Jam Babble

I’m a huge fan of learning guitar form videos. It’s no secret, I’m always suggesting that beginners use quality guitar lessons dvd courses to learn from home if they aren’t going to be taking private lessons. So when I came across this video by Jonathan over at GutarTipsWeekly.com I had to share it.

He has been putting out some absolutely great stuff lately and I want to give a shout out to him for his hard work he’s been putting in at his blog lately.

This video covers the beginner open chords. These are the main chords you’d learn at first including E, A, G, C, D and F. They’re all on the first fret and don’t require any barre chords to be made. If you’re dying to learn a couple of songs to play mastering these chords will make it happen for you.

I wrote a post recently on how to learn chords better it would be worth checking out also since the exercises I suggest in that post would apply here to master these chords well.

So watch this video below it’s a few minutes long but it’s well worth the time. He’s done a great job an put a lot of his time into it I’d say.

Check it out below.

When you first start learning to play guitar it can be frustrating. There is a lot going on at once, your strumming hand is strumming your fretting hand is trying to make a shape it’s not used to combined with the fact that your fingers are pressing on strings all at once (a technique you’re not natural used to) and you’re trying to memorize chord shapes and patterns.

It’s not something you pick up the first day of lessons that’s for sure. I read a great article today about how you can improve your ability to make chord shapes and become more consistent. You see the trouble isn’t that you don’t have the ability, rather it can be a matter of you having issues with your mind doing everything at once. These three tips I’m going to share will help you over come the troubles of muting strings, switching chords too slowly or not being able to get the right fingers on the right frets.

1 – Don’t Stop Strumming

No matter what when you’re playing a chord and switching between another keep that strumming hand moving. Often times beginners will have trouble keeping the two hands independent of each other, so if you find your fretting hand stumbling and having troubles switching between the chords don’t stop strumming.

2 – Just Change Chords

Forming chords correctly whether it be slow or fast and switching between them is a separate skill from strumming. Try forming chords without strumming and switching between them. For instance make an E major then switch to a G major and to a D major then an A major. This will get your brain and fretting hand on the same page of what you need to do to make the chords and switch between them.

3 – Pressure Practice

While your making the chords you’re having trouble with press down hard on the strings, then release your hand and hover just above the strings, then press hard again and hold it for a few seconds. This gets your brain and fingers talking and understanding that you need to be moving and using all your fingers at once. This can sometimes be difficult at first to have your fingers all pressing at once since it’s not a natural motion.

This are 3 great practice exercises to work on if you’re finding beginner chords difficult. Whether you’re learning to play using a guitar lesson dvd, form YouTube or a private teacher chords are primary skill you’ll want to learn to take the time to do it right the first time.

Learning guitar chords is the real meat & potatoes of learning to play the guitar. Of course there are some things you need to be able to do before you jump into learning chords but more or less it’s the most exciting part of learning guitar.

If you’re teaching yourself to play there are a few viable methods you can use to learn guitar chords. This post is going to cover a few of those methods.

1.) Books & Charts: The old fashioned way, well not really that old but feels it in terms of the digital age, was to use posters, charts and books that listed the different ways to play chords. A chord book might contain literally 15-20 different ways to play a particular chord on the guitar neck. Of course this comes in handy when you want to play along with someone playing the same chord progression but maybe an octave higher.

Having a solid guitar chord book that you carry with you in your guitar case is a good idea. Possible alternatives to a chord book now are the iphone apps you can get that allow you to search chords or other digital programs that can be used on hand held devices

2.) YouTube: Ah yes youtube, while there is a lot of junk on this website there are some diamonds in the rough. You just need to know where you’re looking. Finding a few videos that cover the basics major and minor chords on the first few frets will help you with hand positioning and correct technique.

Careful though it’s easy to get sucked into hours and hours on youtube surfing videos. The big reason I’m not a huge fan of YouTube as a viable alternative to learn to play guitar is because it’s too darn difficult to find a string of videos that teach you new things in a logical order.

3.) Video Lessons: This isn’t just a method of learning guitar chords of course. You can learn to play guitar from scratch to a great player using the right guitar lesson dvds. Products like Amazing Guitar Secrets or Learn and Master guitar cover a massive amount of material and of course learning guitar chords is included in this.

What ever method you use to learn the basic guitar chords the key to getting good at them and switching between them is practice. It’s unavoidable. So get started learning the proper positions and fingerings then practice them, practice strumming them, practice switching between them and keep doing it until it feels second nature. At that point you should be ready to put it all together to play your first song.

If you take a stroll through your local music store I’m sure you’ll find a dozen different learn to play guitar dvds. Most of these are geared towards specific styles of guitar playing such as jazz, blues or metal.

Sure there will be a few dvd’s geared towards beginners, but they won’t be a complete course. It’s the nature of the self study guitar world, there just aren’t a lot of products that take you from a complete newb all the way through to being a half decent acoustic or electric guitar player.

That is until now.

