When you are learning to play guitar, it is all to easy to become mired in a groove of playing only 1 style. While this is a ton of fun, it won’t help you evolve as a guitarist very much, and might open the way to you getting to be rather restricted as a musician.
As a industrial metal guitarist, when I first started learning to play guitar I instinctively gravitated towards the heavy axemen of that era, but that started to limit the kinds of things I was capable of, and I found out that learning to play guitar was about more than just copying your heroes.
The key to moving yourself on as a guitarist is to be sure you experiment with some other styles that will complement those that you are acquainted with. For rock and metal guitarists, useful styles of music to test out would be the blues and classical music.
Blues guitar and classical guitar playing include many of the methods that ended up making the metal and rock sounds of here and now, and studying these styles can in turn add another dimension to your own guitar playing. The key is to never limit yourself when Learning To Play Guitar. Limiting the styles you learn limits your development, and the last thing you want is to get stuck playing the same thing over and over again without any room to grow and create better music.
The basics of each particular genre could take asmall getting comfortable with, but the effect on your own individual talents will be hard to ignore. Guitar players you might check out would include people like Yngwie Malmsteen (for the classical influences), Michael Lee Firkins (for country and blues influences) or Ritchie Kotzen (for blues influences).
Try out examples of country music or bluegrass, or ska. Try anything that is a little beyond your own zone and your own established influences. Not merely will you become a far more creative guitar player, but playing around with these other disciplines will help Learning To Play Guitar be much more enjoyable and much more gratifying.
When you imagine yourself as a guitar player you probably think of the electric guitar. It looks really cool posing with one and they make great sounds. But is it so cool you want to spend days investigating which is the best guitar for a beginner, where to get the best price, what amp to start with, what ancillary stuff you need? Or is it better to get that over with so you can concentrate on serious posing and maybe do a little playing? So let’s embark on a journey that will take us flying over the desert of dreary comparison shopping so we can graze in the lush meadows of power chords and adoring chicks.
So let’s begin putting together a pack of necessities for the beginner electric guitar player. Your local guitar mart is packed with snazzy looking axes that may or may not love you back when you start caressing their strings, all at varying price ranges. How can a novice figure out which brands are best for which price? Okay, grab an electric guitar and look at how it’s made. It is, after all a piece of electronic equipment and should be built to give good service. A well built electric guitar will have the body, neck and fret board made of wood, not laminate or plastic.
For most novice electric guitar players, the vibrato, or “floating” bridge is the one to get. The other type is the fixed bridge which does not allow you to “bend” notes using the tremolo arm or “whammy-bar”. While we are on the subject, you should be warned that using the whammy bar on a cheap guitar often leads to broken strings, so if you end up with one of these you might want to remove the whammy bar altogether. And another thing: an electric guitar has twenty-two frets, but some beginner’s models are smaller. Don’t get this unless you’re about ten years old. Stick to the ones with twenty-two frets.
Now we come to the pickups which are little microphones sitting underneath the guitar strings. Pickups close to the bridge give a sharp “twangy” tone, while the pickups closer to the fret board give a deeper sound. It’s quite easy to get a guitar with three pickups and a switch that lets you choose which pickups are being used.
As for price, are the guitars at the lower end of the price range inferior to the more expensive ones? Heck no! You’ll get years of musical enjoyment with one of the less expensive models.
Now let’s turn our attention to amplifiers. The way your new guitar sounds will depend largely on the way your amplifier is put together. The power of a guitar amplifier is measured in watts. The higher the wattage, the more volume. Start thinking in the five watt vicinity to start with. That’s about the size of your average practice amp. As for most electronics applications electric guitars’ tubes were replaced by transistors many years ago but most guitar players use electric guitars with tube amplifiers because they have a better sound quality. You may be able to get your hands on a practice amp with the option of using a vacuum tube, but if you can’t, don’t worry you should apply your time and energy to learning your instrument right now.
As for the question of which effects to get, most people begin with trying to sound like their favorite lead guitarist, but you should try to get some kind of idea of what’s available. There is no “pure” electric guitar sound. It is all altered to some degree. The different ways the guitar sound can be changed is called “effects”. Effects like distortion, reverberation, and equalization give the guitarist more creative control over the sound. Some amplifiers have distortion built in because it is the most popular electric guitar effect. Generally speaking the more effects that are built into the amplifier, the better but if you’re not to into a whole lot of effects just stick to what you really need.
