Technique

Technique is one of the key elements when you learn to play lead guitar. A good teacher is essential to teach you the basic skills and allow you to perfect them. Playing guitar is like artwork, you need to practice and perfect your craft. Many lead guitarist in popular music groups will tell you they never stop learning and never stop perfecting there style.

Discipline

Discipline is what will take you from an average lead guitarist to a brilliant one. When you first learn to play lead guitar it is very important to be disciplined and be able to put the hours in that are needed to master your craft. A teacher can help you set a time schedule and program to keep you motivated and on track.

Body Language

Body language is another important element when you learn to play lead guitar. Attitude and body language go hand in hand to give you the confidence you need as a lead guitarist. If you watch a music video you will always notice the confidence the lead guitarist has compared to his backup musicians.

Leadership Skills

As a lead guitarist it is important to have excellent leadership skills. As the lead guitarist you are responsible for the backup musicians and need to be able to think on your feet and cover any mistakes that may happen during a set. This is something that will come with time but should always be on your mind when you learn to play lead guitar.

Learning Positions

When you first start to learn to play lead guitar it is important to practice while in the seated position. Being seated during practice will help you to maintain full control of your instrument and allow you to concentrate on your practice. Always have both feet on the ground and have your back straight to avoid injury.

Correct Hand Positions

Learning the correct hand positions when you learn to play lead guitar is the most important element. Using the correct hand positions will allow you to move through cords with ease and avoid mistakes. It will also allow you to react quickly if one of your backup musicians makes a mistake or misses a note. Correct hand positions should be practiced regularly even by experienced guitarists.

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1. Learn to Play the Guitar by Ear
2. Learn to Play Guitar – Some Useful Tips
3. Stronger Fingers for Guitar Playing

Slowing Things Down

In order to learn to play the guitar by ear you have to begin with learning the melodies, chords and leads from a recording. To be able to do this, you’ve got to slow them down a bit. Some exceptionally gifted people with really good ears are able to learn to play some slow songs just by listening to them at a normal speed. However, even those folks have problems with learning faster melodies and need to slow things down.

Most of us can’t even figure out slow songs just by listening to them at a normal speed. While most of us can match a note with our guitar or voice if it’s the only thing we’re hearing, we tend to get confused when lots of notes are played together. If you slow the music down, we can separate the notes and play them piece by piece until we learn the whole song.

Slowdown Technology

Years ago, the slowing down process was done using half speed tape recorders. However, as you slowed the music down, the pitch dropped. By the time you got to half speed, the pitch had already dropped a lot. Anyway, for most of us, half speed is still to fast. You will probably need a 1/10 speed in order to figure out certain pieces.

Fortunately, nowadays everything has been made easier with the aid of digital slowdown technology. You can now slow the melody down as much as you want, without having the pitch dropping.

Do You Really Have to Put So Much Work Into It?

You’re probably thinking that spending so much time on figuring out each note yourself must be awfully hard. Why not just buy a book and get over this part? Of course, you can buy a book, but, as it usually happens with all music theory books, it will probably be gathering dust on your bookshelf forever. If you really want to learn to play the guitar by ear, you will have to get involved in the process and figure out the notes from a melody yourself.

While figuring out note by note on your own is the best way to go, consulting a transcription book from time to time while you’re trying to figure out the music is also good. Some beginner guitar players who want to learn to play the guitar by ear learn from a transcription book first and then play along with the original recording at a slower pace to get the rhythm.

You should learn to play the guitar by ear just because this way you get the most fun. Playing the guitar should be fun and this is why you should have started to learn it in the first place. However, the more you time you invest into the learning process by getting involved in practical activities, the faster the progress.

Related posts:

1. Learn To Play Lead Guitar
2. Learn to Play Guitar – Some Useful Tips
3. Changing Chords Tips for Beginners

Playing the guitar requires more than the requisite musical ability, dedication and practice. A guitar player’s fingers must be dexterous and agile to allow quick single string or chord changes in rhythm or solo musical performances. Those fingers also need to be tough and strong to be able to press the strings enough during quick changes to produce clean tones.

