- How to tell that my strings are in tune? There was no digital tuner by that time.
- How can other people change chords smoothly?
- Why can they find chords in a song easily?
- What makes them improvise easily?
- How long will it take to master my guitar?

Today I see that technology really ease up most of my past problems. To tune a guitar for example a newbie now can rely on the electronic guitar tuner. This device really means a lot because it give a high level of confidence to the beginning guitarists. Some electric-acoustic guitars now come with built in strings tuner, the same device you may also find on some type of guitar amplifiers. Technology makes it easy.

To learn chords movement people can visit youtube.com. There’s a lot of good guitar lessons for beginner can be found there, name it how to form a chord and fret it on the fretboard or how to strum or to fingerpick the guitar. If you are looking for the theory behind the chords family so you can learn to find chords for your favorite songs you can get this information from some informative guitar websites.

After mastering the guitar chords we normally are ‘tempted’ to play guitar leads. Again youtube is one of the best online resources to consult. There are tons of good guitar video lessons teaching how to learn the guitar scales and apply them to spice up your guitar playing. The limit is your imagination. You can also find the guitar tabs for the guitar leads you are looking for, along with the MIDI files to give you the sample of the said leads.

Unless you can’t afford to pay for your internet connection I do believe that it’s cheaper and better to learn guitar online. Some of you may say that hiring a guitar tutor is better because he/she can tell you if you make some mistakes or bad habits but I would say that you can find the same information online too. A guitar video lesson with 4 or 5 stars will normally tell you that you can learn some useful information from it.

This article is not to discredit guitar tutors at all. For intermediate or advance level a good guitar tutor can help you to improve your guitar playing. Some real good guitar tutors also sell their DVD tutorials online. This can be a good option if you can’t hire a real one.

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-    Left-handers playing guitar right handed. Weird? No, I don’t think so. Paul Simon ( Simon & Garfunkel) is left handed but when comes to writing and playing guitar he does it right handed. Everything else he does it left handed. You can check it at www.paul-simon.info.

-    Left-handers playing normal guitar left handed. To give you better idea you can turn your right handed guitar upside down and try to fret some chords with your right hand fingers. Everything is inverted, isn’t it? Some left-handers prefer to play this way perhaps due to difficulties to find true left handed guitars, or because they could not afford to buy one so they had to share or borrow normal guitars to practice. When playing chords they have to fret differently because the whole strings are turned backwards. Picking and strumming technique will be totally different and unique.  Albert King and Bob Geldof play this way, they use left handed guitars but the strings are set backwards because they learned guitar using right handed guitar.

-    Left-handers playing true left handed guitars. A true left handed guitar has inverted strings setting. Paul McCartney and Jimi Hendrix are two of the lefty guitarists playing true left handed guitar. Jimi Hendrix used right handed guitar but he reverse the strings.

Should you are left handed and want to learn guitar I suggest you to figure out whether you want to play left handed or right handed like Paul Simon. Try to hold the neck with your right and left hands and feel which one feels more natural to you. If then you decide to play left handed I recommend you to play the true left handed guitar. Why? Because playing right handed guitar left handed needs extra work: You need to transpose the chords, you also need to learn different strumming pattern and picking in different ways. If you can’t find true left handed guitars available in your area buy the normal one and install the strings backwards. By doing this at least you don’t have problems to read chords chart and practice them on your guitar. Note that you may need to modify the nut grooves and flip the saddle upside down to accommodate the new strings setting. Of course there are some pro and con about this option. If you play true left handed guitar then the chance for somebody else using your guitar is close to zero. I look at this as a pro because I personally don’t like the idea of other people borrowing and playing my guitar. The con is you can’t show off without it, you can’t borrow and play right handed guitars either. Think about this: there are a lot of normal guitars out there and too bad you can’t use them ………

To Your Guitar Success,

-TJ-

Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

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