« | Home | »

Beginner Guitar Lessons – 5 Shortcuts To Playing the Guitar

By Mike Hayes | March 31, 2009

Learning the guitar can be difficult and time consuming not to
mention expensive. In fact buying the guitar is the easiest part
for most people.

It sure looks like fun on the video clips but guitar playing can
become frustrating and stressful. After all, the last thing
anybody needs at the end of a hard day at work is another boring
chore.

If your guitar playing has hit a brick wall try these shortcuts
and you will automatically by-pass the frustration of learning
the guitar.

Shortcut 1: tap your foot – this is where it all starts, it
doesn’t matter how many chords or scales you know if you don’t
develop your groove your guitar playing will never get off the
ground!

People respond to music in the following order, firstly the beat,
secondly to  the melody and lastly to the harmony. Your audience
may not notice the occasional wrong chord but they will
immediately be aware of your lack of ‘beat’.

Shortcut 2: learn simple chords shapes – each chord has it’s own
unique spelling, learn the formula for each chord and design your
own chord shapes on the guitar.

Once you realize that it’s not the physical shape of the chord
that is important but rather the combination of specific notes
that create a particular chord you will be free to create you own
‘guitar friendly’ chord shapes.

Shortcut 3: learn to read music – believe it or not the quickest
way to play by ear is to learn to read music.

Sounds like a contradiction however as you will discover reading
music gives you clarity, precision and structure. You ear quickly
remembers and retains the correct sounds.

Conversely trying to learn guitar via TAB puts you at risk of
learning mistakes. Once you understand how difficult it is to un-
learn a mistake you will value the importance of quality
information.

Many guitarists trying to find a quick way of learning the guitar
are seduced by the promise of TAB in reality learning via TAB is
the longest and hazardous route.

Shortcut 4: play by ear – try to play any song that comes into
your head. Start with simple melodies, songs you remember from
your childhood or Christmas carols are a good place to start.

Try to play these melodies on a single string, eventually you
will most likely want to use a combination of strings to
eliminate unnecessary movement but start with a single string to develop your ear.

By restricting ourselves to one string our ear has a better
chance of finding the correct notes and we develop a sense of
musical intervals.

Shortcut 5: learn the notes on the fretboard – there’s no
escaping this one!

Regardless of musical style in order to make progress on the
guitar it is essential that you know all the notes on the guitar
fretboard.

Start by learning the first string notes and associating the
notes on the first string with notes of the same name on other
strings

For example the notes on string six have the same letter name as
the notes on the first string i.e.,

first string, first fret = F / first string, third fret = G /
first string, fifth fret = A / first string, seventh fret = B /
first string, eight fret = C / first string, tenth fret = D /
first string, twelfth fret = E

I invite you to use these tips and tools when you play the
guitar.

From Mike Hayes – The Guitar Coaching Guy & the Express Guitar System

http://www.GuitarCoaching.com
http://AdvancingGuitaristProgram.com

Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson | No Comments »

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.