All beginners will remember the first time they played the guitar for an extended period. Our fingertips are originally soft at the very end, with thin skin protecting them. First we feel pain after pressing down on the strings too hard when playing the fretboard, especially all of the fingers except for the thumb. If the aspiring musician hasn’t given up by then and continues to practice playing the blisters will eventually dry up and leave calluses on the fingertips. These calluses will protect the fingertips from the pain of playing for a little while but eventually the pain builds up again as the calluses keep building you end up with thick rough fingertips on a guitarist’s left (or fret) hand. Graduating to full chords, the entire 1st and 2nd fingers, which form bar chords across the strings, will also go through the process of pain, blisters and calluses. This process toughens up the fingertips, and makes it easy to press on the strings to produce the needed musical tone on the guitar.

The most effective way to strengthen the fingers and improve dexterity is to practice scales and chords on the guitar itself. Chords and scales will help the beginner become familiar with the different chord progressions and musical configuration of the fretboard – it will help the student master the instrument. Knowing and playing chords and scales will embed the musical secrets of the guitar to the player and make it easier to read, learn and perform music, and to create or write your own music for the guitar. As an added bonus, all that practice will greatly improve the strength and agility of the fingers. With the dual advantage of musical training and strength and endurance improvement, a guitarist can develop the ability to perform several full pieces or songs necessary for a long performance event.

However, there is a danger of over-training. Tendonitis is a common affliction of over-exercising and is prevalent in professional athletes and musicians alike. Tendonitis is caused by a repetitive action of a limited set of muscles, causing inflammation and possible damage to tendons and joints. Because certain athletes and musicians tend to use a focused set of muscles in their activities, they share a certain propensity to this injury. But this can be easily avoided. Many persons over-train when they choose to ignore pain during practice and instead continue to perform the activity which directly leads to tendonitis. For guitarists, once you feel pain in your wrist or the tender part of your hands, stop. You should incorporate 5-15 minutes of rest between sets of scales or chord practices. Put the guitar down and shake your hand for a few seconds. If you are not tired but still feel pain, change the practice method: if you are doing scales, switch to slow strumming with full chords.. Changing the set of muscles you exert can help avoid injury and increase the strength of your fingers.

Finally, like an athlete, a guitarist should take care of his body with exercise. Following are two stretching exercises that will improve the flexibility and strength of your fingers:

1. Stand straight with your arms at your sides and hands facing forward. Stretch your fingers down and outward as far as you can and count to ten. Relax and rest for a few seconds and do three repetitions.

2. With the same posture, hold the four fingers of your left hand (except the thumb) with your right and push them towards the back of the hand. Hold the stretch for ten seconds then relax and continue by doing three repetitions.

Remember, strength and agility is achieved by practice, proper rest, and stretching exercises. Now play on!

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1. Changing Chords Tips for Beginners
2. Learn to Play Guitar – Some Useful Tips
3. Learn To Play Lead Guitar

The key to learning any instrument, like most intricate human activity, is to develop brain and muscle coordination, more commonly called, muscle memory needed to play the instrument. If you picture a basketball player, for instance, the key to a good shooting performance is the proper hand-to-eye coordination in order to bring the ball up, prepare, aim, and throw it towards the hoop. The different muscles of the arms, wrist and hands will learn the right movements and strength needed to score. Constant practice will condition the brain, eyes, and entire body to know the routine of shooting the ball.

This is similar to guitar playing. The muscles involved would be the arms, wrists and the fingers, with the eyes, ears and brain working in unison to relate the movements to the music being read and the notes produced by the guitar. This is the mechanism that works when a guitar player starts to change chords.

Luckily, there are simple techniques that can help the beginning guitar player to develop these muscle memories and ear training for proper chord changes. Read below and you will see that chord changes are not that difficult to do.

