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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Understanding guitar Tablature

Tablature is a system of writing down music for the guitar. It is based on a six line grid that represent one of the six guitar string. The top line is the 1st (top E) string, and the bottom is the 6th (bottom E) string. The numbers on the lines are fret numbers. For example, a number 3 on the 2nd line from the top tells you to play D om the 3rd fret of the 2nd string. An O on the line indicates that you play the open 2nd string.

The system relies on you being able to hear the piece of music so that you are familiar with the rhythmic structure of the song and the timing of the notes. It is used in conjunction with memory.

It is basically a form of short hand that helps you determine where to put your fingers on the guitar string while you play along with the cd.

I found a pretty cool video on You Tube that helps demonstrate what I just discussed. I hope this helps you understand how to translate tablature to your guitar string and you will soon be learning your favorite songs in no time at all.

Good luck!




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Strumming the Guitar

The ability to play rhythm guitar is one of the most important pieces in your quest to be a good guitar player. Being able to strum the guitar and keep rhythm with other players is critical.

I found a pretty cool video on You Tube that helps explain the fundamentals in developing a good strum. Basically, you want to count out the rhythm of your pick hand with a 1 & 2 & 3 & 4, etc, starting with the 1 being on the down stroke and the & being on the up stroke. Watch the video for a clear explanation.



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Learning the notes on the guitar fretboard

For many, the task of learning the notes on the fretboard of the guitar is very daunting. I found a pretty cool video on You Tube that breaks down the task to a much simpler process by learning the 7 notes of the C scale first, ignoring the flats and sharps. It focuses on learning the 7 "natural" notes of the guitar first and shows you how to learn them on each string. The 7 natural notes of the guitar in the C scale are C-D-E-F-G-A-B.

If you can learn the position of each of these notes on each guitar string, you will find that your ability to memorize the position of the notes throughout the fretboard is much easier.

Starting with C being the first note to learn, you will learn where that note is located on each guitar string throughout the guitar fretboard.

If you can follow this process, you will cut the time it takes to memorize the notes of the guitar by as much as 1/2.

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