Left-Hand Technique

(I would like to thank the Guitar Handbook for the following excerpt on left-hand fretting techniques)

The function of your left hand is to press the guitar strings down onto the frets in order to sound the required notes. Before your right hand strikes the strings, your left hand must be in position, creating a specific selection of fretted notes for your right hand to play.

Many of the lead guitarist's left-hand techniques - for example, hammering-on, string-bending, slides and vibratos - are all part of the arsenal of tricks associated primarily with the sound of the modern guitar. In contrast, the rhythm guitarist's left hand tends to be more concerned with fingering chord shapes. However, modern rhythm guitarists also use many syncopation and "chop" techniques that rely on the left hand for damping effects. It is, after all, left handed damping that creates specific time values by releasing the strings when it has sounded for the required duration, and that cancels unwanted notes when several strings are played at once.

To play a single clear note without touching any other strings, your fingers should be arched so that the tips come down onto the fretboard more or less at right angles to it. This obviously means that your fingernails should not protrude beyond the ends of your fingertips. You should keep them trimmed.

When you fret a strings, you should hold it down between two frets, but just behind the one you want. The vibrating length of the strings will then be the distance from the higher of the frets to the saddle.

Use only as much finger pressure as is necessary to make the note sound clearly. Pressing too hard will tire your fingers and may hurt. Beginners will experience this immediately-especially with steel strings-since it takes a while to toughen the fingertips and learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure to the guitar strings.

We will get in to more specific style based left-hand techniques in future posts, but that is the foundation.

Good luck, I hope this helps!

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How to Play Simple Songs Today

Most popular music on the radio or anywhere you hear it today consists of a few basic chords. These chords are put in to a succession to convey the feeling or mood that is desired by the song writer.

When you take these chord progressions and utilize different picking patterns, you should be able to hear how these same chords can sound quite different in different songs.

The picking pattern on you picking hand is an important skill to master. While I was looking for a lesson to share this week, I came across a cool video that demonstrates a pretty simple excercise on how to improve your strumming techniques.

The video helps demonstrate how to practice alternate (up and down) strumming on the guitar strings, while changing chord patterns with your fret hand.

I hope you find this video helpful in helping you become a better strummer and ultimately a better guitar player.



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How to Play Beginner Guitar Chords

Playing the beginner guitar chords is a very important step in becoming an accomplished guitar player. The reality is that virtually every song is based off of fundamental chords or some variation of those chords.

I found a cool video that helps visualize the placement of your fingers on the guitar strings and what those chords should sound like. I thought it was a pretty cool lesson on how to be sure you are placing your fingers in the proper places on the strings and helps you hear the difference between those chords.

If you can master these basic chords, you should be able to play just about any song you want to.

I hope you find this video valuable.



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The Major Scale

The Major Scale is the building block for music. It is basically a 7 note step. It is made up of whole steps and half steps. Any time you skip a fret and play the next note, it is a whole step, if you play the next fret, it is called a "half step."

The note you start on is the key of the scale. If you follow the step pattern of whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.

Try playing the scale on one guitar string only before moving on to other ways. I found a cool video that explains what I have written here:



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Guitar 101 - Using all of your fingers on the fret hand

When you are learning to play guitar, it is important to build up your finger strength and be able to use all of the fingers on your fret hand equally.

I found a cool video on You tube that demonstrates a pretty simple excercise to get your fret hand finger strength up. Practice this exercise for a few minutes a day and you will find that your fret hand finger strength will improve in no time.

The guitar strings may be painful at first, but that will pass as you build up calluses on your finger tips.



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Bar chords

The cool thing about playing the guitar is that you can skip over a lot of the fundamentals and jump right in to playing chords. The fundamental chords utilize all four fingers and all six guitar strings.

I found a cool video on You Tube that explains how to play the 4 most commonly used chords in many popular forms of music.

This video focuses on the G chord, the C9 Chord, Em7, and D. As the video explains the finger positioning on the strings is relatively similar on all of these chords and they provide a good foundation for building up your finger strength and strumming technique.

Watch the video as Aaron Tomberlin explains in more detail. I hope this helps.



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Proper Fretting Techniques

When beginning to play the guitar, many players are in a huge hurry to master the fret burning licks on their favorite recordings. At the early stages of learning to play the guitar it is important to walk and master the basics first.

I found a cool little video on You Tube that talks about how to properly position your fingers on the guitar strings to obtain the proper sound, and not have a dead dull sound.

There are occasions when you would want to put your finger directly on the fret to obtain a "harmonic" note. This will be covered in a later lesson.

The basic idea is that each fret on the fretboard, shortens the length of the guitar string to produce the note you are looking to.

Check out the video lesson for a bit more of a description.

Enjoy!



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