When changing chords, first memorize all the chords involved in the song, and then visualize exactly which fingers of the fretting hand are involved in playing the chords. When playing simple barre chords, the most important finger is the index finger, which will squeeze all 6 strings across the fretboard. So as you move towards playing the chord, you have to position the index finger across the proper fret, or place, along the fretboard before positioning the other fingers of the chord. When playing a broken or simple chord, it is usually the index finger that is the most important finger. Primarily, the index finger and the thumb will form a stable anchor on the guitar neck in order for the other fingers to press the other strings of the chord. The index finger is usually played on the lowest fret and the highest string (by pitch, or string 1), where it could more easily find the proper note, and the other fingers can follow to complete the chord.

When playing a particular song, keep time with the music, but anticipate in which bar and on which beat the next chord will continue. For beginners, it would be preferable to practice the entire song slowly from beginning to end, taking care to change to each chord on time and on tempo. When the student can play the entire song like this without chord errors, he can start increasing the speed to the song’s proper tempo. It would also be helpful to identify particularly tricky chord changes. For instance, 2 consecutive bar graphs would be a relatively simple change, because the guitar player needs only to slide his index finger (which is already in the barre position) to its proper position on the fretboard and quickly press in the other strings of the chord. Changes from simple chords to barre chords – and vice versa – and chords that are positioned at a far distance from each other along the length of the neck are more difficult to perform. Isolate these difficult changes and practice those chord changes. If it is still too difficult with the slow tempo, don’t play the last beat of the last chord and use the time to move your fret hand into position for the next fret. Keep practicing these changes until the short passage can be played without error. Afterwards, go back to playing the entire song as discussed above. When you can play an entire song properly, try different strumming styles to accentuate parts of the song, or a particular beat; or alternate strumming and light plucking to give volume and variety to the music of the song. First, it is best to complete the song by actually copying how the original artist played it on the guitar; then you can add your own twists and extra technique according to your ear and taste. This will help you develop your hands for more difficult chords and finger playing techniques.

Do this for every song, and before you know it, you’ll be playing a new song like a seasoned guitarist in a short period of time.

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Custom paint jobs are expensive. A good guitar custom paint shop can charge you easily $200 for a simple coating work, and the more complicated the custom design the more expensive the cost will be. I find it ridiculous to send a cheap guitar to this shop because the paint job price is more expensive than the guitar price itself. If you don’t know how to custom paint your guitar there is a good tutorial you can buy, and when you master the work there is always a possibility to make this custom paint guitar as your side job. A good guitar painting tutorial will cover everything needed to paint your guitar including how to select a good combination of paint colors and how to do airbrush custom paint as well. Many guitarists are inspired by custom motorcycle paint jobs so they want to see some airbrush custom paint works done on their axes too.

The first thing you have to deal with is removing the existing finish on the guitar. You can do this with the help of a heat gun and a metal putty scraper. Other tools such as belt sander and or oscillating sander can be used to remove the old painting. Be careful with the belt sander, if you you accidentally make the surface of the wood slightly uneven,don’t attempt to even them out with the belt or oscillating sander, this will be better done by hand later. In my opinion using the heat gun and scrape is safer for your guitar because they don’t change or damage the guitar body.

Be very careful with your guitar pickups. They have to be removed and depending on the guitar design this job can be tricky. You may need screwdriver set and soldering iron to remove them and sticky labels to label the wiring.

Once the old paint is gone you will need to some sandpaper works on the guitar body. Use the coarse grained paper to even out any steps or imperfections and also to remove the old paint that may remain in curvy places such as the cutaways. Once you finish with the coarse grained paper use the medium grained sandpaper followed by the fine grained paper. Sand the guitar body with the fine grained paper until your fingers can’t feel the bumps or even the wood’s grain anymore. Wipe off the dust with a dry cloth and wet sand the wood with a high grit sandpaper to provide a better surface to paint. Let it dry before you proceed with painting the guitar.

You will need to buy primer (normally acrylic lacquer), base (color coat) and also clear to paint your guitar. The whole guitar painting process is not difficult provided you follow the guitar painting instruction. If you want to know the work details please click here to continue.