Okay, that’s a brief rundown on what you need to begin a career as an electric guitar player, and if you see loads of practice lying around in the guitar store, pick up as much as you can afford.
Ricky has many more tips for guitar players of all levels at his blog Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free, a continuously updated directory of free guitar lessons, videos, chord charts and lots of useful guitar stuff.
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Electric guitars have made their home in our universe. There are even classical pieces composed for electric guitar. This is a new kind of musical instrument. Not only is the sound amplified by electronics but the sound itself is MADE by electronics. Can just anybody learn to make music on this twenty-first century instrument?
Well first of all it is best to start to learn using a nylon string acoustic guitar. Steel strings are rough on the fingers when you are just learning how to play. So whether you get it from ebay or the local music store, you need an acoustic guitar that’s halfway decent. It doesn’t need to be expensive, just playable.
When it comes to buying an electric guitar, you can easily start off with one of the less expensive models. You can get the buzz from playing a real honest to goodness electric guitar on whatever no-frills Stratocaster copy your music store has, and it will get through your initial guitar playing experiences.
If there’s one single lesson that all guitar students of all styles of music need to learn, it’s TAKE IT EASY – SLOW DOWN. The music will still be there, you don’t have to rush out to meet it. If you have a tendency to go too fast, to try to force your body to do chord changes before the muscles have learnt them properly, ask yourself how you want to be sounding in a year’s time. Because if you don’t slow down when you are learning you are going to be sounding like a hat full of baby seals in one year – and probably twenty years time!
An important aspect of learning to play electric guitar is how you are going to be holding the guitar during your long hours of practice. If you do not pay attention to this stuff now, you could end up with back, neck and shoulder problems later from straining your muscles and skeleton.
Now you have your guitar, and of course a decent amplifier. A practice amp is good for use when playing near loved ones if you want to remain loved yourself. Another good idea is to get some kind of guitar effects program for your computer but be aware that some of them can be very hard on your computer’s resources.
A tuner and a metronome are essentials. These are two bits of equipment which are part of the discipline of electric guitar playing. Get into the habit of tuning your guitar from time to time during practice sessions – you might be surprised how far out you can get without being aware of it! While you are first learning how to play electric guitar you probably won’t be able to do too much jamming with friends until you develop a familiarity with your instrument. So once you feel you have gotten the hang of a song or a riff, try it out with the metronome. As slowly as you need to; you are not doing anybody any favors by rushing.
Do you need a teacher for electric guitar? Can you get all you need from books in your local music store or off the internet? It’s true that looking for a person who can teach you what you need to know in a way that you can handle it is a bit of a trial. It’s like any relationship, a lot better without the other person, but what can you do? If you want to try learning without a teacher then make Google your friend. If you are not used to using search engines, just type any questions into the search box in your own words, and the results you get will at least point you in the right direction. Start by looking for guitar forums. This is where you will find people like yourself who have questions together with people who have answers.
There are many ways online to learn to play guitar, some involve buying packages of videos and books which will be delivered to your house. Some give the less expensive option of downloading the videos and instructions. For the most part these guitar teaching methods are excellent. Another way to go is an online course where you can interact with your teacher and ask questions by email or on a forum. This is by far a better way to go because it can’t be quite as easily forgotten about as a course that consists of physical goods or computer files.
As the distinction between electric guitars and synthesizers becomes less distinct the novice electric guitarist gets more opportunities to reproduce the sound of his or her favorite artist. But as your guitar skills expand you will have a world of electronic music to play with. Enjoy!
Ricky has many more tips for guitar players of all levels at his blog Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free, a continuously updated directory of free guitar lessons, videos, chord charts and lots of useful guitar stuff.
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Humidity in the air mixed with oil and stuff off your fingers gets to your Electric Guitar strings, deadens the sound and makes your fingers feel like they are touching really hard earthworms. Not only do they feel icky but worn out strings are a pain to tune. A good rule of thumb if you play every day for an hour or two every day is to change your electric guitar strings around every two weeks.
As a beginning guitar player you have ahead of you the hassle of sacrificing practice time to learn a new routine added to the daunting task of tuning and retuning your new strings. First, to make sure you’re not changing your guitar strings more than necessary, you need to give some attention to your strings during their life on the guitar.
