way up if you can, without catching any strings. If your arm is not placed correctly, you will have trouble doing this – your arm needs to be in the same plane as the body of the guitar, so make sure your elbow is out over the front of the body – if its not this will be tricky.

So think this through. You are playing just downstrokes, and missing the strings on the way back up, yeah? So surely, it’s not going to be a big deal, on the way back up, to also catch the treble (thinnest) strings? So try playing this

If you are absolute rubbish are strumming you might find this hard. But it will come so keep trying! Look at your arm, is it still moving with the same fluidity as it was with exercise two? It should be! If you falter, go back to exercise 2 and start again. Note – you don’t have to hit all the strings on the way back up, in fact its preferable in most situations NOT to – just catch the trebles.

So what are we playing, time wise now? The timing is still 4 / 4, but we are making 8 lots of noises in each bar (section of 4 beats). So we are playing eighth notes. Count em! So although the music is still 4 / 4 we have varied our sound and added some oomph.

A big tip for you

If you are really struggling with this…play it at night, and turn all the lights off. Just you, guitar and the clicking metronome. It’s amazing how this focuses you on the rhythm. You may find that after 5 minutes playing in a darkened room, why you ever struggled to start with. This sounds wacky, but it does work. Trust me.

So let’s examine that again -

Very “busy” isn’t it. Too much. Now here’s where you go from floundering around in bemusement, to realising that its so simple to make this sound fantastic. All you have to do ………wait for it…….is MISS the strings sometimes.

So keep your strumming arm moving, ladies and gentlemen, as we head for…….

Exercise four

All I want you to try, is go back to playing exercise two’s pattern-

But throw in an upstrum, after the third downstrum. Try NOT to think about this too much, just do it. The easiest way to achieve this, is to get this count rooted in your head – if necessary, say it out loud as you play it -

Go from

“One – Two – Three – Four”
To
“One – Two – Three and Four”.

So its Down, Down, Down(up)Down

You might find the first few goes hard. If you do, go straight back to exercise two, and get your rhythm back. But after a while, I guarantee you that you will get this. And when you do, pat yourself on the back, go and make a coffee. Come back and do it again.

Here’s another tip

Take a break and come back to it, if you have tried your best and can’t do it. Frustration will get you nowhere.

So you have one strum pattern sorted and can apply this to a variety of songs

That strumming pattern crops up time and time again. Don’t be a slave to it, but its worth trying if you haven’t a clue what to try on a song, it often fits well.

So you now have a nice solid strum pattern in your repertoire that will give you a base to build from. And you also know that any song with the strumming pattern D D Dud is now within your capabilities. As long as you can change chords of course…

Exercise five

Before you let this new found skill make your head swell too much, try this exercise. Set your metronome at 140 bmp. See if you can strum in time with it now, with the same strum pattern. And then, set it to just 50 bpm and see if you can do that.

If you can do it without too much effort you can then congratulate yourself. You are halfway to being a good strummer.

Exercise six

Let’s stick with 4 / 4 time for the moment and see if we can figure out another useable pattern. Take a minute to review our starting point – I will just use the first 4 beats.

Let’s see if we can come up with something that will suit a slow song.

Set your metronome at about 80 bpm.

Try this

So its DOWN DOWN/UP UP/DOWN.

Remember to keep your arm moving, it’s the most important thing, and if you go wrong, or if you are really struggling, try this as your starting point, counting in your head “One – Two – Miss – Four” and playing with JUST downstrums – and obviously miss the strings on the count of miss, but you MUST keep that arm moving, just strum thin air for the miss stroke!

Down / Down / Miss / Down

Your three downstrokes should be right on the clicks. Your “miss” stroke needs to be on the down, right on the click as well.

So keep that arm moving! And then just flick the trebles on the up after the second down, and after the “miss”.

From a notation point of view, this would be written

D / DU / UD and you should hear the pauses on “/”.

Got it? If not, go back to D D M D and try again, get the rhythm solid first.

Once you have it down pat, try it at different speeds on the metronome and make sure you can repeat it over and over.

Try it over this chord progression

G D Am7 And you should feel like you are knocking on heavens door! Hold each chord for a D / Du / ud

Don’t worry about chord changes if you can’t do that – tips to follow shortly.

OK so we have mastered D / D / DUD and D / DU / UD

You’ll find the second pattern useful on a lot of slower songs.

Let’s move on and see what we can do with 3 / 4 time. As a refresher, the basic count is therefore 1 – 2 – 3.

Exercise seven

Like this…remember to start with just downstrokes, and count out loud, one – two – three. Start with metronome on about 80 bpm.

Add your downstrokes and change your chant to “one and two and three and”

A good start point for a decent strum here, is to just leave out the first up. So its “down miss down up down up”

This sounds even better (another tip) if you EITHER stress the first down by hitting the strings a little bit harder than the other strokes, or just play the bass strings on the first down. Try it.

Form an A chord. Hit the open A string on the first beat, then strum as I have suggested above, for the 2 + 3 + part. So its

Sound a bit like Mull of Kintyre? It should!

This is a pretty traditional and much used strum for 3 /4 time signature songs, you can hear it all the time in waltzy sounding ballads.

Alternatively, you might try leaving the last U off the end, so its Down / Down up Down

Smooth Chord Changes when strumming

This is the thing that usually gets beginners pulling their hair out in frustration. Unless of course you started so old (like me) that you didn’t have much to pull out to start with!

Why is it SO hard to change chords and strum?

I will tell you why, and this applies to learning just about ANYTHING to do with guitar…….and this was the single biggest guitar revelation I ever had, so listen up…….

You can only teach one hand at a time

Your brain won’t cope well, with trying to tell on hand “form a Am chord” and the other “strum D D uud”. Its too much. One of the actions, either forming the chord, or the strumming pattern, must come by instinct, through practice, before you can teach the other hand what to do. As an aside, this is particularly true of finger picking. Teach your hands independently and you will make MUCH faster progress.

So the bottom line is this. Either practice a strumming pattern until its second nature, and then move on to changing chords while strumming this pattern OR learn the chord changes well, and then apply the strumming pattern. But don’t try and do both.

So let’s assume you know three chords. And let’s assume those chords are nice and easy.

D XX0232
Am X02210
Em 022000

And lets assume that you are playing them in that order. And let’s also assume that we are going to use D / D / Dud strumming like this -

“One – Two – Three and Four”.

So its Down, Down, Down(up)Down

Set your metronome on a manageable speed, let’s say 70 – 80 bpm. Form your D chord, and first of all, just get used to the strum.

D chord

D / D /Dud D / D / Dud

Repeat this until you are not thinking about your strumming hand at all, just let it flow. Shut your eyes, feel what you are doing, don’t force it. Feel how loose your strumming arm feels, nice and fluid, like you could hold that pattern all day! Once you are in that state of mind, just LOOK at your fretting hand, don’t do anything else, just LOOK. Now imagine where your fretting hand has to go to get to Am. Now, all you are going to do, is change from D to Am, after your count of four – like this

Keep strumming in time throughout!!!!!

Now, because you are starting on D you will have to take all your fingers off the strings to change. And here comes this weeks million dollar guitar tip:

Open strings are your friends, not enemies

Remember this, and never forget it. What this means is that in the course of changing chords, if you happen to hit some open strings before you have finished completing the change, do not worry about it. This is particularly true of upstrums, where you are only catching the trebles anyway. No one will notice.

Its not so bad in the example above, because you are changing chords where the last “and” half beat it – this gives you plenty of time (that’s the other thing, you always have more time to change than you think). But try it with this strum

And try changing from D to Am with this pattern. Its almost inevitable, unless you are really good at chord changes, that you will hit some open strings (not fretted) on the last Up. In fact, you should. See how much smoother it sounds, if you practice changing the chord on this last half beat. Take your fingers off the D chord on the last downstroke, hit the open strings on the upstroke, then get to Am for the return to the count of “one” and your opening downstroke.

In tab this would look something like this

I will sum up this entire article with a little list of tips that will help you, if you apply it to your practice correctly, to become a great strummer

Posture – make sure your arm is hanging freely in a good position to stroke the strings in a smooth motion

Relax – tension is your enemy

Go back to basics – if you are struggling

Teach one hand – then the other

Pick – the right pick for the job

Feel – the beat and get it “in” your arms

Stroke – don’t dig at the strings

Buy – a metronome, it’s a great investment

Write – on your tab / cheatsheets, the timing / strum pattern

Listen – to music and hear the rhythm, then copy it

Turn of the lights – and hear what sounds you are making

Take a break – if you are struggling, you may find that’s all that’s needed to crack it

Open strings – are your friends

And before I go, one last thing that helped me enormously. If you are like the vast majority of people and listen to music in the car, don’t JUST listen. Move your strumming shoulder in time with the beat. It’s amazing how often this has helped me to crack a strum. Don’t worry that you might look a bit odd doing this, you will soon realise the value in it, I promise you.

This is dedicated to all the people at Guitar Noise who have dragged my guitar playing to a level that I never ever thought I would get to. To all you newbies, remember no one was born with the ability to strum, it’s all down to practice, like anything else. And most of all, enjoy the journey!

Since I had now had a guitar, I needed lessons. One of my favorite places on the Internet is the auction site, eBay. Off I went and searched for “learn guitar”. A lot of people on eBay want to sell you CD’s or DVD’s to teach you to play the guitar. The two times I tried to learn guitar before involved spending three weeks trying to smoothly shift between C, F, and G chords and then giving up because it seemed like it would take forever to make pleasant sounds. I was looking for a way to learn guitar that was different than my previous efforts. Guitar Concept sells their course at eBay and it seemed to be the thing I was looking for. I downloaded the demo, liked what I saw, and then bought the CD.

Guitar Concept starts you off with pentatonic scales and learning different modes. I was finally able to make pleasant sounds with the guitar – a major breakthrough. I was learning the minor pentatonic scale, going up the scale and then down, and thought it might be easier to memorize the scale if I played the notes of the scale out of sequence. The result sounded like I had just made some music. I stopped, laughed out loud and thought, “Wow, this is so cool”. One of the best things about Guitar Concept is that there’s a real person behind it who answers your questions.

The Guitar Concept web site has a links section that started me looking for sites with good information for a new guitar player. I discovered Guitar Noise (just as you obviously have!) and spent quite a few weeks trying to digest everything. I used Guitar Noise initially to help me figure out music theory. The Power of Three, and Moving on Up, both by David Hodge, were particularly helpful in taking the mystery out of chords. I could make chords all over the fretboard – not just in the “standard” places.

Another useful link from the Guitar Concept site is to Guitar For Beginners And Beyond. This site has free fingerstyle lessons. Most of the lessons even come with a movie. Always On My Mind is my favorite lesson here.

One of the links on the Guitar Noise site is to Darrin Koltow’s Maximum Musician site. I found a book here, “Blues Grooves for Beginners” that changed my life (really, it did). I discovered how much fun it is to play the blues. One of the songs in the book, “Souped Up Shuffle” seemed to be way too hard for me ever to play. One five-note section of this song took me twenty seconds to play because my left hand just didn’t get it. I stuck with it and now use this song as a warm-up exercise that I can play without even thinking too much. An important lesson for me – things that look hard can often be made easy with lots of practice. My success with this book gave me confidence to tackle other things that looked too hard.

While exploring the Maximum Musician site I stumbled across a link to Truefire. This was another life altering discovery. Truefire contains thousands of guitar lessons at a reasonable cost. A typical lesson costs $2.50 and comes with an MP3, PDF and often a Powertab file. Dave Rubin has an excellent lesson for a beginner called “Eight to the Bar”. Keith Wyatt has a blues primer that has lots of good bits. I thought that slides and hammers and pull-offs were too hard but I downloaded a David Blacker lesson called “Delta Blues Essentials” and can now slide and hammer all over the place. It sounds so cool doing a hammer on to the B string followed by a slide from the 2nd fret to the 4th fret on the high E string. If you can’t find what you’re looking for at Guitar Noise, head over to Truefire.

Mark Stefani is a major presence at Truefire. Some of his lessons are difficult but others, like, “Boogie Woogie Shuffle”, only look difficult and, with a lot of practice, are great fun to play. Mark has his own website that has many free lessons.

One of the lessons at Truefire contained a link to Acoustic Guitar Workshop. I thought that I would be happy to always use just a pick. After listening to some of the fingerstyle lessons here, I was hooked and purchased the course, “Fingerstyle Blues 1″. The last lesson in the course is a song called “Fishing Blues”. It sounds truly amazing when I get it right. I haven’t forgotten my pick but fingerstyle blues are a lot of fun to play.

One of my goals at the start of my guitar adventure was to learn my favorite song, If You Could Read My Mind. I got an “Easy Guitar” book from the library and managed to play the melody of the song without too much trouble but it was strangely unsatisfying. The song sounded too much like “plink, plink, plink”. Back to Guitar Noise I went and found Arranging Things by David Hodge and Birth of a Chord Melody by Graham Merry to teach me all about the wonderful world of chord melody. I now have a decent arrangement of the song. It still needs work but it no longer goes “plink, plink, plink”.

