Monday, 6 April 2009

Learning The Guitar Is So Different Today

Those who know how to play the instrument want to explore ways to improve their playing skills. When learning how to play the guitar you will here guitar jargon, these types of words were created so guitar people are able to communicate with each other in their own context.

The speed and confidence you have in making chord changes is key to mastering the guitar and successfully playing the instrument. You must make yourself comfortable with the position so that you will be able to execute correctly while playing the guitar. The pinkie is not used since it is the shortest finger and is not conducive to playing the guitar. Playing classical guitar is more inclined to figure work and plucking.

Whatever the reason you’ve got the guitar, learning to play online is a must. Let’s face it learning to play the guitar should be fun and not boring or frustrating.

Many people can not learn or find it boring to learn from a book, and many people find that private lessons are much to expensive, there is an alternative learn how to play buy DVD course or by learning online. When practicing playing the guitar each time your practice you will see how it the practicing paid off and maybe one day you will be a great guitar player.

When you first start out learning the guitar the positioning of your hands will feel strange and it will feel like you can’t move your hands correctly, to make this easier it is ok to look at where your fingers are positioned and as time goes on you will no longer need to do this. Learn how to play the guitar the correct way the first time and this will make it easier in the future, if you try to take shortcuts this will not help and actually make it harder for you to learn.

The remedy for this is of course to practice reading the sheet music without looking at the fret board. However, there are many learning processes going on at the same time when you practice on your instrument. A beginner should practice tuning the guitar so that he can become better and better at it. You will need to practice often, try to create a schedule by looking at a calendar and make a plan and stick to it. Most people like to make an appointment so it seems like you cannot miss it. Essentially, effective guitar practice consists of taking four elements of playing the guitar and incorporating them into your practice routine.

When you make preparation, timing, and warming up a part of your routine of how to practice the guitar effectively, you will see how quickly you improve your skills. Please, whatever you do, don’t take up the guitar if you are only going to practice the last hour before your lesson. But it does mean you need to set aside time to practice and commit to actually it.

When first learning the guitar the beginner should begin with the common chords, this will be the easiest way to begin. We've all been there soon after we get hold of our first guitar we know that to play anything people are actually going to listen to we need to "learn a few chords".

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

What To Look For In An Internet Guitar Lesson

Purchasing products online can require a little extra care and research to ensure that you are receiving the best product possible. Some people still feel apprehensive about shopping over the Internet, but it really is very safe and provides access to things you simply cannot find anywhere else. For example, a new and exciting trend is online education services, particularly those for playing musical instruments.

If you are interested in discovering some of these innovative and accessible programs, then you are making a smart choice. Here are some tips and ideas about what to look for to make sure that you find the program perfect for you. By ensuring that the program you choose meets these criteria, you will know that you are receiving the best guitar lesson possible.

The first requirement is that the program have been designed by a true musical professional. It is very important that the instructor not be an amateur because as a student your skill level will be limited by that of your teacher. This is why you need to make sure that your guitar lesson package has been written and designed by a pro.

The second requirement that you need to verify is that the instructor is not only a professional musician, but also a professional music teacher. There is a very big difference between knowing how to perform a skill and knowing how to teach others to do the same. A professional will understand that different people have different learning styles, and will be able to provide a guitar lesson to suit every learner.

The third requirement is that you consider how dynamic and creative the program is. It is next to impossible to learn how to play an instrument well from a text based book. Instead, a good program will offer interactive features such as visual aids and audio files. Your guitar lesson package should provide you with clips and examples that teach you how to play by showing you rather than simply telling you.

Finally, an online musical education program will not be effective unless it gets the student playing right away and keeps them playing every step of the program. Learning how to play an instrument is dependent upon becoming comfortable with the actual playing. This is why without active playing, no guitar lesson can be effective.

One system that meets all of these requirements and more is the Express Guitar learning program. This program was created by professional musician and teacher Mike Hayes. As a true master of this instrument, Mike Hayes knows what it takes to turn students from amateurs to pros. Visit http://www.guitarcoaching.com to learn more about this system and other great offers. By finding a program that meets your needs perfectly, you too can become a master guitarist in no time at all.

http://www.guitarcoaching.com located in Queensland, Australia, Hayes is passionate about his work and dedicated to helping students in guitar lessons.

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Tips to learn How to Play Guitar More Quickly

Once you have decided you want to play guitar, you want to learn fast. While nothing happens overnight, you want a way to play guitar as quickly as possible.

While you will still have to work at your lessons to learn how to play guitar, here are some tips that may help you catch on more quickly and see more progress.

Have a Chord Chart Reference

When you are learning to play guitar, you should always have a chord chart reference nearby. Most guitar shops have these for sale. Some are a single page that has been laminated. On it are a series of pictures that show where your fingers need to be in order to play a note. While you will be learning these chords in lessons, it helps to have a visual reference as you try to play guitar between lessons.