I want to introduce you to what I feel is the best guitar lessons dvd program available. I posted a video of two of this program on my blog before so for anyone who’s followed my posts this might not come as a surprise.

The best dvd program I feel is Learn and Master Guitar by Legacy Learning Systems.

This course truly is a complete program that takes you from learning to hold, tune and strum the guitar right up to learning genre specific skills for jazz and blues.

Of course it doesn’t claim to make it happen over night. It takes time for you to practice and learn the skills it teaches along the way, but the key is that everything is in there.

A true beginner probably would find there is more then 1 years worth of material on the 20 DVD’s that come with the new expanded program. While a more intermediate player might make it though the content in 6-8 months.

How ever at the $150 price point it’s a steal no matter if you’re just picking up a guitar for the first time or have been playing for a couple of years on your own.

The instructor, Steve Krenz, is top notch and recognized in the music industry as being one of the best teachers in Nashville. He has toured across the US with some big names and also done studio and session work for artists around Nashville.

I could go on and on about this program (I own a copy), but I don’t want to over hype it. I suggest you visit this site, it talks more about the complete guitar lesson dvd course pack.

This post is inspired by something I read this morning at another blog I follow often ZenHabits.net. Today’s post was about “the only way to become great at something” and it immediately reminded me of when I first started playing guitar.

When I first started all I could think about was when would I be able to play well enough to piece a song or two together. Once I reached that point the speed with which I learned new material and new concepts slowed down greatly.

As a beginner guitar player we learn a lot in a short period of time. We learn chords, positioning, strumming patterns and more. How ever once we learn these things our development begins to slow. We’ve satisfied our initial goal of being able to play some songs on the guitar we know. Of course our journey as a guitar player shouldn’t stop there, we should continue to grow.

The post I read this morning talks about taking 6-10 years to become great at something depending on how hard you work at it. I think I believe this. I haven’t worked as hard at becoming a better guitar player over the last couple of years and because of this haven’t really progressed.

What can you take from this as a beginner guitar player?

Well if you’re just starting out I’d suggest you get the best guitar lessons product you can find, with as much content as possible. Forget anything that promises to teach you guitar in a weekend or over night. These are basically nothing but out right lies and fibs. No one has become a great guitar player over night and even the greats are learning new techniques and material each year.

Once you’ve got a good guitar lesson course or signed up for some private lessons commit to learning. I don’t mean going to the lessons but immerse yourself in the process of becoming a good guitar player. Practice, look for new ideas and techniques online. Get together with friends that play, really do all you can to push yourself as a guitar player.

To become great you must never stop learning. When we stop learning we become ignorant and stagnant. The guitar is a wonderful instrument and you have the ability to become a great player, just never give up!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with guitar tab, it’s basically a simple version of musical notation for guitar players. In a nut shell when you’re looking at a tab for a song the lines you’re seeing correspond to the strings on your guitar, and the numbers you see on each line are the equivalent of the fret you must play on your guitar.

Tab can be used to show you an arpeggio, chord or a lead guitar piece.

Why learn Guitar Tabs?

Learning to read music if you haven’t learned to play any instrument before isn’t the easiest. It’s even more difficult if you’ve taught yourself a bit of guitar, but have never taken any formal lessons. Learning to read tabs will allow you to learn to play new songs and advance your skills without have to learn advanced music reading.

Of course, to really strengthen your skills learning to read music should be something you’ll want to do. I’ve read that something like well over half of the worlds best guitar players cannot read music it does come in handy especially if you want to play with a band or become a professional studio musician.

Where can you start

There’s a video below you can watch in a few minutes that will get you started on how to read tablature. It’s basic, but it will get you pointed in the right direction.

Next I’d suggest you Google a few of your favourite songs and look for a tabbed version of the tune. So let’s say you were looking for an Eric Clapton tune… go a head and google “Eric Clapton Layla tab” without the quotes. You’ll get a few results.

Here are some of the top tab sites I’d suggest visiting:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/

http://www.911tabs.com/

http://www.azchords.com/

http://www.guitaretab.com/

Each of these sites has a HUGE library of songs sorted by artist and then song to choose from. If you’re interested in learning more about how to read music I suggest you take a few minutes to check out these guitar lesson dvds. This program is great for beginners or someone who has started to teach them selves how to play guitar.

Here’s the Beginner Guitar Tab Video

Barre chords are the next step after you master your major and minor chords in the first position. If you read my post from yesterday on beginning guitar chords then you probably saw the video explaining the basic major and minor chords and their positions.

The next step after you master those (and also even for F & B major chords) is barre chords. This is a difficult beginner skill to learn. I know because I struggled with it for quite some time when I first started out and I still find my index finer gets tired when I’m playing a song that is primarily barre chords.

I’ve found another great video today that will give a short introduction to barre chords, it’s just below. This video is from the learn to play guitar dvd series by Legacy Learning Systems. The complete program is called Learn and Master Guitar and it’s probably the best self study guitar program I’ve come across.