While I was looking for different versions of If You Could Read My Mind, I discovered GuitarPro and the GuitarPro archive. GuitarPro is a neat tool to let you edit music. MySongBook contains almost 40,000 songs in the GuitarPro format-something for everybody. One interesting use of GuitarPro is to change a song’s key. If a song appears difficult to play, you can try changing its key. Sometimes it becomes a lot easier in a different key.

During my never-ending search of places to help me learn guitar, I encountered Guitar Principles several times. The site’s main product is a book called The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar. I was always a bit afraid to visit the site because I might learn I was doing everything wrong and was a hopeless case. I took the plunge and bought the book and found it extremely useful. I was horrified to see how much my left hand fingers were flapping in the breeze and how much tension I had. The book helps a player to recognize tension and to avoid it. Before this book I wondered why bending strings was so hard. I realized, after reading the book, that it’s almost impossible to bend a string with a tense left hand.

I spend a lot of time at Guitar Noise looking for interesting things to learn. In the blues section, I found a lesson from Olav Torvund, a Norwegian lawyer who also has a passion for the blues. His site has hundreds of lessons about blues guitar and, for people like myself who don’t speak Norwegian, the site is also in English. Playing the “Hoochie Coochie Shuffle” from this site is just so much fun it should be illegal.

While poking around at torvund.net, I found an excellent site to buy sheet music and guitar instruction books called SheetMusicPlus.com. This site is easy to navigate and the company is very reliable. I have already bought several books from the web site. You can search for “easy guitar” at this site and get hundreds of books that have songs from your favourite artists arranged for the beginning to intermediate guitar player.

I’m eight months into becoming a guitar player so what’s next? I seem to have a fairly common guitar disease – “75 percentitis.” I learn 75% of a song and then get distracted and don’t learn the whole song. So lately, I’ve been re-visiting my favorites and learning the whole song. I’m also learning St Louis Blues from the Acoustic Guitar Workshop and have just bought a book at SheetMusicPlus called Classic Blues for Easy Guitar that has songs like, Boom Boom and Sweet Home Chicago arranged for easy guitar. This book is going to be a lot of fun. Hurt by David Hodge at Guitar Noise is also on my current list of things to practice. I think it’s impossible to see the Johnny Cash video of Hurt and not get a lump in your throat.

I have also started working on the dreaded C, F, G chord change but something mysterious has happened. It’s not as hard as I remembered. Amazing.

Learning guitar is hard work but it’s really important to have fun and have your guitar make cool sounds while you’re learning all the hard bits.

Thanks for listening!

Think about it. In our brains, we can easily understand that, having picked up the guitar all of a week, month or year ago, we’re certainly not in the league of our favorite guitar idol. And, again in our brains, we pretty much know that couldn’t be otherwise.

But time after time we curse ourselves for not being as good as we could be. Of course, the “good as we could be” is often not rooted in much reality. I’ve discussed this in numerous articles in the past, such as If I Only Had… and I think, unfortunately, the whole concept of learning as a process, and a process to b treasured at that, is in danger of being lost.

And that, to me anyway, is the real problem: that our desire to be perfect, and instantly perfect at that, steals the joys and pleasures of learning from us.

This is one of the main reasons that I teach. I know that probably more than ninety-nine percent of my students are not going to become professional guitarists. But I fully intend that one hundred percent are going to be able to enjoy making whatever music pleases each of them.

It’s been said millions of times before and much more eloquently than I could ever hope to say it, music is not a competition. Making it so tends to bring about the frustration that most musicians feel and that frustration usually revolves around one’s impatience with the learning process.

You’re going to be playing music for the rest of your life. Take the time to enjoy and savor each moment of the trip. It’ll make you happier and, believe it or not, it will make you work harder at getting better. That’s what life’s all about.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Pitfalls for beginning students and select edit to begin making improvements.

As a teacher, I want my students to play. And while many will grudgingly work (and that’s a very loose interpretation of that word…) on scales and technique exercises, they seem to be happiest when their playing sounds like something. And I find that songs, especially songs that the student knows and likes, tend to encourage the beginning musician to work harder on perfecting his or her skills. Someone who might not take the time to practice a descending C major scale just for the sake of knowing the scale may play it hundreds of times in succession in order to make it fit into the chorus of Wild World. And enjoy doing it, especially when that magic moment comes when the song all falls into place and the audience, whether a friend, family member or pet, nods in appreciation.

Even children starting out playing single notes are more happy to play a melody they recognize (Jingle Bells, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, or a condensed version of Ode to Joy) than they are to play a (seemingly) pointless drill.

But (and there always is a “but,” isn’t there?), as much as I think that teaching music through songs will usually be more engaging for both the student and his or her listeners, it does the student little good to simply “replay” a song. Something has to be learned, something that can be taken out of the context of the song and used someplace else. Usually a different song! And unless all you want to be able to do is to simply copy guitar parts you hear on CDs or records and not even think about what you’re doing, I think it’s hard for someone to walk away from learning a song without indeed having learned something useful.

I know that, no matter what your level of expertise on the guitar or any instrument, it’s important to have a sense of balance when it comes to knowing what you need to learn. And it’s also important to understand that there are many ways of learning any one thing. If you’re honest with yourself about what lessons, if any, you get from learning a song, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to learn one. Or several hundred.

The other thing to keep in mind is that songs, traditionally, are pretty much what you’ll find yourself playing as a guitarist. When you perform in front of people, they’re not going to ask, “Would you please play the first two measures of Stairway To Heaven?” or “How about the middle part of Comfortably Numb?” They want to hear a complete song. And even if you just know the strumming part, that’s usually more than fine by them.

For what it’s worth, I never think of songs as a “bother.” My guitar and I are, at almost any given time, at the service of any song. They are my stock in trade, as it were. The guitar and performer are simply extras.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to easy guitar songs and select edit to make improvements.

Like most topics, there’s a lot of discussion about this, not only among both teachers and students, but most guitarists are willing to give you an opinion on it as well.

Before we delve into chords, though, I’d like to make a quick point that learning chords is not always the best way to start out, particularly for younger children. Many teachers advocate learning the notes within the first five frets on each of the strings before moving on to chords. There is some merit to this. For starters, it helps someone who’s not played a single note on the guitar before a chance to develop a little dexterity and also proper fretting technique. I think we’re all agreed that it’s usually easier to fret and sound a single note than a whole chord. For someone starting out, the inability to get a full sounding chord can lead to much frustration which, in turn, can lead to deciding that maybe the guitar is just too much trouble and not worth learning. For younger students, and also for some adults, the confidence gained by playing some single notes on various strings is all they need to make the next “step” into chord playing. We’ll be touching on this a little next time out.

If you use this technique with younger students, the next logical bit of progress is to introduce what many people call “cheater” chords. G, for instance, can be played with only one finger if you don’t play the fifth and sixth strings (fingering: XX0003). Likewise you can do a “half C” chord by only playing the notes on the first three strings (fingering: XXX010). This again is simply a matter of building up both confidence and good finger positioning. Believe it or not, I find that teaching the C and G major scales to be very helpful in the forming of chords. Once someone is used to using his or her fingers on certain frets to play the scales smoothly, it’s a small transition to learn to leave the fingers in place, thereby forming C, G and “middle of the neck F” chords.

But when it comes to teaching chords in a more “traditional” sense, I tend to start out pretty much the way I describe in Guitar Noise’s Absolute Beginners article – Absolute Beginners Part 1: Chords. E minor is first chord we learn, followed by E major, A minor (which is the same fingering as E major), then A and then we stop for a bit. D major and B minor come next and then we’ll finish up with C major and G major. I know a lot of teachers prefer to use “two finger” chords first, E minor, E7, A7 and Am7, and, depending on the student, I may indeed stick with those at first, particularly as they lend themselves very nicely to learning to change between chords.

And speaking of which, it’s kind of silly, to me anyway, to teach chords without going over transitions. That’s why I’ll usually teach Horse With No Name right at the start. I want a student to get used to the idea that chords are supposed to have movement and that movement should be, for the most part, rhythmic and regular. So switching between the Em (022000) and the “horse chord” (200200) is just another way to get a beginning guitarist started in a friendly and easy manner. We will also work on changing from E minor to E major and, if things are going well, from E major to A minor.

When working on transitions, I find the best thing to do is to start by giving each chord eight beats, usually all downstrokes, and then changing to our new chord for another eight beats and then changing back. It’s important to do this in a steady rhythm since most chord changes occur in a song setting (which, to no one’s surprise I’m sure, is rhythmic). For me, I’d rather have the student miss getting all the notes right but keep the rhythm steady than to stop the rhythm in order to reset their fingers. That’s why I don’t care how slow we start out, tempo-wise. Chord changing, like most things about the guitar (and so many other things) is truly a matter of repetition and practice. It will come with time and patience. Good rhythm skills, though, are hard for a lot of people to come by and that’s why I stress them so much in learning to change chords.

If a student has gotten to the point where the “eight beat chord change” is comfortable, then we’ll move to changing the chords every four beats, then two, and finally changing on each beat. This may take the student a while, but there are all sorts of other things to be learning in the meantime.

Usually, I’ll group the chord changing exercises by pairs, E minor and E major, E major and A minor, A minor and A major, E minor and A major, E major and A major. As I’ve mentioned, the seventh chords are easier for some students when starting out. Then we’ll try to switch back and forth between three different chords. There are so many songs that involve only the E, A and D chords that most people know. Wild Thing comes immediately to mind for some reason. And any blues song in A is now playable to most beginners.

There are two things (three really, but the third is part of the second) I’d like to quickly add to this discussion. First, chord changing is something that can be done quite easily during a person’s “free time.” By this I mean why watch a football game without your guitar? You don’t even have to strum it (although I recommend you do) to work on changing between the chords. If it’s too noisy, then do it during the commercials. That’ll give you easily ten minutes practice out of every thirty of a program.

Second, I almost always start teaching beginners about the roots of chords as we learn them. This way we cannot only learn what strings to strum or not to strum (like the low E (sixth) string of the D major chord), but we can also learn what I call the “bass/strum” technique. This is simply hitting the root note of the chord on the first beat followed by the full chord on the next three beats of the measure. Because I teach the E, A and D chords first, this is a fairly easy concept for most students to get. It’s also a little sneaky because hitting the open-stringed root note first gives the student a little extra time to get the rest of the chord in place.

My other reason for teaching the “bass/strum” is that when we get to the C and G chords, as well as others where the root note isn’t an open string, the student is conscious of the need to get the bass strings in place first. This isn’t as easy a thing to teach. If a guitarist learns to make a G chord by placing his or her fingers on the high E (first) string first, then that is often how he or she will try to switch the chord in transition. And because most of the time you switch a chord on a downstroke, this can lead to all sorts of rhythmic hiccups.

Beginners should definitely check out the article Absolute Beginners Part 1: Chords.

This answer can be edited and improved by you on the Guitar Noise Wiki. Go to Beginner chords and select edit to make improvements.

The focus of this article is how to get chord voicings that are different from the old standard ones that are made in the open positions of a standard tuned guitar. You know, E (major), A (major), and D (major), etc.

The idea came about for this article because, again, I was jamming with a friend of mine, trying to stubbornly impart some of my knowledge. Just a little knowledge that I thought would help us cope with the others’ chord changes and riffing without too much thought.

Simple Chord Shapes

What I have found in my beginner’s stage of playing guitar and jamming is how do I get some of the chords that are in the same range as what my friend is playing on the guitar?

The application of finding different voicings of the same chord arises from using the same simple shapes of chords that you will find within the first three or four frets on the fretboard – or is it fingerboard? Let’s begin with E, seen below in Figure 1, beside the chord diagrams for A and D.

You can see in the above diagram of the chord E where the frets are fretted on the fretboard, which strings ring open, and what the notes are played on each string (below the diagram). Remember that a major chord is made up of a major triad, three notes. These notes come from the chord name’s major scale and are the 1st or root, the major 3rd and the fifth. The major 3rd is simply the 3rd note of the major scale. A minor third would be a half step below that.

The rest of the major chords within the first four frets are shown in Figure 2:

Please take note that while all of the major chords within the first four frets are provided above in Figures 1 and 2, there are other some other chord voicings for these chords within that area. One such chord I can think of is:

When I use the type of shape above, the chord shape for E (see Figure 1), where I fret notes with the lowest fretted string being the fifth, I call it an “E Shape” as seen in Figure 4. I do not know if anybody else calls it this. Later you will see this shape used to make other chords.

The first thing you can do with this “E Shape” is move it up and down the neck of the guitar to different frets as in Figure 4. Always keep the finger closest to your head on the fifth string. This is marked below with the circle on the mentioned fret placement on the diagrams. The diagram below on the left is the “E Shape” used in place to make the open position E chord. The diagram below on the right is the placement of the “E Shape” with the circled fret placement at the second (to form E), fifth, seventh, and ninth frets. The fret markers are show for the fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets.

If you have not already noticed at this point, these fingerings do not make major chords (or if they do you must really work hard think of their major chord name) and I am not going to name them in this article. The point is to demonstrate that the “E Shape” is transferable up and down the neck to form “good” (by personal preference) sounding chords.

Making Use of the “E Shape”

So how do you make use of the “E Shape”?