Focus on Your Hand Positions

The most important thing to get right when learning to play guitar is the locations of your hands on the guitar. This can take some time to get them right, as it always feels odd to put your hands in the positions necessary to play properly. Take your time and keep looking at your hand positions to make sure they are correct.

Pace Yourself

Don't get frustrated if you aren't able to play guitar as quickly as you would like. Like all things, learning to play guitar takes time. You need to be patient and allow yourself adequate time to learn.

Also, don't try to learn too much too fast. If you push yourself too hard to learn to play guitar, you may make it harder to learn. You should work on each thing you are learning until you have it down perfectly before moving to something new. Trying to learn too many things at once can become confusing.

Listen For Guitar Sounds in Music

While you go about your daily activities, listen to other guitars. There are always guitars being played in music. You should listen to these to learn guitar sounds. Study what other musicians are able to do with their guitars. There are different ways to strum a guitar. There are also numerous other sounds that can come out of this instrument. The more you listen to other guitars the more you will begin to understand the sounds you will be able to make with yours as you continue to learn.

About The Author:
Guitar Lessons Singapore is the Only Guitar Agency In Singapore. Master The Guitar Quickly And Easily. Fun & Inspiring Guitar Lessons. Call Audrey @ 6844 8985. Learn more at http://www.guitarlessonssingapore.com

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Tuesday, 24 March 2009

Blues Guitar – A Brief History

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, blues guitar players like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Lonnie Johnson were the influential performers of the day. They used a slide which was often made out of a knife blade or the broken or sawed off neck from a bottle. Most of the music was improvised, and unaccompanied. The form of the songs were loose, and were rarely, if ever, played the same way twice.

As the 1940’s came, the jump blues style characterized by big band music sequestered the guitar to the rhythm section primarily. The primary influence of this era on blues guitar is that it heavily influenced the development of what would later be known as rock and roll, or rhythm and blues.

After World War II in the 1950’s, blues guitar became electrified and amplified. Starting in Chicago, this new electric blues was characterized by the sounds of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Jimmy Reed. All of these players grew up in Mississippi, but migrated to Chicago. The bands typically had, in addition to the electric guitar, harmonica and a rhythm section of bass and drums. Sometimes there would also be a saxophone, though it would be relegated to a rhythmic support role.

B.B. King and Freddie King were also making names for themselves at this time. They were somewhat unique at the time because they did not make use of the slide to play the guitar. B.B. King has long been considered one of the greatest blues guitar players of all time. Freddie King has often been called the King of the Boogie Woogie guitar.

While Chicago had it’s own sound in the 1950’s, some other artists such as T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker were creating what some call the California Blues style. T-Bone Walker was born in Dallas, while Hooker was born in Mississippi. The California Blues Style that they helped to forge was smoother than the Chicago Blues and is somewhat of a melting pot for Chicago Blues, jump blues, and some jazz swing.

Starting in the 1960’s, Caucasian audiences gained more interest in blues guitar thanks in part to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and what was later to be called the British Blues Movement. Bands such as Fleetwood Mac, Cream, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the Rolling Stone, and the Yardbirds were performing classic blues tunes in addition to their original tunes. Many of these artists inspired American blues-rock artists like Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and Johnny Winter.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Luther Allison where creating what is called the West Side style of Chicago Blues. Their bands were dominated by the amplified electric blues guitar and heavily influenced later artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Lang, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

Since the early 1980’s, the blues has enjoyed quite a resurgence in America. The Texas Rock-Blues Style of Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Fabulous Thunderbirds brought the blues to American rock radio stations. Eric Clapton, who originally gained his fame with Cream and John Mayall, continues to make great blues guitar albums and even recently recorded a set of old Robert Johnson classics. Many famous, legendary blues guitar players such as Buddy Guy and B.B. King continue to share the stage with the new generation of blues guitar players like Robert Cray, Joe Bonamassa, and Walter Trout.

Griff Hamlin is a professional guitar player. He has just released Playing Through The Blues, a book on learning to play blues guitar. Visit http://www.playingthroughtheblues.com for more information.

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Sunday, 22 March 2009

What You Should Know About Beginner Guitar Chords

One of the biggest mistakes a new guitarist can make at the start of their musical career, whether for profit or pleasure is to go out and look for or buy a compendium book of six thousand chord shapes and all the variations and permutations that are involved.

You will instantly be overwhelmed with way too much information and thoughts of dread at the amount of time and effort involved in what you want to achieve. Learning all those shapes and fingerings is a massive undertaking and you will never finish it anyway.