I have a copy of the older version which was 10 dvds. The new expanded edition has 20 DVDs with it. There’s a link to the course in the side bar of my blog under blog roll, Beginner guitar dvds.

OK back to our discussion of barre chords.

When you’re first learning your major and minor chords the issue is often getting your fingers to cramp into the position of an E, A or a D. Once you throw in a barre there it becomes a bit more difficult because you still need to make that same formation but now you also have to compress all the strings on a fret.

The biggest trouble beginners run into when playing barre chords is they are “blunting” some of the strings. This means you don’t have all the strings compressed down enough and you end up getting a dull blunted sound from those strings. Usually it’s the B, G and sometimes D strings that are the culprit.

Don’t get frustrated by this it happens to all beginners and practice will make perfect with this particular task. I would suggest you first learn the F major chord, then move up to the 5th fret, same fingering and position that will be an A chord. That is the easiest position of barre chords to learn.

After you get those down move onto the harder variations which in my opinion would be B, D (on the 5th fret) C, (on the 3rd fret) and so on.

Ok, so that’s an intro to the concept of barre chords now take a quick peek at this video below of Steve Krenz. He’s the instructor from Learn and Master guitar. He’ll provide a brief overview of starting to play barre chords.

If you’re on the journey of teaching yourself to play guitar using videos on YouTube and other free resources I’m sure the question has come up when do I start learning chords, and what chords do I need to learn?

When you first start out you’ll want to stick to the basic major and minor chords and avoid barre chords. If you try barre chords too early it can be discouraging. Your fingers aren’t strong enough yet and over all you’re not used to the positioning of your hands and fingers.

In this post I want to introduce you to the most important beginner guitar chords. I’ve found a great video that shows you the correct finger positioning as well as hand positioning for each chord so you can watch it being done and then practice on your own.

I’ve learned a lot using guitar lesson dvds over the last year so I can say from experience that using videos to further your understanding of guitar is probably the best method outside taking a private lesson from someone.

Beginning Guitar Chords

OK here are the chords the video is going to cover for you:

• Em
• E
• C
• A
• Am
• D
• G
• F (there is a second way to play F besides what the video shows, they show a barre chord)
• B (don’t get discouraged by B yet, it is a barre chord but you’ll get it just take your time

Knowing these basic major and minor chords will allow you to grab some chord progressions on the web of your favourite songs. Don’t get discouraged right away since it takes some time to

1. Be able to form and hold the chord correctly
2. Switch from one chord to another smoothly

Learning these chords is the beginning, but practicing them and learning to switch between them smoothly with varying strumming patterns is when you really start movin!

So here it is: Guitar Chords for Beginners Enjoy!

This is a discussion I’ve seen a lot of on different music boards & guitar lesson websites. Beginner guitar players want to know what’s better to start out on, an electric guitar or an acoustic guitar.

From what I’ve read and researched it seems that the Fender Strat Pack is probably the most popular beginner guitar set out there, although this doesn’t mean that you should grab an electric to start with.

Here are a few things to consider when you’re first starting out and buying your first gutiar.

1.) What type of music do you like?

Myself I’m a big fan of acoustic type music. Some of my favourite tunes are acoustic versions of big pop hits so for me I rarely play an electric guitar. Since when most of us start out learning to play the guitar we do it because we dream of one day being able to play our favourite songs it makes sense that we take that into consideration when choosing what type of instrument we learn on.

For me, if I was into heavy hard rock then learning on an acoustic guitar wouldn’t be very fulfilling to me. I’d want to get that big CRUNCH sound that hard rock bands such as Nickel Back are getting on their recordings (NOTE: you will not get that big of a sound from a starter guitar and amp ).

How ever if you’re more into artists like Jack Johnson or other singer song writers then an acoustic guitar would likely make you feel you’re making bigger progress.

Take this point into consideration before you buy.

2.) It can hurt your Fingers

Learning on a acoustic guitar from the start can be harder on your fingers. The strings are a heavier gage and there’s generally more action between the strings and the neck. So when you’re first starting out your fingers are going to be sore. In contrast on an electric guitar the strings are lighter and there’s less space between the strings and the neck.

Many beginners find it tough to start out on an acoustic because it just seems too hard. Their not getting the right sounds from their chords, they’re finding it tough to compress all the strings when playing barre chords etc. From this stand point an electric makes a lot more sense when starting out.

3.) How much cash do you want to spend?

You can get a beginner electric of acoustic for a pretty low price. I’ve seen both acoustics & electrics for around a hundred bucks. Of course to get the most fulfillment from your electric you’ll also want a small practice amp. This might put your over all price up towards the $200 mark.

Few beginners will purchase both up front, so if you’re plan is to own both in the next few years I say start with an electric, learn the basics and then spend a few bucks on an acoustic.

It will be easier on your hands, you’ll feel better about your progress and you’ll eventually end up with both an acoustic and an electric.