It is quite easy in theory. It takes quite a bit of practice to get a good bar chord. You use a finger bar to make a bar chord. To make and A chord use the chord diagram given below in Figure 5. I have read and practiced what I think is the easiest way to make a bar chord. Placed the fingers that are higher up the fretboard down first. After the higher fingers are placed then place your index finger down to bar the fretboard. You will find that you may find some fret buzz – work through it by moving your finger and pressing down tightly with your index finger.

To follow these steps using the diagram below do the following:

• Place your pinkie (4th) finger on the fifth string, seventh fret
• Place your ring (3rd) finger on the fourth string, seventh fret
• Place your middle (2nd) finger on the third string, sixth fret
• Place your index (1st) finger as a bar across all of the strings, fifth fret
• (You should check out other musical sources for specific fingering diagrams.)

The notes for this A major chord are also given in the diagram below, Figure 5. You can compare it to the often-used chord voicing of A above in Figure 1. Give both of them a few strums to hear the difference in how they sound. The chord voicing for the A given below should sound a noticeable higher and even a little more upbeat when compared to the chord voicing for A in Figure 1.

How do I use the “E Shape” further? Simply move the whole shape, bar included, up to the seventh fret. Now I mean that the bar moves up to the seventh fret. The circled fret placement moves up to the ninth fret as in the chord diagram for B in Figure 5 above.

So as you can see you just have to move the whole shape a fret or two to get a new chord. You may have even noticed that the “E Shape” was evident in the second chord voicing of F in Figure 2. Go back up to Figure 2 and have a look. You will see the same shape as seen in Figure 5 above. Do not forget to make a bar chord using the process I described three paragraphs above in bullet form.

You can easily get 7 chords by using the “E Shape” with the circled fret placement on the fifth string. The high E chord voicing with the bar on the 12th fret will be hard to make on most acoustic guitars. If you have a Stratocaster type guitar you might even be able to get this type of bar chord with bar all the way up on the 15th fret – that is a G chord.

Other Chord Shapes

You may have asked yourself “What about the other chord shapes?” These are all applicable, some requiring more practice than others. You can use the “A Shape” from the A chord in Figure 1 as well as the “D Shape”. Do not be intimidated by the difficulty of the shape. Practice will allow you hands to form almost all shapes almost anywhere between the nut and the 12th fret or above if you have an electric guitar.

How do you find where you should put the bar when using the bar chords?

Let’s look at Figure 1 again.

The key to using this method to getting different chord voicings easily is looking at the fretted notes in relation to the nut. With the E chord one there is one note fretted after the nut on the 3rd string 1st fret in the “E Shape”. This means that the bar in the bar chord with fall immediately behind the note that is on the lowest fret.

Let’s first talk a little bit about natural notes (or tones). A natural tone is one of the notes that does not have a sharp or a flat in it. Those notes that do have sharps or flats are called accidentals. So the naturals are: C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. An accidental would be C# or Cb (C flat).

To make the next available chord that uses a natural note as its root, shift the “E Shape” up one fret and bar all the strings on the 1st fret. This gives us an F chord. See Figure 2 above. You should have a real grasp of using the “E Shape” now so you should try using it on your guitar.

Once you have done that, move on to the “A Shape”. You can see above that the lowest fret fretted is the second. That means that when you use the “A Shape” to make a bar chord the bar must be two frets behind the “A Shape”. See Figure 6 below. You will notice that I have dispensed with that circled fretted note in this figure.

Take note that the easiest way may be to use two bars when using the “A Shape”. However, you may find that you want to use your last three fingers to hold down the “A Shape” and of course your index finger to make the bar. Using your last three fingers to make the “A Shape” provides you with certain advantages if you can eventually get your fingers to stretch that way. You can easily make 7th chords by removing your ring finger. This would be removing the middle dot from the small bar diagram above.

That is right, I snuck in a little variation on your basic “A Shape”. Theoretically you can do this with all of your “Shapes”. If you remove certain fretted notes from the diagram you end up with different chords. Look below at Figure 7. Take note of the blank circles where there used to be solid circles. These are where you can remove your fingers to make other chords that vary on the original at that position. Also note that the solid dot has been marked on the bar made by the index finger.

You should have noticed in Figure 7 that I added something a little different by using an “A minor Shape”. The base of the “A minor Shape” is actually the same shape as the “E Shape”. However, when the “E Shape” is used, by shifting your fingers by one string you can form the chord A Minor. See Figure 8 below.

Placing the “Chord Shapes”

How do find the chord you need quickly? One method is to memorize the fretboard’s natural notes. To do this easily, I use “bands” of natural notes on the fretboard. These bands of natural notes occur in quite a few places between the nut and the 12th fret. After the 12th fret the fretboard repeats itself. If you have already read my article called Basic Music Theory you should already have a map of the fretboard to use.

If you do not have a map of the fretboard then I recommend you make one. I have written fretboards in a couple of different ways. The first way was with all the notes – both naturals and accidentals. I find it easier to read the map of the fretboard if I list only the natural notes. One way to write out a fretboard is provide in Figure 9. Another way to write it out is vertically; turn the fretboard of figure 9 clockwise 90 degrees.

You can see that “bands” of natural notes appear at frets 5, 10 and 12. Places where there are natural notes almost all the way across the fingerboard occur at the 3rd and 7th frets. These are also good to remember as “bands” of notes including the accidentals with them. A diagram with both types of “bands” would look as Figure 10 does below.

Now that you know you can use a few different shapes see if you can find a voicing of G that uses the “D Shape” as seen in Figures 1 and 8.

Figure 10 will also come in handy when you are trying to find the right spot to start all of your scales. Of course you will need a little alteration to place such scales as the C Major scale beginning with the 8th fret of the 6th string. I leave the rest up to you.

Experimentation

I thought I would just let you know that one of the experiments that helped me to realize that I could use “Chord Shapes” in this way was using alternate tunings. I like to play with the blues and often would tune my guitar to open tunings. One such tuning is Open D. Its strings are tuned low to high: D, A, D, F#, A, D. This allows for very simple formation of major chords.

To form a major chord with an open tuning you bar at each fret – just one bar across at each fret. If you draw another fretboard tuned to Open D you can see D by strumming the open strings, E by barring at the second fret, F by barring at the third fret, and so on. This is what led me to realize the use of “Chord Shapes” and bar chords to easily find alternate voicings of different chords.

So experiment as much as you can with your guitar. Warnings about open tunings: be careful about tuning your guitar to an open tuning that puts more tension on your strings than would normally be on them. Also be careful about changing the tuning all the time as this may possibly cause unwanted twisting or other damage to your guitar. There are articles on Guitar Noise and the Internet that can inform you about alternate tunings. You should also check with the manufacturer of your guitar just to make sure if your tunings are going to place more tension on guitar than you would normally have.

Basic Chords

The simplest chords are based on having only three notes in them. On a guitar you will start to learn by letting the strings on your guitar ring by bringing your pick or thumb across 6, 5 or 4 strings.

Below are some chord diagrams for three chords, E major, A major and D minor. When musicians talk about major chords they simplify the names by just calling them by their letter names (see below). Minor chords are indicated by the capital letter of the chord plus a small case “m” beside the capital letter as in D minor: Dm.

The chord diagrams below are standard chord diagrams. The strings on a standard tuned guitar are E A D G B E, left to right.

The thick dark line is the nut or the zero fret on the guitar.

The guitar player places their fingers on the strings where the dots are placed.

“O” above the indicated string means that that string is played with the other strings but is let ring “open”.

“X” above the indicated string means that string is not played or it is actually muted. Do not worry about muting the strings if they are on the bass side of the guitar. Just do not strum them with the other strings.

One way to play a C major chord (or just C as commonly written) is given below.

Remember that the statement above says that the simplest chords are based on having only three notes in them. You may have noticed that more than three strings are ringing in chords you strum. That is because some notes occur more than once in the chord. They may have different pitch or frequency but they are the same note.

So now the questions arise

• How do I know what notes are which in a major chord?” and
• What does the word ‘major’ mean in the term ‘major chord’?”

The answer lies in what is called chord theory. Only basic chord theory is discussed here. Still, this can seem to beyond your grasp before you begin to understand it.

Major Scales

Most people begin playing piano with an introduction to where “middle C” is and how to play the C major scale. You can find one of the C notes on you guitar on the second string, first fret. If you have trouble finding it just look at the C chord diagram above and you will see a dot on the second string from the right.

A scale covers one octave. An octave covers the notes within a range of 12 semi-tones above it. Hard to understand? Just look at the C note of the second string first fret and then count up the string 12 frets (semi-tones) and you arrive at the note C an octave above the previous C.

I would diagram the fret board but I believe that going between the paper and the guitar is necessary for the learning process.

Now, what are the notes in a C major scale? The notes in C major scale are:

C D E F G A B C.

Take a second look at where these notes are on the fret board. If you do not know where to fret the string you will in a second. There is a formula for the major scale, a pattern if you will.

Each fret is a semi-tone away from the next fret. Two frets away means that the note is a full tone away from the next note. The C major scale is the only major scale that has no notes that are sharps or flats.

That makes the C major scale pattern as follows:

When you look at the fret board it looks like this (this fret board is sideways to save space):

You would actually fret the C note here, where the dot is:

These dots are the position markers for the 5th, 7th, 9th, and 12th frets on the fret board:

Homework interrupt:

At this point I suggest writing out the fret board on a piece of loose-leaf paper. I find it easiest if you write the fret board out vertically as if you were looking at the guitar standing up. (This is the way standard chord diagrams are written.) Just turn the above diagram 90 degrees clockwise. The fret board should have six columns of notes and room for 20 to 22 frets depending upon your guitar. The fret board repeats itself at the 12th fret.

A standard tuned guitar will be tuned:

Quick Review

Now you know the C major scale, where the C major scale is on the second string on the guitar, the formula for every major scale (T, T, ST, T, T, T, ST – remember these are the intervals between notes), and you should have a map of the whole fret board of your guitar. The map of the fret board will help you when you are looking for different ways to play the same chord.

Notes of the C (Major) Chord:

Simple major chords are called major triads. Triad refers to the chord being made up of three notes. The three notes of a major triad are the 1st, major 3rd, and 5th of the root note’s major scale. The C major scale is labeled below in terms of what the numbers are:

For the moment do not bother wondering about why some of the Roman numerals are capitals and others are small case and the majors, minors, dom and what the rest of the stuff means on the third line of the list above; just take note of the number. You may write in the regular numbers if you like. That makes the C chord made up of C, E and G.

That makes a C (major chord) made up of C – the 1 or the root (I), E – the major 3rd (iii), and G – the 5th (V). Now that you have your fret board map you can see where these notes are fretted in the open position chord. What is an open position chord? A open position chord is a chord that has one or more strings that are let ring open when played. Look at the C chord below. The notes played on each string are given below the respective strings.

The second C chord shown above and to the right is a 3rd position chord because the lowest fret that is fretted in the chord is the 3rd fret. Take note that it is not the lowest note that is fretted that determines the position of the chord; it is the lowest fret fretted.

Notice that there is a note with sharp in the D chord. D is the 1st note, F# is the major 3rd, and A is the 5th note in the D major scale. The D major scale looks like:

So you begin to see that you can figure out the notes for all of the major chords by figuring out the major scales for each root of the scale and taking the 1st, major 3rd, and 5th of the major scale. When you place the chords on the fret board the notes will match up with the notes in the chord diagrams. You can do this with any major chord to figure out its notes.

Homework interrupt:

At this point you should figure out all of the major scales for just the roots that do not have sharps or flats in them (to clarify: the major scales of C, D, E, F, G, A, and B). The scales for the roots of C and D have been provided but you should write them out on a piece of paper anyway. You should write out all of the scales in order of occurrence on the fret board: C major scale, D major scale, E major scale, F major scale and so on.

Hint: You may have asked yourself how do I know when to put in a sharp or a flat for that matter. For the moment when figuring out the above listed major scales, use all sharps.

Note: There is a semi-tone between all notes that are two frets apart. That means that there is another note between A and B; that note is A#/Bb. (The small case “b” is often used as the flat symbol in standard word-processor programs because it is faster to use it than inserting a symbol or it is simply not available.) A# and Bb are the same note. That extends to other notes such as C#/Db, D#/Eb, etc. TAKE NOTE THAT E# is F and Fb is E; B# is C and Cb is B. THIS MEANS THAT THERE IS NO SEMI-TONE between E and F or between B and C.

When you end with the B major scale and look at all of the scales you should notice that some scales have more sharps than others. When you have the scales written one under the other in the order of C, D, E, F, G, A, and B the number of sharps in the scales do not increase in order.

HERE COMES THE INTERESTING PART – When you put the scales in the sequential order of number of sharps, low to high this sequence has a particular property. All of the scales are now five notes away from each other. If you place the roots of the scales in a semi-circle you have half of what is called “The Circle of Fifths” or “The Cycle of Fifths.”

How does this make a difference to me?

There are many songs that are totally based upon or have sections based upon The Circle of Fifths. Just look at some of the music from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, even up through to current day.

When you finish the other half of The Circle of Fifths you will a complete circle that allows you to see all of the major keys in the order of sharps and flats.

Look up more information on the Internet about chord theory, The Circle of Fifths and scales.