Most musicians seem to make the assumption that they have to know all the music before they can create any for themselves. Nothing could be further from the truth, you do not have to learn all of those chords before you can start to play the guitar or any other instrument for that matter.

You must have heard about songwriters who have created songs with only three chords, the Beatles for instance. Thousands of songs have been written with 3 chords, so for the time being, three chords is all you are going to need to concentrate on. You will make much better progress by learning familiar 3 chord progressions and familiarising yourself with the structure of how the chords work together than trying to learn hundreds of chord shapes that don’t have any relevance to one another or that you can’t relate to.

Here are a few areas that you may not have thought about but will advance your playing a lot quicker than just knowing a bunch of fancy chords.

1. Pick a few easy chords that you know you could and would like to play. Lets take a C Major chord as our example as this is almost a standard army issue chord that everyone uses or will come across at one time or another throughout the coarse of their playing.

2. Focus your time on learning how to get your fingers from that chord shape to the next shape, i.e. C Major to G Major. Speed is not what matters here – just a smooth action or change over.

3. Use a drum machine or metronome at around 80 – 90 beats per minute and strum all the strings of one chord and then move to the next. What you want here is to just listen to the sound you are creating. This will be satisfying to begin with for you to know that it is possible for you to make some music. Also you will be gaining finger strength and building muscle memory. The next time you come to play these chords you will find it gets easier and easier to play. If you keep learning new chords all the time to begin with you won’t make any significant improvement.

4. If it is possible, you need to record what you are doing into your computer or tape player. Listening back to your playing the next day will benefit you tremendously. I must admit that you might cringe a little bit at your own playing at first, but if you take the plunge you will make the decision consciously or unconsciously to want to get better, quicker. In a very short time frame, you will get use to hearing what you sound like, that is when you will start to have some real fun. You will start to generate your own ideas.

5. Stay relaxed while you play and don’t force yourself to do anything. Ten minutes of focused practise at a time will yield far more results than mincing about for a few hours with no focus.

If you are one of those people who will do what is discussed above, you will instantly be in front of the pack. Go to any music shop and listen to the new guitarists sitting their showing off. Most of them are playing a bit from here, a snippet from there, there is not much that is refined or practised. This habit can be with them for the rest of their natural playing life.

If you start out gradually and focus on building slowly on what you have previously learnt, chord by chord, your playing will be much more confident, natural and above all, worth listening to.

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Wednesday, 18 March 2009

Play The Guitar By Starting With Chords

Learning to play the guitar is at the top of the ‘to do’ list for many of us. In fact many are investigating the right place to get resources to help make their dream of playing the guitar a reality. But wait. Don’t run out and buy training materials or courses just yet. Don’t start working with your beginning training materials just yet. There are some critical items to get out of the way before you are ready to move ahead. To find out more, read on. In this article I present play the guitar by starting with chords.

Before you start training to play the guitar, let’s start with a quick question; the song that you are playing on your guitar consists of what? The answer is notes. Notes are the very basis. And notes combine to create chords. In fact a chord is really just a group of notes all played together. As many beginners soon discover, playing most songs requires that you know and can play chords. And when you do this correctly the sound is pleasing to the ear!

Most beginner training material or classes begin with some easily created chords. As you play the guitar you’ll soon learn the simplest guitar chords. The good news is they don’t require the use of very many of your fingers. They are ‘G’, ‘C’, ‘D’ and ‘A’ and they take only three fingers.

As you begin to play the guitar you will learn to press down on the proper strings on the fret, on the neck of the guitar. Be sure to push down firmly, but not too hard. Then all you need to do is strum the strings directly in front of the hole found in the body. Sure it might take a little practice to become comfortable, but soon you’ll have one chord, then two and soon you’ll have all of the simplest guitar chords at your command.

It will take a little practice to find the right position for each hand and your arms. Your body will tell you when you have found the right position. You’ll know the wrong positions because of fatigue, aches and pains. Adjust your positions to help relieve the pain. Remember to expect some discomfort as your body gets adjusted to this new endeavor you are just starting.

Start your practice as you play the guitar with simple songs. They should have few chord movements. Practice, practice, practice. Try closing your eyes while you play. Replay each song until it is memorized and you are comfortable playing it. Practice until your fingers and hands seem to know exactly where they belong throughout the song. That’s when you know you’ve got it and are ready to move on to the next challenge.

To your success as you learn to play the guitar!

By: Bob Hamilton

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Tuesday, 17 March 2009

The Girl With The Green Guitar

The high energy performances of rising country rock star, Candy Coburn, are starting to win her an ever increasing fan base. Sporting her trademark green guitar, a Mother's Day gift from her husband, Candy literally explodes onto the stage in her live concerts. Her music has a unique style that Candy says was shaped by her life experiences and which seems to connect with her audience.