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Dreadnought Guitars

dreadnought-square shoulder guitar

Dreadnought is the acoustic guitar shape developed by Martin Guitar Co. in 1920’s and most of the modern acoustic guitars today are derived from this model. They are easy to distinguish because of their square shape. The large body produces good volume and projection but some people don’t like the wide waist design because it made the guitars uncomfortable to play. Gibson offers two types of dreadnought guitars, the round-shoulder and square-shoulder designs.

Grand Auditorium Guitars

grand auditorium guitar

Grand auditorium has a dimension of a dreadnought but narrower in waist making it more comfortable to play when rested on the knee. The narrower waist sharpens the definition of each note and gives a better bass and treble balance. This model has been very well accepted by most people.

Grand Concert Guitars

grand concert guitar

Grand concert guitar looks similar to the grand auditorium but smaller in dimension and has a brighter sound due to its shallower depth. This guitar is perfect for small players. The grand concert model gives more ‘intimate’ feeling to the players.

Jumbo Guitars

jumbo guitar

Jumbo guitar has the largest size and the sound chamber delivers extra volume and resonance. This type of guitar is commonly used for bluegrass or country style music.

Besides these common guitar shapes there are other guitars model such as traveler guitar, bowl-back guitar and cutaways guitar. Note that cutaways shape can mix easily with the four shapes above. If you visit Taylor Guitar website you can see that they offer cutaways guitar for all of the four shapes above.

-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

No related posts.

Generally there are 4 different guitar sizes: 1/4-size, 1/2-size, 3/4-size and 4/4 or full size. Note that the size is not based on the guitar overall length but the length measured from the guitar nut to the guitar bridge (the scale length).

As a general guide, a full size guitar normally will have 25” scale length, while the 3/4, 1/2 and 1/4 will have 23”, 21” and 19” scale length. These numbers are average and may vary slightly.

The optimal size of a guitar is always a compromise between comfort and sound quality and stability. The smaller the guitar body the more difficult it would be to get a good quality of low tones. The shorter the scale the trickier it is to get a stable pitch and intonation. Due to this reason smaller guitars don’t necessarily be cheaper than the full size ones.

Here is a rough guide of the guitar size:

The table above compromise between the player’s age and height so you must decide which parameter fits better. To me the height is more important because the taller the player the bigger guitar he can play.

Reducing guitar size will also reduce the guitar sound volume because the resonator box is smaller compared to the full-size guitar. They also tend to have more treble sound, although the guitar materials also have some contribution here.

It is much easier for a young child to play an appropriate sized guitar. I don’t recommend children to learn to play guitar on a full-size one because they can easily develop poor posture which can be difficult to rectify. They may also develop bad fretting fingers position because their small fingers can’t reach the whole strings. All of these problems should be avoided starting from the earliest stage of their guitar journey.

-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

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After you pass the initial barriers you will find that there is at least another one more problem waiting: How to find chords in your favorite songs? You can search for the tabs and chords online but sometimes you won’t find them. Now thanks to the digital era you can easily find guitar software to make your life easier. I just found some useful guitar software that might be of your interest. You can download the trial version from this page and see whether they can help you.

Chords!

Click this image below to download the software:

Chords! is a Winamp plug-in that automatically identifies chords and guitar tabs to any song played with your Winamp. With this plug-in you can:

- Find chords for any song on your playlist
- See guitar tabs and chords synchronized to the song
- Mix the chords into the song and hear the sound
- Save the chords and time markers in a simple text file

You are free to use this guitar software for 15 days. After that period if you think it is useful you can buy the full version license. There is a forum you can visit and ask questions regarding this product.

iChords2

Click this image below to download the software:

iChords2 is a Windows Media Player plug-in that works similar to the Chords! for Winamp, however they are developed by different software company. It is rated 5 Cows by Tucows in June 2008. With this guitar software you can:

-    Find chords from CDs and audio files (MP3, WMA and WAV) and presents them on a virtual GUITAR or KEYBOARD.
-    edit the song adding chords and lyrics in an easy and fun way
-    Export songs as videos files! This enables you to have the song, chords and lyrics everywhere in your iPod, MP4 player or mobile phone
-    Four different guitar view modes, including for left-handed players!
-    View and Print your chords also on the keyboard mode
-    Choose the level of complexity and learn in the way that suits your skills: easy, normal and difficult chords
-    Works with DRM-enabled WMA files found in online music stores

The trial version of this software will let you use it for 20 times only.