Korg GA-30 Guitar Tuner

Korg CA-30 Chromatic Tuner

There are really 2 types of tuner on the market for the guitarist – the “guitar tuner” and the “chromatic tuner”. The difference between them only really becomes apparent when you try to change to a non-standard tuning (e.g. DADGAD). The guitar tuner is designed to pick up the six notes of a guitar in standard tuning (EADGBE) and works well doing this, but has difficulty in allowing an alternate tuning, because it doesn’t recognise anything other than EADGBE. Some, such as the Korg GA-30 allow you to modify the standard pitches by up to 5 semitones higher and lower, which does let you use alternate tunings. Much more comfortable to use, however, is the chromatic tuner, which will recognise any note and tell you how sharp or flat you are tuned – you can use any alternate tuning with no problem. What a tuner cannot do is to tell you which octave the note is in and here is the basis for much confusion – try to tune an octave too high and your strings will snap, an octave too low and they will flap around like a clothes line.

For this method of tuning, the tone generator, which will produce a continuous tone at 440Hz, is important. 440Hz is the international standard frequency of Concert A, which is found at the 5th fret of the high e string.

Why the rider “open tune” in the first paragraph? The reason for this is that whilst a guitar may be fine when the open strings are in tune, it may not be when fretted notes are played. This is due to the way that the frets are laid out – it’s to do with “equal temperament”, which I won’t go into here and relates to the intonation of the guitar.

Now that we’ve got the technology out of the way, let’s get down to tuning the guitar. What state the tuning is in is irrelevant – this method will bring your guitar into standard tuning and in the correct octave!

So, first things first – check you know how to operate the tuner! Not difficult, but it does save time when tuning, if you don’t have to keep flicking through the (albeit 2 page) instruction manual. Now connect your guitar to the tuner or, if you have an acoustic, bring it close so that the inbuilt microphone can pick up the sound from you guitar.

The first step is to get one string near to being in tune – not only the right pitch but in the right octave. So, switch on the Concert A tone. Fret the high e string (the thinnest one) at the 5th fret. Now tune the guitar to the generated tone – the first string at the 5th fret should sound (at least close to) the same note as Concert A. Once you have this, you can turn off the tone and the tuner, for the moment.

You now need to bring the other 5 strings close to being in tune, by following this method:

Tune the B string (second thinnest and second from bottom) at the 5th fret to the open high e string.
Tune the G string (third from the bottom) at the 4th fret to the open B string
Tune the D string (fourth from bottom) at the 5th fret to the open G string
Tune the A string ( next to thickest string) at the 5th fret to the open D string
Tune the low E string (thickest and topmost string) at the 5th fret to the open A string.

At this point, it is wise to understand the effects of a non-locking tremelo/vibrato/whammy bar. The mechanism is held in equalibrium by springs, how many depending upon the gauge of the strings. Springs being springs, they stretch with tension and strings being strings, they don’t (we’ll come back to this later). As you add tension to the string, by turning the tuner, you do two things – you add to the total tension on the springs, causing them to stretch slightly and reduce some of the tension on the other strings. So, when you tune one string up, you are automatically tuning the other strings down. You will have to take this into account when fine tuning. There are locking vibratos, like the Floyd-Rose, but tuning them is explained well on the Floyd-Rose website.

The guitar should only need fine tuning now, so set the tuner up again and we’ll start with the low E (or 6th string – the fattest). When played, it should register E on the tuner and you should only have the “in-tune” LED lit. If not, the tuner will tell you what is needed. In general, tuners show whether the string is tuned flat or sharp by red (and maybe also yellow) LEDs arrayed n the minus (flat) and plus (sharp) sides of “tune”. It may also have an “analogue” meter with “moving” arm. In addition, the chromatic tuner will give you the actual note which is nearest to the one played. Indications on the minus side mean that the string is tuned flat and needs to be tightened slightly. On the plus side, the string is too tight and needs to be slackened slightly. As you turn the tuning knob, you will see the result reflected on the display of the tuner – take things nice and easy, fine tuning can be turning the knob as little as1-2 degrees. Due to the way physics works, the strings will need to be plucked regularly to keep an sound strong enough for the tuner to pick up. If you have a hard-tail (no vibrato), you can tune the string accurately. If you have a floating bridge (i.e. non-locking vibrato), it is best to tune about 10 cents sharp (+10 on the dial or a couple of LEDs on the sharp side).

Now repeat this on each of the other strings. If you have a hard-tail, tune each string accurately. If you have a floating bridge, reduce the sharpness on the 5th and 4th strings down to +5 and zero sharpness on the thinnest 3 strings. You will now have to start with the low E again and tune, this time just a couple of cents sharp, same with the A and D strings – the thinnest 3 strings (G, B, high e) should be more or less correct. Repeat again, tuning each string accurately, until all are in correct tune. Sorry, but with floating bridges this step is just down to getting closer and closer with each cycle through the strings.

If the strings are new, you will find that they stretch over a period of about 12 hours and you will have to retune. There are methods people use to reduce this, but I find that if I change strings when I’m not going to be playing any more that day, they have fully stretched by the time I come to pick up the guitar again and I just need to retune the once.

Your guitar should now be in open tune. We can check the intonation quite easily – your tuner can recognise a note but not it’s octave, which is OK for this step, even with a “guitar tuner”. Assuming the string is properly tuned open, fretting the 12th fret should give you the same note albeit one octave higher. Check each string – if they all give exactly the same note as the open string, all is well. If they differ, the guitar will need to be intonated. Most electric guitars are quite easy to intonate. Acoustics, on the other hand, are not so easy. As a beginner, I would recommend taking the guitar (irrelevant of type) into a guitar tech and have him do it. Ask him if you can watch how he does it, so that, when you feel confident enough, you can do it yourself.

As you get more experienced, you will find that you can rough tune without needing to start off using the Concert A tone.

Tip: Make use of a change of strings to clean up your guitar, particularly the parts, which are difficult to reach with strings on (e.g. fretboard)

Happy Tuning.

I live in UK and started life as a drummer (yes, I know all the jokes!) when I was about fifteen. My school friends and I put a band together and played locally for several years until we went our separate ways to university, work etc. I found the drums easy to play, but, whenever we were onstage or watched anyone else playing, I always yearned to be that bloke at the front playing lead guitar. The Stones, Clapton, Hendrix and Page were my heroes. I saw them all become legends, and that should give you a clue to my age!

Many (many, many) years later there I was all of a sudden forty-eight and standing in front of an open air stage watching a live band – and watching the guitarist in particular. I suddenly had this mad urge, and no, there were no dancers on stage. The very next day I went to the local music shop. “I’m looking for a guitar for my nephew for his birthday.” Confidence was and still is a big issue. “I like that Les Paul type; how much is it?” After asking the shop guy to play it for me because I didn’t have the nerve, I ended up buying a second-hand Epiphone Les Paul and a case. Then I had to go home and explain to my wife what I’d done. To cut a very long story short, all went well and I now had to learn to play.

I knew a few basic chords from years ago when I’d had a little go at the guitar and then not bothered to continue. I got some books, spent literally hours on the internet and started lessons with a local teacher. I felt totally………….overwhelmed ! I didn’t know what to do first. I pressed on regardless, but never seemed to get anywhere. I changed teachers and began to learn some theory. My brother-in-law took up the guitar and we began to practice together but not very often. I tried to sing and someone told me I had a lousy voice. Everything was getting harder, not easier. Once, I was even asked by one incredulous youngster, who actually played the guitar himself, what I thought I was doing trying to learn to play at my age. Lots of doubts began to set in.

No one seemed to address the older guitarist (and I still believe this today and it is one reason for my writing this article). People who start later in life generally, but not always, have a family and that makes for difficulties with practicing. They don’t get back from work mid-afternoon and have the time, inclination or stamina to practice till the small hours and then start again, as they used to, when they were still at school.

Nevertheless, I plodded on, trying to put aside these doubts, and like many people, ended up after a few years with a lot of starts and middles to songs but very few that I could play all the way through. Then, a turning point! A guy at work, who I knew vaguely, said he had picked up the guitar again, and he was ten years older than me! He was practicing with a younger friend and was really enjoying it. Would I like to join them? Yes, please! And with trepidation, I went to the first practice. We played lots of songs from start to finish several times! I sang! I enjoyed it! I’m playing material I wouldn’t have been particularly interested in by myself but it doesn’t matter. We are almost performing.

I’m beginning to believe in myself! And this is the crux of the matter: I’ve now been playing just over five years; I’m a slow learner on guitar. I’ve set my sights too high many times (like wanting to learn to play Crossroads from start to finish with all of Clapton’s nuances). I’ve been going to give in to all my self-doubts many, many times. I’ve struggled by myself often. I’ve been about to give in to that little voice that says “You can’t do this” or “You’re no good at this” or even “Go back to drums!” If I had given in to these obstacles (and that’s all they are – fences that you have to climb over) then I would have given up the guitar and, having invested five years of my life so far in learning, it would have been an utter waste. So don’t give in to your doubts (especially you older players). If you think you are getting nowhere, try and play like you did the very first time you played and you’ll soon see how you’ve progressed. Also keep revisiting things you tried to play before and found difficult. If you leave a few months between trying you’ll find you can do more than you could before. Above all don’t give in and you’ll never give up!

Till next time

Well hopefully you have been doing the relatively easy exercises, familiarizing yourself with the frets we learned last time. Just to refresh, we learned the names and notation for the open strings and the notes you tune to. This week we are going to end the brute force memorization pretty darn quickly. One fret and one scale and you are on your way to enlightenment.

The one fret is the tenth

Why did I pick this one? If you take a look, you’ll notice there are no sharps or flats to be found. The tenth fret, and the fret one octave higher, fret 22, are the only frets on the neck other than the open and 12th that have no sharps or flats.

Those three frets, 0, 10 and 12, I treat as my mental home keys. Think of them like a familiar landmark in case you get a little lost. That wasn’t so bad was it?

Now about that scale. Here it is. We are going to learn it two ways, but there are many ways to play it. I could give you exercises, but you’ll really benefit from looking at the strings and figuring out a couple of new ones yourself.

What is so important about this? I’ll tell you. You may not have learned barre chords yet. But when you do, knowing the location of each note on the sixth string will give you the name and location of every E shaped barre chord.

You want a G major chord? Well, stick that barre finger on the 3rd fret, over the G on the sixth string. Feeling adventurous? Try the 15th fret. Want a D chord? No problem. You know that D is on the tenth fret, strings 1 and 6, so put your index finger there.

What do you do when you see someone playing something you want to play, but you don’t know the chords? Take a look at where the guitarist is forming the chords. After this lesson you should be able to play and identify at least a couple of barre forms. That knowledge, combined with the knowledge of what the root note of the chord is, will have you playing that song in just a few minutes.

With that in mind, here is the other method of playing the same scale, starting with the B note on the A string, fret two.

Why this scale? It will all become clear soon. Trust me. Just go over both of these scale figures as exercises, naming the notes out loud, trying your best not to look at the tab. Instead, use the standard notation as much as possible. What we are striving for is a solid knowledge of the natural notes on the E and A strings.

Think about this: The low E string, fifth fret is the same note as the next string up, played open, correct? E string at the fifth fret is A. So if you know this stuff one way, you know it the other. If you memorized the E string, you already know most of the A string. Heck, you know most of the other strings, too! What am I talking about?

Here is a picture to clarify my rambling:

Notice how the notation is exactly the same in all three examples, but the tab is different.

The following stuff is just meant to jog your mind into seeing relationships on the fretboard. You won’t have time to figure this stuff out while playing, but the insight you gain will help you become more familiar with the fretboard.

From a math perspective, the fifth fret of E is A, and the fifth fret of A is D. Logically it follows that the tenth fret of E is also D. 5+5=10. Follow me? So if you know the notes on the E string from 10 up, you know the notes on the D. If you know the notes on the E string from 5 up, you know the A string.

Take a minute and think about this, and you’ll see the reverse is also true. The 14th fret of the A is B. You know that to get to A on the E string you add 5 frets. So B must be the 19th fret on E, 14+5. In fact, this holds true anywhere on those strings: the distance between two identical notes on the E and A is 5 frets. The same holds true for the A and the D strings. The relationship between E string and D string is 10 frets. Check it out in the notation above.

B is the 19th fret on E, the 14th fret on A, the 9th fret on D, the fourth fret on G and open on B.

And that is the basis for the only exercise for this week. I’d like you to do your own note and scale discovery. Noodle around on the frets and figure out how many different ways you can do the same thing. Keep in mind the important thing: the names of the notes on the tenth fret and the natural notes on the E and A strings.

Here are the rules for the exercises from last week. Remember to refer back to David’s Your Very Own Rosetta Stone if you have questions about the note names on the staff.

1. When you play the exercises say the notes out loud as you pluck the strings. Try to match the pitch of the note. No, you don’t have to sing. No, it doesn’t have to be pretty. Just try to get close.
2. As you say and play the note, visualize where it is on the staff. Get the picture in your head. For instance, low E is below the staff with three ledger lines above it. Low A is just under two ledger lines. If you can imagine the locations you are halfway there.
3. When you tune your guitar before playing, say the notes as you pluck both strings. Try to match the pitch. So you’d pluck the fifth fret of the low E and say, “aaaaaa.” Then you pluck the open A string and say, “aaaaa.”

Play the exercises above for 10 minutes a day.

