Guitar lessons for beginners and more

The Importance of Embracing Critique

Here’s the scenario. You are a lead guitar player in a band. You just performed for a group of people. Overall, you feel like it went well and really poured everything you had into playing your parts and improvising that solo section. Most people tell you they were impressed with the performance. You feel good about it.

However, one friend, who also happens to play guitar, says to you, “Yeah, dude, you played your parts well, but the solo section seemed way too long and lacked interest in the melody.”

Some of you might not pay much attention to the comment, but for others, this could be devastating, especially for newer guitar players who don’t have a lot of experience or confidence.

In general, I think at a gut level we believe that critique directed towards us is somehow a bad thing. Maybe in our minds we would say it’s a good thing, but when it comes towards us, our initial reaction might be to write it off rather than consider it, and in some cases, we might be even afraid of it, or discouraged from ever playing music again.

Major Guitar Scales Lesson: G Major Scale Positions

The past couple weeks we learned our C major scale in all five scale positions up and down the fretboard. This enabled us to also learn the F major scale in all five scale positions, because all we had to do was change the “B” notes in the C major scale to “Bb” notes for [...]

The Only Exception Chords by Paramore

As a guitar player, the ultimate goal is to be able to play songs. However, if you are first starting out it can be hard to find easy guitars songs to play that aren’t too hard. The good thing is that some of the best songs ever written are the most simple ones.

Here are the chords and lyrics for Paramore’s The Only Exception from their “Brand New Eyes” album. It uses the most basic guitar chords and has a swung 6/8 rhythm. If you are new to strumming, you might want to check out our guitar lessons for creating and understanding strumming patterns.

Major Guitar Scales Lesson: F Major Scale Positions

For the next several weeks, we will be learning our major scales up and down the fretboard in all five positions and in all twelve major keys. Seem like an impossible task? Don’t worry. It’s not so bad, but in case you missed it, you will most definitely want to take a look at the introduction to the major guitar scales method we’re using to do this, and you might want to read up on the music theory for major scales.

The beauty about learning our major guitar scales with this method is that it not only teaches us the scale patterns but it inevitably teaches us the theory behind each major scale and the individual notes of each scales and how they interact and relate to one another. If we know how the notes interact with one another on the fretboard, we can begin to start crafting some interesting melodies and solos.

This week we are going to learn the F major scale.

Guitar Scales Lesson for Beginners: Major Guitar Scales

When I studied guitar at university, I learned one of the most foundational methods for learning the guitar fretboard and learning a variety of guitar scales up and down the fretboard. You can learn this too. You’ll just need some time and a bit of dedication.

Before we get started, I want to draw attention to our recent post on music theory for major guitar scales, which will be essential for understanding this lesson. Once you’ve read that, come back and continue.

Introduction to the Guitar Scales Method

In the previous mentioned lesson on music theory for major scales, we learned that a C major scale has no sharps or flats, and we learned how to construct major scales in other keys by modifying the C major scale. Knowing this basic theory is crucial, and we can use it to learn any scale on the guitar fretboard by starting with the C major scale.

Because of this, we are going to learn the C major scale in all positions over the fretboard to provide a basis for learning every other guitar scale out there. Again, I learned this method my first semester of taking guitar in university and attribute it to giving me a comfortable grasp of the entire fretboard.

The Ultimate Acoustic Guitar Buying Guide

Not all acoustic guitars are the same. There are a lot of differences and characteristics that set each and every guitar apart from the other. Some of these characteristics are really obvious, but some are more nuanced and require a bit more attention.

When you make a serious financial investment, such as buying a guitar, it’s important to make an educated buying decision.

The purpose of this guide is to give you a comprehensive overview of the things you should consider when buying an acoustic guitar or determining the quality of one.

Music Theory for Guitar: Major Scales

I’ve talked before about the music theory behind guitar scales some, but for this guitar lesson, I want to back up just a bit.

In that lesson, we learned that a scale is simply a group of notes (pitches) arranged in ascending and descending order. There are different types of scales: major, pentatonic, melodic minor, harmonic minor, whole tone, etc. We’re not going to get into the differences between each one in this lesson, but we are going to look explicitly at the major scale. Most of the music we hear on the radio is based on the major scale, so if we know the major scale, this will give us a huge foundation from which we’ll learn other things in the future.

Before we talk more about the major scale, we need to know about half steps and whole steps. All of the pitches (C, D, E, F, G, A, B) are separated by whole steps except that E to F and B to C are separated by half steps.

If you start on the 1st fret of the low E string, which is an F note, and move up one fret to the 2nd fret of the low E string, which is an F#, you’ve moved up one half step. If you were to move up two frets, you would have moved up a whole step. A whole step equals two half steps. [...]

11 Easy Guitar Lessons for Beginners

One of the most challenging aspects as a beginning guitar player can be knowing where to start. That’s why I introduce to you Guitar Friendly’s twelve easy guitar lessons for beginners. These guitar lessons are perfect for beginners and an excellent place to start.

1.) Frequently Asked Questions by Beginning Guitarists - Are you thinking about playing guitar? Did you just take the dive into learning guitar? Find out some answers to the most frequently questions asked by beginning guitar players like: how much will I need to devote to practicing guitar? how bad do your fingers hurt when you first start playing? is it better to learn on electric guitar or acoustic guitar? how much is guitar going to cost me? These are just a few questions.

2.) Basic Guitar Chord Chart Library – If you are a complete beginner, then you will want to start learning the basic finger positions for guitar chords.

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How to Tune a Guitar in Standard Tuning

It’s an absolute necessity that every guitar player have a guitar tuner. If you don’t have one, go out and buy one (check out our review of the best guitar tuners). Tuning the guitar by ear is a difficult thing to do for most people, and even if you can tune your guitar by ear, a guitar tuner will likely give you the most accurate tuning.

If your guitar is even slightly out of tune, it will sound really bad. It’s important when your first learning how to play guitar to have a tuned guitar, because an out of tune guitar will make you much worse than you really are. Talk about discouraging!

Tuning Your Guitar by Ear

Before we try to use the audio samples below to tune our guitar by ear, we need to discuss a bit about tuning your guitar. If you go from the lowest string (the fattest string) to the highest string (the thinnest string), standard tuning is where the the guitar is tuned to the notes EADGBE. [...]

The Parts of the Guitar

There are many different types of guitars: acoustic, electric, classical, acoustic-electric, but generally, they all have some distinguishing parts in common.

Parts of the Acoustic Guitar

Starting at the very right in this picture, we have the headstock. The headstock holds all the tuners. Each of the strings wrap around the tuning pegs of the tuners and rest on the string grooves of the nut (plastic or bone) on the guitar as they are laid out across the fretboard. From this angle, we only see the fretboard. The fretboard lays on top of the neck of the guitar. On some guitars, the wood for the fretboard will be different than the neck.

The frets are the “bumps” or bars that lay perpendicularly across the fretboard. Sometimes the frets will be to long on the fretboard so you might feel the frets poke or rub your hands in an uncomfortable way as you move your hands up and down the neck of the guitar. Luthiers, or people who make guitars or work on guitars can fix this problem by filing down your frets.

At the body of the guitar, we have the sound hole, which allows the sound to be amplified and project out of the guitar. The strings go over the sound hole and then meet at the bridge. On the bridge, we have the saddle, which is similar to the nut in that it has grooves for the strings to rest on. When a string is plucked on the guitar [...]