Other guitar software that worth trying is the Ultra Wave Guitar FX. You can click on this image below to download the trial version.

Have Fun!

-TJ-
Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

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OK, assuming you’re a dare warrior we can start mutilating your guitar bridge.
First off you have to remove all of the guitar strings. If the guitar bridge is severely cracked the chances are you may remove it without problems, especially if the bridge was not glued properly. If the guitar bridge sticks hard to the guitar top you have to pop it off with the help of a flat chisel heated up at the sharp end.

Start working the chisel from one corner and let the heated sharp end melt the glue, applying just enough pressure to drive it in between the guitar top and the bridge. Work the flat chisel around the guitar bridge until all of the old glue melted allowing you to lift the bridge away.

Inspect the bridge thoroughly and decide whether you can use glue to close the crack. If so you will have to use a clamping device or rubber band to keep the glued surfaces stick together. Wait until the glue dries before proceeding to the next step.

While waiting for the bridge you can check the guitar top surface for scratch or damage. In case of surface finish damage you will need to file it or sand it to get a smooth surface for a better surface contact. Finish the sanded area as needed.

After both of the guitar bridge and guitar top dry you can glue them back together.  Use a clamping device if possible to ensure good surface contact.
Give enough time to let the glue dry before you install the strings.

Caution: NEVER shift the bridge position! You should glue the guitar bridge back to its original position. Fail to do so will ruin your guitar intonation. The distance from your guitar nut to the 12th fret should be theoretically equal to the distance between the 12th fret and the bridge saddle.

Feel free to copy or distribute this guitar bridge repair article if you find it useful.

To Your Guitar Success,

-TJ-

Beginner Guitar Lessons Admin

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Most of guitar beginners perhaps have the same question. Some of you probably have seen guitar advertisement promising you can master the guitar fretboard instantly. Well, actually there are no short cuts or magic pills in playing guitar, if it sounds too good to be true then probably it is. Just like any other things in this real world to become skillful at something you need to practice. But it’s not just practicing: there is a BIG difference between people practicing with and without guidance.

OK, back to our topic about guitar: How to play notes confidently (umm, and correctly of course. There is no point playing wrong notes confidently unless you want to humiliate yourself)?

To achieve your guitar goals you need to understand at least two aspects: Theoretically and Technically. By theoretically I mean to become a proficient guitarist you need to know some guitar scales and understand your guitar fretboard by heart, meaning you SHOULD know each note on your fretboard. To learn the guitar scales you can start off from the pentatonic scale. This scale is heavily used in rock – including the heavy metal, rock & roll, rockabilly, etc. – and if you add a ‘blue’ note to the pentatonic scale you will be able to play the blues style. We will talk about the pentatonic scale in the future post.

To learn the guitar scales you will need to know the notes on your fretboard. Can you remember each string on your guitar? Try some meaningful words, started from the thickest one (number 6) like this: Each Abandoned Dog Got Back Easily. Find something unique, be creative. Now that you have memorized the open string notes you should be able to find the other notes on the fretboard easily. If for example you are looking for ‘f’ note you can make it by pressing the first and sixth strings on the first fret, or by pressing the fourth string on the third fret. If you need further help you can always return to the guitar fretboard basic tutorial.

From the technical aspect you can enrich your guitar playing with string bending, guitar tapping, guitar vibrato, guitar picking and other techniques such as guitar arpeggios that can help you perform better. Some of these techniques will be posted here so please stay tuned. In the realm of guitar how to play it makes your performance stand out above the others.

To Your Guitar Success

-TJ-
the Beginner Guitar Lessons Blog Admin

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