1. Speed doesn’t count.
2. Say the note as you play. Feel free to drop your voice down an octave at the top. Don’t strain yourself.
3. After you have run through the line once, cover the tab with a blank sheet of paper and keep playing.

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Here it is, the big payoff. Don’t cheat now;

go memorize the E and A strings first.

Right. Who can play an open A major chord? How about Am? Can you play an E major chord? Don’t tell me you can play Em too!

So, that’s just four chords, right? Wrong. With the knowledge of the note locations you gained above, you’ve got at least 12 E shaped chords, 12 Em shaped chords, 12 A shaped chords and 12 Am shaped chords.

What on earth do I mean?

I mean you can’t imagine the power of what you have just learned.

This is not optional, in order for this to make sense you must read David’s column But Then Again.

That should both clarify things and amaze you.

Next stop, scales and improvising.

Play well.

Also check out… Fretboard 101 Part 1

Music notation is a magical language. In Part 1 of our study, Your Very Own Rosetta Stone, we learned how to read the notes on the staff and to determine how those notes corresponded to the notes on our guitars. But every note of musical notation actually tells you two specific things. Not only does it tell you the name of the note, it tells you the note’s duration, or rather how long it should be held. This is the timing of the note.

At the beginning of a piece of notation, as we saw, the staff will give us important information regarding the song. The first thing is the clef. For our purposes today, we’re going to concentrate on the treble clef. You remember, from Part 1, that there is the treble clef (or “G clef” because it looks like a stylized “G”) as well as the bass (or “F”) clef. Since our examples will be for the guitar, let’s use the treble.

Immediately after the clef comes the key signature. This, as we learned, tells us what key the song is in by pointing out the number of sharps or flats, or if there are any.

Following both these is the time signature. More often than not, this consists of two numbers sitting on top of each other, like a fraction. It could also be a “C” or also something that looks like the symbol for “cent” in American currency. If you’re playing most music, easily 95% of it will have one of these time signatures:

Rather than write all this out again, I’m going to borrow from one of my “Easy Songs for Beginners” lessons, House of the Rising Sun:

The time signature (along with the key signature) is one of the first things you encounter when you read music, so you might as well learn just what it means at some point, no? The time signature usually consists of two numbers written one on top of the other, almost like a fraction except there is no line (other than the lines of the staff and that doesn’t count). These provide you with two important pieces of information about the song that you are going to play. The top number tells you how many beats are in a measure (and we learned about measures in Before You Accuse Me). The lower number (the “denominator” if you will, the number that sits on the bottom) indicates which note is going to count as “one beat.” The vast majority of music you are likely to encounter will be in 4/4 timing:

Sometimes you will see “4/4″ timing written out as “C.” I have no idea where this “shorthand” notation came from and would be more than happy to entertain suggestions. As well as “C” there is also a “C”with a vertical line slashing it. It looks like the symbol for a penny and, of course, my keyboard does not have one! This is known, appropriately enough, as “cut time,” or

There are also songs, many marches in fact, which are in 2/4 time. And you have undoubtedly heard songs that use 3/4 timing as well. Waltzes are in 3/4:

Probably eighty-five to ninety percent of all songs are written in either of these two time signatures. 6/8 timing is very similar to 3/4 in that it has the same kind of “triplet” feel. It’s easier to count in groups of threes rather than sets of six, isn’t it?

I realize that, at this point, you have no idea as to what a “quarter note” or an “eighth note is. Don’t worry about that for the moment. First, let’s define a measure! “Measure” and “bar” (as in “twelve bar blues”), in case you’re wondering, mean the same thing. In music notation, and in many TABs, a measure is indicated by a single vertical line that crosses the staff at numerous points in a piece of music. Here’s what they look like:

There are two additional types of measure lines. A double line at the end of the song indicates (big surprise here!) the end of the song. Would I lie to you? Another symbol is the “repeat sign” which indicates you are to repeat a section of a song:

If you were playing this example, you’d first play measures one through three. When you came to the repeat sign in measure three, you’d go back to the first repeat sign in measure two and then play measures two and three again. Then you’d finish the song with measure four. In other words, you only repeat what is within the repeat signs. Notice that the double dots show you which way to go! If you ever run across a situation where there is no first repeat sign, you’re expected to go back to the beginning of the song.

Within each measure, you will have the number of beats indicated by the time signature. If there is a change in this value, which, although very rare in most music you will deal with, can happen, a new time signature will appear to let you know. Check out the lesson on Bookends or Blackbird if you’d like to see examples of this.

And while I’m trying to cover every conceivable thing, let’s talk about counting and keeping tempo. You may not believe this, but keeping a steady beat while playing is more important that I can possibly begin to tell you. So when we talk about the number of beats in a measure, it is absolutely vital that you make the beats uniform. Not only within the measure but also throughout the song, unless we run into one of those exceptions we’ve talked about. Practice counting beats aloud if you’ve never done so before. Yes, you’ll sound fairly daft simply saying “one, two, three, four,” over and over again to yourself, but no one said being a musician wasn’t without painful sacrifice. Are you ready to look at our time signatures from the first example and count along a few measures of them?

Still with me? Great! Let’s look at some notes. For the sake of simplicity, let’s work in 4/4 time and use a single note in order to demonstrate differences in timing. In the following example, all of these notes are the B note that corresponds to the open B (second) string. However, they are all different, as you’ll see.

An important thing for me to point out here is that the “stems” of the notes (except, of course, on the whole note, since it has no stem) can go down instead of up. If you look at any piece of music you’ll see this. For the classical guitarist, as well as others, there is a special reason for this, and we’ll get to that in our next chapter.

When you reach the line of eighth notes, notice that there are different ways of writing these out. First we see the notes individually – each note has a stem with a single “flag.” In measure two, I’ve connected the flags of each pair of eighth notes, grouping them into a single beat. Measure three shows the eighth notes grouped in sets of fours. This “grouping” can be done in many ways. I could string all eight together if I wanted to.

Likewise, when you see sixteenth notes and thirty-second notes (not shown here – they look exactly like eighth notes except that they have two and three flags, respectively, on the stem), they can be portrayed individually or in groups. Again, we’ll learn more about these (and triplets) next time.

Okay, just to make your life interesting and to show you there’s nothing at all to this, let’s see some notes in action. And before you get all worried that you can’t handle it, let me add that I’ve selected the first part of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (soon to be seen in a (bad pun alert) starring role in an upcoming lesson on arrangements for single guitar!) as our first example and Happy Birthday as our second. By the bye, I’m not throwing in the lyrics, just the count. If you truly need the lyrics, ask the first child you see.

Twinkle, Twinkle, I imagine, gave you no trouble at all. Four quarter notes to a measure is a pretty easy way to start, right? And in measure two, you caught on to the fact that you had two quarter notes (one beat each) and a half note (two beats), which adds up to four beats, right? See how easy this can be?

Easy, that is, until I sprung Happy Birthday on you. I can hear you now – “The first measure only has ONE beat!!!” Well, if you managed to get to the last measure, you probably found it just as confusing to see that it had only two beats. And I know you read the 3/4 time signature correctly, so what gives?

This is what’s called a “pick up” beat. Some songs don’t start on the first beat; that would make things rather dull. This one begins with two eighth notes on the third beat. So, if you were counting things out for yourself, and if you gave yourself a full measure to set the pace, you’d go “one, two, three, one, two, Happy…” and launch into the rest of the song. The rest of the song is an easily figured combination of quarter notes, half notes and eighth notes. It’s nothing you can’t handle. The last measure is only two beats because we’ve used the third beat as our pick up beat. Think of it as all that matter/energy stuff that I didn’t understand in physics. We have to have the three beats somewhere – we’re just splitting them between the opening and the closing of the song.

So what happens when you’re not playing? This is called a “rest.” All rests have symbols which, just like the symbols for notes, indicate different time durations. Here they are:

There’s one final thing I want to bring up to you in this lesson. You’ve no doubt noticed that the things we’ve covered quite a bit of material. But what happens if we want a note of a length other than what we’ve seen, like a note that is three beats long? How about a beat and a half? What about five or six or seven beats?

Notation has an ingenious way of dealing with this. It’s called a dot. Long before it was associated with the word “com,” the dot was an important part of reading music. When you see a dot after a note, you automatically add half of that note’s value to the note. As you see here:

Another way of making a note longer involves the use of a “tie.” This is a slightly curved line, like a parenthesis that is lying on its side. It connects two or more notes and you simple add them together:

Let me leave you with an example that uses many of the things we’ve seen in this lesson.

It’s Silent Night, which I’m certain you’re all familiar with. I’ve just written out the melody lines (even threw in the TAB so you can cheat if you want to!), and I took the liberty of writing in the key of C (no flats, no sharps) so that you can concentrate on learning both the note names and the timing:

Remember that all of this will not be instantly ingrained into your brain. The more you use notation, the quicker you will find you know what the symbols mean. You may not believe this, but spending five minutes a day looking at music will do you wonders. Take any beginner’s book or piano book and practice on the melody lines (the single note section usually at the top of a song) to familiarize yourself with notation. Learn some simple pieces, like Alan Green’s Study In Blue, which just went up onsite a week ago.

There are more things to cover in reading music notation, but what you’ve learned in these two lessons will provide you with most of the information you need to read standard notation. And hopefully the wait for “Part 3″ won’t be anywhere near as long!

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

1. Did I get a good deal on this guitar?
2. Is this guitar any good?
3. Was David smart enough to copyright his hairstyle?
4. What chord do I get when I play these strings?
5. Which scales should I use and where should I play them?

The answers are:

1. Yes you did, if that guitar makes you want to pick it up and play.
2. Yes it is, if that guitar makes you want to pick it up and play.
3. If he was, he’d be a billionaire.
4. Why don’t you tell me?
5. It depends a lot on the answer to number 4.

Ok, so I answered number 4 with a question. I’ll go ahead and answer that one too. The reason you don’t tell me is that you don’t know what notes you are playing.

I have no idea why there is so much reluctance to learn the names of the notes and their positions on the staff. It’s easy. Give me 10 minutes a day for 10 days and you’ll know them all. You only have to learn it once. Your understanding of theory, chord construction, scales, songwriting, and progressions will grow astronomically. You’ll get a bruise on your forehead from slapping it and saying “Oh, I get it.”

Read this excerpt from Jamie Andreas’ article: Why Should I Learn To Read Music?

“IN GENERAL, everyone can only benefit by learning to read music. Believe me, if you DO have talent, if you have something to say as an artist, you are not going to lose it by developing your mental understanding of the “theoretical” aspect of music. The only people who will lose their artistic ability by education in music are the ones who didn’t have any artistic ability to begin with…

(Not being able to read music is)… like trying to learn grammar without being able to read words. You may be able to get some understanding if you find a creative teacher, but you will never achieve a complete or satisfying understanding of grammar in the way you would if you could read.”

There is nothing magical about to happen here, just brute force memorization. Do you think you can’t memorize which note corresponds to which fret? If I can, you can. Do you know your telephone number? Social Security Number? Home address? Work telephone number? Bank account? I rest my case.

It’s going to work like this. I’m going to explain a couple of things about the notes we are working with. I’m going to give you some exercises that will take less than 10 minutes per day. At the end of two weeks, you will be amongst the fretboard enlightened.

Here is what we are going to memorize.

Truth be told, we are actually going to memorize an octave above the high A.

Now you probably see two ways of selecting notes above, but really there are three: Standard Notation, Tab, and the note names. We will be using notation and names together.

I’m going to put the tab in to identify the note the first time you see it. Then you need to cover it up. I’m all for tab. I use it all the time. Here, though, it will work as a hindrance to your development. Don’t use it.

If you’ve read my bio, or the scary stories column, you know I used to be an actor. It’s very rewarding but the most difficult thing to do is memorizing lines. Some shows I had several hundred to memorize, along with stage direction, inflection, and timing.

There are a number of tricks to help you memorize, but you really have to find out what way works best for you. The one way that seems to work for just about everybody is figure out some relevance to the thing you need to know. Create a relationship between what you do know and what you need to know.

So here we go relationship building. You already know a lot more than you think. This week we’re going to plunge headlong into memorization with things you already have memorized.

But first to save a bit of bandwidth, I want you to read the beginning of David’s Your very own Rosetta stone. Stop at the section called “Accidentals will happen.” We’ll get to that later. Don’t get too hung up in note values, we just want to know the names of the lines and spaces and a basic familiarity with what standard notation looks like.

Okay, now that you have a basic understanding of the staff and the names of spaces and lines, we are almost done.

Do you know the names of notes on the open strings? Do you know how to tune your guitar string to string?

Wow, that was fast. Congratulations, you’re doing great. You already know 24 note locations.

“Huh? 24?” you say.

Yep, 24.

Let’s count ‘em.

You know the open string names.

E – A – D – G – B – E

Here is how they look in notation and tab.

That’s 6 of them.

What happens at the 12th fret? Correct, it is the octave of the open strings. So the note names are the same, but where they sit on the staff is different.

12 fret – E – A – D – G – B – E

That is 6 more, so you have twelve under your belt now.

Where are the other 12 you know? Well, when you tune your guitar, you fret the string below the one you are tuning as a reference for the next string. So if you are tuning A you fret the fifth fret of the E string.