On electric guitars, you will find the first three strings are plain wire, and the other strings are wound around a central core. Some strings use nickel-plated wrap wire which gives a great overall sound, but if you’re after a brighter sound you’ll be using a stainless-steel wrap which gives you a brighter sound.
To keep the strings fresh for as long as possible, get in the habit of wiping your strings down with a soft, dry cloth. Get the cloth between and behind the strings every day before you put away your guitar, and you’ll be giving them extra life.
Keep your cloth handy so that once you have begun the job of changing your guitar strings, you can wipe oil and dirt from the finger board as you go.
Your first job is to take a close look at how your strings are attached to the guitar. Not everybody thinks of that and they end up having to phone a friend to get their strings back on. Now would be a good time to mention that you’ll need a string winder, a little item that will save you a whole lot of time. A decent string winder is quite inexpensive and will often come complete with a string cutter for removing the unwanted ends of guitar strings. If you don’t get the built-in trimmer you will need a small pair of pliers.
Most guitarists find it best to remove and replace one string at a time. Once a new string is on the guitar, tune it. It will go out of tune again, but start on each one right away.
Start on the sixth string. Use the string winder to turn the tuning peg so the string loosens. Then use the cutter to cut off the twisted end of the old string and remove it from the tuning peg.
Take out the old string completely – once again paying attention to how your old string comes off so you can do the opposite when putting a new one back on.
Feed the new string through the hole in the body or the tail piece of the guitar. Pull until the ball is anchored in place.
Pull the new string over the bridge and the nut and past the tuning peg. Always wind so the string wraps from the inside of the post out. There should be enough string to go around the tuning peg a couple of times. Use your cutter to remove excess string.
Pull the string through the hole of the tuning peg and wind it, keeping it tight all the while, using your string winder til the string tightens up. Once the tuning peg is finger-tight, fine tune the string by hand.
Repeat the process for all the other strings.
Once you have all the strings on the guitar, do a little strumming and pull on the strings and retune them til they stay in tune. While you are still new to guitar playing set aside a whole afternoon for changing your strings. Pay attention to detail to make sure you are clear about what you have to do and why.
Ricky has many more tips for guitar players of all levels at his blog Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free, a continuously updated directory of free guitar lessons, videos, chord charts and lots of useful guitar stuff.
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There can’t be many people who wouldn’t have loved to become a guitar hero. Standing onstage, legs apart thrashing out power chords and blistering guitar solos loud enough to make peoples ears bleed. And there are a number of truly great electric guitars that have stood the test of time.
One of the most famous electric guitars is the Fender Stratocaster. Originally designed way back in 1954 the Fender Strat was the instrument favoured by the late, great Jimi Hendrix. This is also the guitar selected by Pete Townsend of the Who and, of course, Eric Clapton. The Fender Stratocaster is as popular today as it ever was, a testament to the excellent design.
Another well known guitar from Fender is the Telecaster. This beautifully simple instrument was first introduced as the Broadcaster in late 1949 and has been in continuous production ever since. There are and have been many well known and talented guitarists who like to play Fender Telecasters. One of the most well known is, of course, Keith Richards who takes to the stage with an array of Telecasters, open tuned to a ‘G’ chord for that classic Rolling Stones sound.
If we are talking about classic guitars we must of course mention the fantastic Gibson Les Paul. This is another design classic, first produced back in the 1950s and made ever since. Jimmy Page, guitarist with Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, is a great lover of the Gibson Les Paul. A modern day guitarist who is a great exponent of Les Paul is, of course, Slash of Guns ‘n’ Roses fame.
Since I’ve mentioned a couple of Fenders its only fair to mention a couple of great Gibsons. I could have chosen the fantastic ES335, a favourite with many great guitarists, including BB King but instead I have chosen the exceptional Gibson SG. This fantastic looking electric guitar, with the distinctive double cutaway, was introduced in the early 1960s to compete with the popular Fender Strat. This is the guitar of choice for Angus Young, lead guitarist and songwriter in the Australian rock band ACDC. This is also the guitar used by the great Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath.
There are just so many great guitars but these four are, without doubt, at the top of the list of great electric guitars of our age.
If you are just getting into playing electric guitar I can recommend any of these guitars. But the one that I would start with is the Fender Telecaster. This was the first really good guitar that I bought for myself and it worked wonders for my guitar playing.
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