She has already released one CD titled, "Enjoy the Ride", and her second CD is due out sometime this fall. She has been doing a lot of touring during which she has opened for many of country music's biggest stars. In her most recent performance in Missouri's bootheel region, she opened for Little Big Town. She certainly did a good job there of warming the crowd as she had them hooting and yelling for more.

Candy is a down to earth girl with a big heart, and as soon as her performance ended, she headed straight for a group of children in a special section high up in the arena. The children, many of them in wheelchairs, were given a thrill by having their pictures taken with the performer they had just finished cheering for on stage. She remained signing autographs and having her picture taken with fans until the main performance was ready to begin. Even when Little Big Town had finished their set, she was found in the lobby still mingling with her fans.

This is not unusual for this down-to-earth, unspoiled, but quickly rising, new singer. She can often be found doing charity shows in her home region, and relates easily and naturally with her growing number of avid fans. Do not be surprised if in the future the cry of "We want some Candy" is heard all over the world of country music.

About the Author
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Sunday, 15 March 2009

Learning To Play Guitar Through Books, Videos And Software

Like for many out there who wants to learn to play the guitar, my journey towards learning the guitar had many ups and downs. I had took formal classes at $20 an hour. In addition, I was doing a group classical lesson too. While this method appears to be the best and easiest way ever to master the guitar, I found it really expensive and needed a lot of passion for guitar in order to be disciplined and sit down to practice. Furthermore, I was still a student. I had to think about my sports, studies and such. So, it was almost impossible to commit myself to a weekly class. Although, I actually did it, somehow, someway. I purchased the latest books, videos, and online software as well as software which were beneficial to me.

By using each of these different delivery methods I learned a bit, and am able to play many basic tunes on the guitar. Of course, I felt that some were useless, and some were good. This article contains opinions that are mine and may be or may not be similar to yours. So why talk further?

I still remember vividly that tuning the guitar in standard tuning was one of the toughest things to do! Still unable to do it for months, I actually practice on a wrong tuned guitar! Another major problem was playing chords. Even if you had not encountered any problems with this, the teaching of playing guitar is difficult to talk about on plain paper.

I fell in love with metal. I was listening to Trivium and found the guitar sound do beautiful that I decided that I wanted to be like them! I knew that I would take as much time as I could just to learn the songs and jam at a jamming studio because that was all that I wanted. I thought it would be real cool to play some flicks for a few of my friends whenever I meet them. This was when I started to look for ways to learn guitar. The Internet was not really good with lessons and such as it is today so I went to the music school and bookshops and bought a few musical books. It covered a little about music theory. What it failed to do was teaching me how to play! This was went all the problem started.

Another problem was actually reading the music. How did I know even know that I was playing the notes right? It was presented poorly in a horrifying manner which bores you to death. There was no one to correct me. You could just tricked yourself and say that you are right, when you are wrong. The biggest problem with the book method for me was a lack of easy diagram that showed me how the fingers were supposed to be and how the notes, bending and such were supposed to be like. Later on, many good books came with audio disc which could allow you to check if you played the notes right. This was a good improvement and help for everyone, without a doubt. Tuning was became much easier especially when electric tuners became cheaper, and I could listen to what the songs I was learning were supposed to sound like. However, problems still stayed after the introduction of the audio disc. I still felt that books are not the best method for learning to play guitar.

Then, I tried the videos. I could see and hear what the instructor was teaching. It was as though I had actually hired a teacher. Video close ups answered many of my questions on hand position and the nature of guitar playing. I was actually able to learn from the instructor and actually play some cool flicks. I found the rewind function very useful. I used it few hundreds of times to master difficult parts which I could not play in one whole short. However this method proved to be quite frustrating. The first was of course getting sick of it. You probably rewind it about 20times and there goes it, you get sick of it! The problem that I did not like the most was that you only learned to play songs that are on the tape. You will not be taught to play the songs you desire. At times, I would find this wasting of time because you are learning songs Another problem was the camera views of the clip. Some videos had lousy camera angles which could not let you see what the instructor is doing.

Now, on to the hottest way: Online software! Technology nowadays gives us the ability to purchase e-courses that allow you to learn at home, instead of wasting time going to music schools. It takes advantage of the tabs that are available free on the internet. This course overcomes the disadvantages of books and videos because it is dynamic. The software can also help you learn through fun means, instead of boring means. This is a cut over the other methods in my opinion. The main benefit with this method, and with this course in particular is that it is more interactive, interesting and engaging!

So what are the bad sides? The software will appeal to only some people. If they do not appeal to your likings, much of the content will be wasted. I have come across many bands/artists that many have tried to teach me although I am not interested. I still believe that online software is the best way to go to learn to play guitar. The interactive benefits are excellent. This is also a very easy way to learn!

By: Victor Chia

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