5th fret of E = A
5th fret of A = D
5th fret of D = G
4th fret of G = B
5th fret of B = E
5th fret of E = A

and amazingly an octave above is the same

17th fret of E = A
17th fret of A = D
17th fret of D = G
16th fret of G = B
17th fret of B = E
17th fret of E = A

Here are the every day exercises:

1. When you first pick up your guitar I want you to say the notes out loud as you pluck the open strings. I also want you to try to match the pitch of the note. No, you don’t have to sing. No, it doesn’t have to be pretty. Just try to get close.
2. As you say and play the note, visualize where it is on the staff. Get the picture in your head. For instance, low E is below the staff with three ledger lines above it. Low A is just under two ledger lines. If you can imagine the locations you are halfway there.
3. When you tune your guitar before playing, say the notes as you pluck both strings. Try to match the pitch. So you’d pluck the fifth fret of the low E and say “aaaaaa.” Then you pluck the open A string and say “aaaaa”..” These first three shouldn’t add anytime at all to your normal playing. You have to tune anyway right?
4. When you have finished practicing/playing go through the same thing again. Pluck the opens and say the name of the note, pluck the matching tuning note and say the name.

Here are the playing exercises. This is where the 10 minutes a day comes in. There are five exercises. Doing the math, it works out to 2 minutes each.

1. Speed doesn’t count.
2. Say the note as you play. Feel free to drop down an octave voice-wise at the top. Don’t strain yourself.
3. After you have run through the line once, cover the tab with a blank sheet of paper and keep playing.

This first exercise is just your open strings and the matching note on the string below.

This second exercise is an octave up from the first.

Now the fun begins. Although this will sound a tad odd minus F and C it gives you an idea of just how flexible you can be once you know the fretboard.

Where have you seen this one before? The frets have been changed to protect the innocent.

and finally:

That was a lot of reading and I promise next time things will be mercifully short of exposition. AND, we’ll have a two-for-one bonus. Memorize the low E string and I’ll throw in the high E for free.

Also check out… Fretboard 101 – Part 2

Thou Shalt…

…learn the difference between playing and practicing.
Both are essential, but don’t mistake one for the other.

…use a metronome while practicing.
If you don’t learn good timing now, you probably never will. Remember: the habits you develop now will determine what kind of player you’re going to be. This can be a good thing or a bad thing.It’s up to you to develop the habits that will lead to the skills you desire.

…listen to ALL KINDS of music.
Listen to a variety. The greatest players are almost invariably the ones with wide-ranging musical tastes. Remember that no style of music sucks; you just like some more than others. Someone hates the music you love, but that doesn’t mean it sucks. And you can get ideas even from stuff you don’t like.

…STEAL!!!
Steal licks, phrasing and solos from everywhere and do it all the time. If you like it, learn to play it – but then you have to make it your own. Play it backwards, change the tempo, play it in a different key. Go to a low note instead of a high note. Experiment. Make mistakes and keep the good ones. When you’re finished, you’ll be on your way to that elusive quality called style!

Thou Shalt Not…

…get sloppy in thy practice. The way you practice is the way you will play. Develop good habits now while you still suck. Then, when you’re a better player, the habits you developed early on will pay off in a big way!

…run before you can walk. The secret to playing well fast is – get ready for this – to first play well s-l-o-w-l-y. If you can’t play that lick perfectly at 60bpm, you have no business playing it at 200bpm.

…sacrifice emotion for technique. Speed and slick sounding licks are great. There is a place for them. If that is the kind of player you want to be, more power to you. Just remember, though, that a good sequencer can take your place.

…ignore technique. This is the flip side of the emotion/technique argument. Having great technique and learning (gasp!) music theory will not interfere with the emotional aspect of your playing – unless you let it. Don’t hide behind the tired excuse that “all that technique gets in the way of emotion.” That’s a sad excuse for not building your chops. Face it: it’s a cop out. The truth is you’re just too darned lazy.

A Few More Tips and Pointers

Don’t pick at your calluses.
Use an emery board to smooth snags and rough skin.

Learn the whole song.
It’s fun learning the signature riffs to favorite tunes. But nothing is quite as frustrating for you or annoying for others as knowing bits and pieces of 20 songs without being able to play one in its entirety.

Don’t give up.
Sometimes growth is maddeningly slow. Keep at it. You’ll get out of that rut if you keep plugging away

Find people who are better players than you.
Learn by watching. You might be surprised to see how willing some people are to share their knowledge if you’ll just ask.

Find someone who knows less than you and teach them.
You may not be a master guitar instructor, but passing on what you know is a good feeling. It’s also a great way to learn. Teaching makes you think about things in a different way, and in explaining a new concept to someone, you’ll often gain new insight yourself. It’s good practice. Also, if you can play a little and they can play nothing, they’ll be a little impressed. That’s great for the ego!

USE YOUR PINKY!!!
I have never heard anyone say, “I wish I hadn’t spent all that time working on pinky speed/accuracy.” Why shouldn’t you be able to use all the tools at your disposal? ‘Nuff said on that.

Accept both praise and criticism with the same attitude.
Humility and Gratitude.

Never boast about how well you play, or complain about how poorly you play.
Let your playing speak for you. Let your praise come from others, not yourself. There will be no shortage of people willing to tell you exactly what they think of your playing. It’s okay to be critical of yourself, but don’t get so hung up on it that you hinder your growth. And don’t go overboard and slip into false humility.

Regardless of how good you get, you will probably never be a rock star.
Look at the odds: there are literally tens of thousands of really good guitarists out there. Some of them are great. But few of them achieve any kind of fame. That’s okay! Don’t let it discourage you! Keep playing, keep getting better, and make music for the sheer joy of it. If you ever “make it,” that’s the icing on the cake.

Play every single day of your life. Even if you just run through scales or practice chord changes, play a little every day. Not every day will be a great breakthrough, but some days will. Cherish those when they happen, and build on them.

Tape yourself.
No matter how bad you think you sound, tape at least some of your practice on a regular basis. When you get a new idea, record it. Save the tapes! Years from now, you and your friends/family/kids/grandkids will get a great deal of enjoyment going back and listening to your musical growth and seeing how you have improved. You may even find yourself inspired by some of those old, forgotten ideas. And if you are one of those few who make it big, you can make a great “basement tape,” sell millions of copies, and get even richer and more famous.

Make music a PART of your life – not your whole life. Be a real, well-rounded person. Learn something new – and non-musical – every day. Love, trust and honesty make you vulnerable, but they make you real and make life worthwhile. Leave egos to people who think they have something to prove. Treat everyone with respect. Be a human being first, and then a guitarist.

Write songs. Some people are born with the gift. Others have to learn it. Either way, just do it, and keep doing it. You can only get better. If one out of ten is worthwhile, you’ll be doing great.

Spare time. There is no such thing. The time you get is all the time you’ve got. ..Do something good with it.

Time, part II. Time spent with family and friends is rarely regretted. Nobody ever lies on their deathbed thinking, “Gee, I wish I had spent more time at work.”

Playing live: Give it your all! When you have a live gig, gear yourself up to give 100%, and then exceed it. If you don’t want to be there, don’t show up. If you do want to be there, act like it. Never, ever, ever take any audience for granted. They all have a dozen other things they could be doing than wasting their time watching someone go through the motions. You owe them the best you have to give in every set, every song. This goes for both paying and non-paying gigs. It is what distinguishes a pro from a jerk who can play guitar.

Play different. Not just different styles, but different ways of playing. If you usually use a pick, try playing with your fingers, and vice-versa. Get a slide and experiment with open tunings. Play songs you usually play electric on an acoustic, and vice-versa. Play your old familiar licks in a different key. Experiment! It will keep your playing fresh!

Changing strings. Don’t worry about what people tell you. You don’t need to change your strings once a week or anything as extreme as that. Once you get used to playing, you’ll know when you need new strings. Like so many other things about playing, this is a matter of personal preference. And when it comes to buying strings, most are made by the same few companies. Find the gauge you like, then buy the cheap ones.

SPECIAL ADDITION: Thanks very much to Andrew Price for the following info:
Below is a list of companies that do make their own strings (and may make strings for others as well):

Martin, Gibson, D’Addario, GHS, Fender, Thomastik-Infield, Vinci, Mapes, Dean Markley, LaBella, S.I.T., Ernie Ball, Pyramid, Savarez, RotoSound, D.R., D’Aquisto,.

To see where I got this info from, check out this link on Acoustic Guitar Magazine’s web site (That’s me using the name “Georgia”):

This leads to my next tip:

Don’t let pride prevent you from growing as a player – or as a person.
If you find out that you are wrong or mistaken or misinformed about something, don’t hesitate to accept it and make a correction. It’s better to be humble and correct than stubborn and wrong.

More stuff directly related to guitar:
A lot of beginners, before they really understand what they are doing, try to press down directly over the fret. While that may have some usefulness for someone trying to achieve a particular effect, in most cases, you want to press down on the fingerboard directly above the fret.

Up and down the neck
In typical guitar terminology, “up” the neck means toward the base of the guitar (where the pickups or soundhole are), and “down” the neck is toward the nut. Confused yet? Okay, how about this: the 6th string is the thickest one (also called “low E”) and is the string closest to the top when holding the guitar in typical, right-handed playing position. It is also called the bottom string by some. When you want to hit a high note, however, you go up the fretboard (toward the bottom, if you remember), while lower notes are “down” toward the nut (at the top of the guitar.). Okay, I am confusing myself now. Let’s try a little more philosophy.

Manners are cool
“Please” and “thank you” never go out of style. Remember that rudeness is a weak person’s imitation of strength.

Slow and steady win the race.
Becoming a better player is just as much a matter of patience and persistence as it is practice. Some skills come slowly, while others will seem impossible right up to the moment they actually click and become simple. Whether you learn by leaps and bounds or at a snail’s place, just don’t give up. A year from now you’ll be better than you are today if you just keep at it.

To Be Continued…someday!

About the Author

Darryl Roberts is a 40-something sometime-guitarist from Southern California. He is the father of 3 teenage daughters, and plays guitar in a fruitless attempt to maintain his sanity. Email him at mail4dtr@yahoo.com.

“Bluesifying” Your Chords

Ever notice how some chords and riffs just have this sound which can only be described as “blues-y?” There’s something about what you hear that puts the blues into your head and doesn’t let it go.

It’s not that hard to make a chord progression sound more like the blues. Most of you are aware of how chords are formed from thirds, stacking every other note on the scale one atop the next. The simplest chords, triads, come in four “flavors:” major, minor, augmented and diminished. You can find out all about this in The Power of Three.

Add another third on top of a triad, and you’ve got a seventh chord.

Here’s a quick guideline to “bluesify” any major chord: add a flat 7 on top of the basic triad. This will give you a dominant 7 chord, which lies at the heart of the blues.

Too simple, you ask? Well, check it out. Here’s your twelve bar blues pattern in A:

A for four bars
D for two bars
A for two bars
E for one bar
D for one bar
A for two bars

(If you want to learn about the 12 bar blues, check out our Easy Songs For Beginners Lesson, Before You Accuse Me.)

Now let’s simply change each major chord to its dominant 7th:

A7 for four bars
D7 for two bars
A7 for two bars
E7 for one bar
D7 for one bar
A7 for two bars

Here are common open position seventh chords, plus some moveable shapes:

Another thing that sings out the blues is toying with the third note of the major scale. The note is a major third up from the root, which is our tonal center. When you change that major third to a minor third, you are making it a “blue note.” Toying with the third, by making it minor and then making it major again, gives you a great blues sound:

This is especially effective when used in finger-style play:

Playing with the third of a major chord, especially if you’ve made it a dominant 7th (as in the last two examples) is an extremely powerful way to communicate the blues feeling.

Dressed To The Nines (or Jazzing Up Your Blues)

Jazz is not as far removed from the blues as people might think. Certainly the open structure of blues lends itself quite well to the improvisation of jazz. There are many jazz guitarists with roots firmly embedded in the blues.

But most beginning or intermediate guitarists shy away from jazz while they have no problem whatsoever in embracing the blues. Intriguing, no? This phenomenon is often a matter of perception – we think of jazz as being full of difficult chords and strange scales. Jazz is exotic. Blues is down and dirty.

As with anything, you form such perceptions based on what you know and how you put it into practice. We’ve just seen and heard how simply adding the seventh to our major triad gives us a blues feel. What you throw on top of the seventh – ninths, elevenths and thirteenths – puts you in the realm of jazz.

The ninth is a particularly fun (and easy!!) chord to play. It is important to remember that your chord has to have both the seventh and ninth. If it only has the ninth with no seventh, it will simply be an “add9″ chord. Here are some open position ninth chords, plus a moveable shape (with the root on the A string):

Ninths can be used in most cases where you’d use a seventh chord. So, in the blues, which is often loaded with seventh chords, you can have a field day. Have you ever heard a really slow, almost seductive, twelve bar blues song but couldn’t quite figure out what the chords were? Chances are that the guitarist was using ninths. A popular technique is to slide down to the ninth chord from one fret above. Give this a try:

Finally, let me give you a quick exercise to use all the things we learned today. If you need to give it a name, call it Darrin and David’s Blues:

We are playing our A7 in a shuffle pattern (where you can also play the open G string if you like) when we make use of a couple of passing chords in the middle of measure four. This brings us to an Eb9, which we’ll use to chromatically slide down to the D9. If you want to impress your friends that you know some jazz chords, the first passing chord (x0456x) is a D7#9 and the second (x0567) is an A7add6.

Another thing that jazz players like to do when they play the blues is substitute the tenth measure (D or D7 in this case) with a chromatic climb and return. Here we show the last four bars of our blues song as E9 followed by a step up to F9 before returning to E9 and then finally back to A. I also thought it would be fun to include a jazz style turnaround that holds the A as a sustained tone while chromatically descending from B to A.

Even if you play folk or rock, experiment with things like seventh and ninth chords. No, they won’t work every time. But more often than not, you will find yourself with a great sound that you’ll want to use again and again.

What annoys me most is how much discouragement there is out there for folks wanting to take the plunge and learn to play something.

Take the guitar: the most ubiquitous instrument available today, used in everything from heavy metal ballads to classical concertos to songs of revolution. It’s a truly versatile instrument, one with a thousand resources available to it by virtue of its popularity.

Yet, if you’re someone other than a young man expressing a wish to learn, you can expect to run a gauntlet of criticism, confusion and plain bad advice. People will say you need to spend thousands on a decent instrument (untrue), have hours and hours of spare time to devote to practice (untrue), definitely need a teacher (I’ll come back to this one) and probably should have started twenty years ago when you were capable of learning something new (my response to this is unrepeatable!).

I hear this advice being given, and watch hopeful faces dim, dreams fade and the spark of creativity and love of music get snuffed out before it has ever had a chance, before fingers have been placed on strings and smiles (or sometimes curses) evoked by the creation of music from wood and steel and hollow resonance.

In this article, I intend to show that anyone can get playing guitar in some fashion, despite the seeming cult of money, time, instruction and age requirements lined in opposition.

Buying The Instrument

Let’s take the first item, the instrument itself. Yes, the more you spend on a guitar, the better it is likely to be. In terms of acoustic guitars, the quality and type of wood used has an enormous impact on the sound, and if you are in a position to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end guitar with lovingly hand-made solid spruce top, rosewood neck, ebony fingerboard and finely worked shell inlays, that’s great. The error here is to assume that this is the only kind of guitar to aspire to.

So there you are, the avid beginner. On a budget, yet wanting a guitar even though you’ve never even held one before. Do you indulge your new hobby while the kids need clothes, your spouse wants to be taken out for dinner and there are bills to be paid? That Martin or Taylor is starting to look like an awfully risky investment. But everyone says you have to spend good money to get a decent instrument!

Untrue. Or rather, true, but in relative terms. With today’s mass-production techniques, even the cheapest guitars have value in terms of the music you can make with them. You can pick up a starter steel-strung acoustic guitar from Tanglewood, Yamaha or Fender Squier for around $150, which will sound perfectly good and serve you well.

If money is really tight, and you aren’t even sure if guitar playing is something you’ll take to, you can get a budget classical guitar for $50. Yes, it’s probably the wrong kind of guitar for the music you want to play, but it has 6 strings and frets in all the right places. You can strum it, learn your notes, find out how it should sound, how to tune it, how to pick out your first chords and tunes and generally get the hang of handling this strange beast – and heck, it’s not worth a lot so you can haul it around with you, leave it in any room, pick it up and play at any time and just plain have fun with it.

Stepping Up

You love guitars now and want something better? Great, go out and spend a little more on a more suitable instrument. You’ve realized you’re probably not going to take to this after all? Also great: you didn’t waste all that money and your spouse isn’t going to kill you!

My first guitar was a student classical; I got it when I was 16. Somehow I never found the time to learn. Fifteen years later, it was still here, waiting for me to start over again, and this time I fell back in love with that guitar sound, and started learning to play for real. Playing that classical led to me getting a steel-string acoustic, and then several other guitars. Today, that old cheap instrument hangs on the wall (tuned to DADGAD) and, yes, it still gets played.

Finding The Time

Instrument acquired, your next obstacle is time. It is essentially true that the more time you can spend practicing and playing an instrument, of whatever kind it is, the better you will get and the more accomplished you will be.

Let’s take a step back and look at this for a moment. Why are you learning to play guitar? Do you want to be in a band, or be famous, or challenge the likes of Eric Clapton? Chances are that if this article is striking a chord thus far, you simply want to make music, have some fun, play and sing familiar songs, maybe even write your own tunes if you can manage it someday. Of course, we’d all like to be amazing players. But right here and right now you just want to strum that sucker and enjoy the noises you can create.

This is where a lot of poor advice comes in: the keen new player wants to learn something – anything – that sounds nice and gets them a musical fix with the least possible effort. Not because of laziness, or lack of interest, but because real life tends to get in the way of music. The stereotypical teenager sitting in his room for hours on end, playing away until his fingers bleed, may indeed have a life. But it’s one without kids, a mortgage, bills to pay, a job with which to pay them and the myriad things that steal away time. The “professional” musician (one who makes a living from playing) has hours of practice under his belt. The compromises and sacrifices along the line were made long ago, and he doesn’t think about them any more.

We regular folk, on the other hand, need to be a little sneaky. Don’t get discouraged by those who insist there’s no point learning to play if you can’t give it infinite amounts of time. Time is a flexible thing. If you have your guitar handy, you can get in some practice most any time, often while doing something else.

The purists hate the idea of sitting playing the guitar with the TV on, but if you are watching the kids and they are watching the television, what’s to stop you from focussing on your quiet strumming? Do you have ten minutes free time while waiting for dinner to finish cooking? Then you’ve time to run through that new song you were working on last night. Heading out of town for a boring conference? Put the guitar in the car and have something more interesting to do each evening than picking out a cable movie.

Research has shown that playing, say only ten minutes at a time – but playing often – is more successful than putting in a solid hour once a week or less. And if you have your guitar somewhere accessible, it’s easy to grab it, practice those elusive chord changes a couple of times, then go on with whatever else needs doing. No, this approach isn’t ideal, but it solves the problem and lets you get to the music.

After all, the main point to all this is pleasure. Music is for fun. It’s relaxing or invigorating depending on your mood. Even if you never get beyond House of the Rising Sun, if that makes you happy, great!

Learning To Play

Next step: learning to play. The best solution here is to get a teacher. I used to think that was just a knee-jerk reaction: there are so many books and videos out there, why take the trouble to get formal lessons? In the long run, having someone to guide you and show you the best way to play what you want to play really is the best solution – but there are workarounds for that too. Private lessons can be expensive, so if you can’t budget for that, check out your local community college or similar, they are sure to run evening classes for adult beginners (yet another advantage to picking a popular instrument to learn!). They are usually well-run, and even though you are learning with a whole room full of people rather than one-on-one, you should get enough individual attention to make some progress. It’s a good way to meet new people too.

If you don’t have the time for classes, then you’re stuck with teaching yourself. This isn’t always a bad thing. Many of the great guitarists down the years taught themselves perfectly well. Most of them had an extra spark of genius that the rest of us might not possess though, so don’t expect instant miracles.

The choice of teaching materials out there is confusing, so it might take a few false starts before you find the book or video that suits you best. However, you are sitting in front of one of the greatest boons to music ever created: the Internet. A quick web search will show you just how many sites are devoted to teaching basic chords and guitar care, along with theory chord structure, jazz progressions – whatever you need is sure to turn up. Some are just text based, while others use flash and midi and even streaming video to demonstrate technique, and it’s all free!

A good approach is to use a few of these sites to learn the basics. Once you have made a start, it will be easier to judge other materials for how well they suit you. For example, I prefer to see the music I’m playing as well as hear it, so I look for videos that come with a printed booklet. And I enjoy finger patterns more than power chords, which narrows down the field still further.

Age

Hopefully by now the desire to play guitar is back burning as strongly ever before. So I will come to the last point: age. Life begins at 40 they say. Where music is concerned, life begins at any age you like.

The average harpist, you might be surprised to learn, is a 40 year old woman who’s raised a family and suddenly has the chance to fulfil a lifelong dream, possibly by ditching her no-good husband in the process! Mountain dulcimer players tend to be out of high-school and there are as many folk coming to more traditional instruments like piano and violin late in life as there are tiny children starting with the Suzuki method.

And the average guitarist? That would be you, whoever you are – someone with the dream of making music, and with the time and money to go about it (in other words, probably not a lot of either!). Is it easier to learn when you’re young? Of course, everything seems easier then, but a lifetime of experience and of listening to music will stand you in good stead. You more than likely already possess skills you can transfer to help you in your new interest.

And more to the point, choosing to play an instrument as an adult opens up a whole new world you never even realized was there for the taking.

So what are you waiting for? Go play!

About the author

Cathi Pearce is a self-confessed instrument addict, and having taken a long break from the recorder and flute of her childhood, suddenly got the music bug again several years ago. A celtic harp was shortly followed by mandolin, fiddle, lyre and piano, all of which she has learnt to play with varying degrees of success, not to mention the numerous guitars now taking over the house. Finding a teacher has helped her guitar skills improve in leaps and bounds, and she can usually be found working on her latest classical piece in between breaking off for some 12 bar blues or nifty fingerstyle tomfoolery. Still very much a beginner, Cathi’s main difficulty is narrowing down her choice of what to play next, with a whole world of music out there for the asking. Her current challenge is getting the hang of the new 12 string guitar that arrived several weeks back. Cathi lives in the UK with her concertina-playing fiance Forest and a housefull of musical things.

Well, if you haven’t got a clue at all, perhaps we can help you. Guitar Noise welcomes you to the first of our Absolute Beginner articles. It is our hope to get you started playing the guitar as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

First, though, one very important thing to know: the guitar is not some magical device that somehow makes beautiful music while you simply hold it. Like any other musical instrument YOU HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO DO IT!! Fortunately, as with most instruments, getting started is no trouble at all. But getting good should take you the rest of your life.

I don’t want to sound like the stereotypical parent telling his child, “Yes, you can have a pet but it’s your responsibility to feed it, walk it, clean up after it, etc.” But you must understand that learning how to play is very much a negotiation between you and your guitar. And you do have to bring something to the table: a willingness to use your brain, to experiment and to fall flat on your face. You cannot expect the guitar to play itself and you cannot expect to play it without putting in (a lot of) effort.

You will find yourself faced with all sorts of choices and more information than you can possibly use at any given moment. Let me suggest a few old articles of ours that you should read at your leisure and reread once you know a little more about the guitar: A Question of Balance, If I Only Had…, Common Sensei.

Finally, please realize that as great a tool as the Internet can be for education, it is still only one source. Ideally, you should equip yourself with as many means to learn as possible. I’m one of those persons who stresses the use of books, and nothing is more helpful than a human teacher when one begins learning the guitar, even if your “teacher” is the friend next door who’s only been playing a year. You can look at pictures and videos and listen to tapes and read a lot of text, but I cannot begin to compare that to the value of dealing with a person. Even if it’s only to learn how to hold the guitar and to put your fingers on the fretboard.

See Larger Image

The first thing that you have to know about your guitar is what exactly it does. Pluck a single string, any one string. What you are hearing is called a note. This is a single note and every note has a name, designated by a letter of the alphabet (A through G only) and sometimes the notation “#,” which means “sharp” or “b,” which means “flat.” When you see something written out as “F#,” this means “F sharp.” “Bb” would be read as “B flat.” In western music, there are twelve possible names for all the notes. To find them all and to see how they relate to one another, please read my column The Musical Genome Project.

Exactly which note you play depends on what string you struck (not to mention whether or not that string was in tune). And whether or not you are fingering the string on the neck of the guitar. When you put your finger on a fret – which is a space on the fretboard between any two metal strips (which are also called frets, by the way) – you create a new note. The guitar is an instrument that offers you the choice of playing individual notes, one at a time (as in most lead guitar parts) or several notes at once, which are called chords.

But before we can even think about chords, we have to make certain our guitar is in tune. Tuning is assigning each of the guitar’s strings to a particular note. And before we can look at that, we have to agree on what to call our strings. Traditionally we either number the strings from 1 (thinnest or closest to the floor as you are holding the guitar) to 6 (the thickest one). Later, when you learn to read guitar tablature, you will see that the stings are lined up in this way. But we will come back to this in a later Absolute Beginner lesson.

Back to tuning – In what we call “standard tuning,” the strings are tuned to the following notes:

The first string, being the thinnest, will be highest in pitch, while the sixth string will be lowest in pitch. And please don’t start asking about alternate tunings, low tunings or anything like that just yet. You have to focus on one thing at a time and if you can’t get your guitar into standard tuning, then all the other tunings aren’t going to matter.

Fortunately for us, Paul Hackett has written a great article on how to tune your guitar. Not only does it discuss the use of tuners, but it also includes a link to a site where you can get a note to which you can tune your 6th (low E) string.

Now that our guitar is in tune, shall we get down to business? We are going to be playing what are called “first position” or “open chords.” They are called this because they are played close to the nut and utilize a number of open strings. Let’s start with the easiest chord to play, the E minor (usually written as “Em”):

Chart of Em Chord

This is a chord chart. It is a picture or graph that represents where you need to position your fingers on the fretboard to form the chord. The heavy line across the top of the graph is the nut of the guitar.

The vertical lines descending from the nut are the strings. You will see six of them. From left to right, they are the 6th (low E, the thickest one), 5th (A), 4th (D), 3rd (G), 2nd (B) and 1st (high E, the thinnest) strings. This will almost always be the case in any chord chart that you look at. This is why, whether you play left handed or right handed, you can read the same charts. The position of the strings is not going to change relative to your perspective of them.

The horizontal lines that intersect the strings at regular intervals are your frets. When you see a dot on a “string” you are supposed to put your finger on that particular fret and string. Here, in our Em chord, we want to place a finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and one on the second fret of the D (4th) string. More on this in a moment…

If you see a “0″ above a particular string, then you play that string as an “open” string. This means that you do not have to put a finger on it at all. An “X” means that you do not play the string at all. An open circle (which we will not be seeing today) means that particular note is optional. You can play it or ignore it.

Let’s get back to our Em chord. As I said, we want to place a finger on the second fret of both the A and D strings. The other strings we can play open. This seems easy enough. But which fingers shall we use? And how should we go about placing them on the strings?

I’ll answer the second question first: When we place a finger on the string, we want to place the tip of the finger, the rounded part just below the nail, on it. It’s the same part of the finger you’d use to dial a push-button phone or use an adding machine or write me an email asking me which specific part of the finger to use.

If you look at the fingertips of people who’ve played for a long time, you’ll see that their tips are actually closer to flat than round! Using the tip also causes you to arch your fingers so that they are arcing away from the neck of the guitar. This should keep them out of the way of the open strings so that they (the strings) can ring freely.

You ideally want to place your fingers as close to the metal fret closest to the body of the guitar. But don’t place your fingers on the metal fret – your fingers should be in the space between the metal frets. This space, as I pointed out before, is also called the fret and when someone says your fingers should be on the second fret, they mean the in the space between the first and second metal frets and not on the metal itself.

Okay, which fingers should you use? Believe it or not, this is going to be your choice. Yes, there are standards, and there is also a lot of debate over this. But the truth is that everyone’s fingers are different and what feels comfortable for you may not be so for someone else and vice versa. Choice of fingers will also eventually depend on other ever-changing circumstances: which chord did you come from, which are you going to, are you going to be doing any ornamentation or fills?

For now, though, let’s use our middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and our ring finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. You will hopefully understand why I chose these particular fingers as we move along. With your fingers all set on their appropriate strings and frets, strum all six strings of your guitar. Voila! You have just played an Em chord.

Now let’s move on to the E major chord. All major chords are represented by a single letter, which might or might not be followed by a flat or sharp symbol. So if you see the symbol “E” or “F,” for instance, you know that it is an E major chord or F major chord. An “Ab” means an “A flat major chord.” Here is a chord chart for E:

Chart of E Chord

Perhaps now you will see why I chose to play the Em with those particular fingers. An E chord is essentially the same: you start with your middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string and your ring finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. To this we are going to add the index finger on the first fret of the G (3rd) string.

Do yourself a favor and play both of these chords one after the other. Listen to the tonal differences between the major and minor chord. This will not mean much to you know, aside from their noticeably different sounds. But as you learn more about the guitar and about chord theory you will be glad you took the time to train your ears in this manner. For more info on this, just to keep in the back of your mind as you learn, read my first column on ear training called Happy New Ear.

Are you all set for another chord? Well, take your fingers as they are positioned for the E chord and shift them up to the next higher string:

Chart of Am Chord

You should have your index finger on the first fret of the B (2nd) string, your ring finger on the second fret of the G (3rd) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. This is an A minor chord, or Am for short. On this chart you will see an “X” over the sixth string. This means do not play it. Start your strum on the open A string.

Later you will learn that it is indeed okay to use the open E string as well (since the E note is part of an Am chord), but for now I want you to be able to concentrate on not always hitting all six strings. Not all chords can be played on all six and you should get into the habit early of not flailing away on your guitar.

Since the E and Am chords were relatively easy, shall we take on a bit of a challenge?

Chart of A Chord

The A chord causes people no ends of problems because it’s not always easy to get three fingers into one fret! Here is something I wrote in one of our Easy Songs For Beginners:

“Now the A chord is another matter. Some guitarists actually have a lot of trouble with this chord. It looks like it should be easy enough, simply press the second fret of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th strings. But that’s exactly where the problem lies. Most people (and a lot of teachers) will tell you to use this fingering:

Personally, I find this very uncomfortable. By some happy accident, I learned the A chord after the E chord. At the time, I was trying like crazy to make as few changes with my fingers on the fretboard as possible and I managed to come up with this:

I just find it easier to get a better sounding A major chord this way. Not only is it more comfortable for my fingers, but I can switch quickly and easily back and forth between the A, E and D chords (which are the three most common chords when playing songs in the key of A major). I should mention, though, that I know a number of people (mostly guys with big fingers) who can’t get all three fingers on the second fret no matter what combination they try. Sometimes they resort to playing the A chord by barring the second fret (to “barre” means to lay a finger across all the strings of a fret). In this case, you wouldn’t barre the entire fret, just the first four strings. But here you have to make certain NOT to play the first string.

The point of all this is to show you that there are different ways to play chords. Ultimately, you should use whichever fingering gives you the greatest comfort and ability to switch from one to the next. You may often find yourself learning to play the same chord with different fingerings depending upon the context of the chord progression in which it is used.”

It’s worth noting here that my charts are decidedly backwards. This is why it’s always important to look at everything.

The next two chords I want you to initially learn as four string chords, using only the first four strings.

Chart of D Chord and Chart of Bm Chord

Virtually everyone plays the D major chord in the same manner: middle finger on the 1st (high E) string, ring finger on the 2nd (B) string and index finger on the 3rd (G) string. You will find yourself using your pinky a lot when playing the D in order to get a Dsus4. This will come in the future. Also, you will find that the open A string not only can be played, but is essential to working in an alternating bassline. If you can’t wait to find out more about these, check out the lesson on Margaritaville.

For the B minor, use your index finger on the 1st string, middle finger on the second and ring finger on the 3rd. There are a lot of ways of playing this particular chord (and all chords, for that matter); I have chosen this one because I feel it is the simplest voicing.

There are just two more important first position chords. I’ve saved them for last because they will, in all likelihood, require the most attention and practice:

Chart of C Chord and Chart of G Chord

To initially form the C major chord, let’s start out with our Am fingering: your index finger on the first fret of the B (2nd) string, your ring finger on the second fret of the G (3rd) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the D (4th) string. Now take your ring finger off of the G string and place it on the 3rd fret of the A (5th) string.

Remember to keep your fingers arched so that each fingertip touches only its respective string, and that the rest of your fingers are out of the way. Picking each string individually, from the A down to the high E, should produce clear, ringing notes. If you get any “clunks,” then you need to work on having your fingers better positioned on their frets.

Once you have the C, take your ring and middle fingers and place them on the same frets on the next lower strings. Your ring finger will be on the third fret of the low E (6th) string and your middle finger on the second fret of the A (5th) string. Remove your index finger entirely from the fretboard and place your pinky on the third fret of the high E (1st) string. Now you have a G major chord.

Because so many, many, many songs have G to C or C to G chord changes, this is the way most teachers will show you how to play these chords. It is not what I do all the time. Often I will play a G major like this:

Without a formal teacher, this is the fingering I found most comfortable for me. I will often use the first fingering when switching from a G to a C, played with my pinky still on the third fret of the 1st string. This is the same C chord, it is simply a different voicing, which means that I’ve changed the strings on which I play certain notes. Again, this is something that you will pick up on as you learn more about chords.

One last quick note – sometimes, particularly on TAB found on the internet, chord charts will be replaced with something that looks like a serial number. Again, this should be of no surprise since most people do not have the software to make chord charts. These numbers, more often than not, are set in parentheses and read from left to right as chord charts are, complete with “Xs” and “0s.” Any other number is the fret you want to finger for that particular chord. On these “serial number” chord charts, the chords we covered today look like this:

Em – (022000)
E – (022100)
Am – (X02210)
A – (X02220)
D – (XX0232)
Bm – (XX0432)
C – (X32010)
G – (320003)

This should be more than enough to get you going. Yes, there are a lot more chords to learn and also different versions of these particular chords. But knowing these eight first position chords will allow you to play literally thousands of songs. Knowing these chords, as well as being able to switch between them fairly quickly and smoothly, should be any beginners first task. If you are at all familiar with any of the songs on our Easy Songs For Beginners page, then I would recommend that this be your next step in learning.

I hope this lesson helps you in getting started. Our next installment will be on strumming, involving straight strumming (with and wthout a pick) and fingerpicking. The final “Absolute Beginner” articles will be on reading music and reading TAB. Part one of Reading Notation is already online.. And finally, there will also be a “Miscellaneous” article as well to cover general things that shouldn’t take a great deal of time, such as posture and holding the guitar.

And then there will be all the things we missed, not to mention all those that you will one day encounter as you learn more and more about the guitar. “Miscellaneous” will also cover symbols for (and explanations of) muted strings, hammer-ons and various guitar techniques that, again, you will want to know at some point.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

I get questions by email like the following all the time:

I have just bought a cheap acoustic guitar from a pawn shop because I have little or no money. I don’t know much about playing the guitar. How do I tune this thing? Are there any pages to help me out?

While I consider the task of tuning a guitar one of the most basic things for a guitarist to learn, explaining it so a complete beginner can understand is difficult. So I am forever rewriting this particular lesson in an effort to simplify things.

What you should know right away is that tuning a guitar is the single most important concept for a beginning guitarist to learn. At the same time it is often their first stumbling block. If your guitar is not in tune, you will never sound good. Rather than having your friends tune your guitar for you all the time you should learn how to do it for yourself.

This lesson contains instructions for a beginner to tune a 6 string guitar to standard tuning. For more experienced players, there is a lot of detailed information compiled on the Guitar Tuning page. There you will find lessons on 12 string guitars, open tunings, alternate tunings, harmonics and more.

To begin there are some important things to keep in mind when tuning your guitar:

• You should get into the habit of tuning your guitar every time you pick it up.
• Always “tune up.” You want to increase the tension of the string until it reaches the desired tone. If you go too far, loosen the string tension and tune up again.
• The goal of tuning is to put your strings in tune with each other. In “standard tuning” your strings should be tuned to the following notes (low-to-high): EADGBe.

The easiest way to get into tune and stay there is buy an electronic tuner. These small and inexpensive devices can save you a lot of trouble. While an electronic tuner is a great addition to your guitar case, they come in really handy in live situations and noisy environments, you should not rely on them exclusively. Do not neglect learning the skill of tuning for yourself as it is great for developing your ear.

The First Step

The first thing you need to do when tuning your guitar is get a reference pitch. You should start with the low E string, also known as the sixth string. You can get a reference pitch by using another guitar that is in tune, a piano, a tuning fork, an electronic tuner or even a midi file on your computer.

Your goal is to tune your sixth string to sound exactly like the low E sound. To do this, play the pitch, then slowly adjust the tuning peg of your sixth string until the pitch of your guitar sounds exactly like the file. Remember to tune up by increasing the string tension. If you tune too far give the string a lot of slack and start the process again. It is best if you eliminate all other noise from your area. That means turn off radios and anything else that may distract your ears. Once your sixth string is tuned to E you are ready to tune the other strings.

Next you are going to tune the fifth string A. To do that you must match the tone of the 6th string with the tone of the 5th. This is done by playing the same note on each string, one after the other. Place your the index or middle finger of your left hand just behind the 5th fret of the 6th string. Using your right hand play the 6th string at the 5th fret. Immediately after play the 5th string open – that is, no fingers on any fret. Listen to the two tones. As the two notes are still ringing use your right hand to adjust the 5th string’s tuning peg. Remember to tune up. Once both strings sound exactly the same your fifth string is in tune.

You are going to do the same to tune the 4th and 3rd strings. Once the 5th string sounds good, fret it at the 5th fret, and play the 4th string open. Adjust the 4th string’s tuning peg to match the notes. Keep going to tune the 3rd string: fret the 4th string on the 5th fret, and play the 3rd string open, and match the notes. When it comes time to tune the 2nd string, you have to fret the 3rd string on the 4th fret (not the 5th), and play the second string open, and adjust the 2nd string’s tuning peg. Tune the first string by fretting the 2nd string at the 5th fret, and play the first string open. Match the two tones, and you’re done.

If you are really new to playing music you may have problems hearing if the sounds actually match. New guitarists tend to break a lot strings by tuning too far because they just don’t know. There are ways to avoid this.

As mentioned earlier, the best way to make tuning really easy and painless is to buy an electronic tuner. Guitar Noise recommends the MU30 – Chromatic Tuner/Metronome by Ibanez. The metronome feature makes this particular tuner an essential piece of inexpensive equipment.

Sometimes people who believe they are tone deaf can tune a lot easier using a harmonic tuning method. If you want to learn how to tune your guitar using harmonics see our lesson Harmonic Tuning.

Some other places you can find a reference pitch include:

• After the early morning BBC2 Open University transmission the test card with the young girl and blackboard has a 440Hz “A” tone. Useful tuning reference, providing you wake up in time.
• The French telephone dial-tone is also at 440Hz.
• You can dial up 440Hz to tune your violin in Vienna, Austria.

If you want to learn how to tune a 12 string guitar see the answer to the FAQ What if my guitar has 12 strings?