Archive for the ‘ General ’ Category

It’s not surprising that proper care of your guitar will give you a more consistent quality sound and a much longer guitar life. If you are serious about playing guitar you will want to get some accessories that are essential for the care of the guitar. A guitar player is only as good as the sound and the quality of the guitar he is playing.
The first item would be a hard shell case for transporting the guitar to and from the different locations that you will be playing the guitar. Many people use what they call soft or cloth “gig bag” which zip up and protect the exterior surface of the guitar. A major problem with this type of case is that the tuning nuts on the end of the neck of the guitar get out of tune almost every time you transport it as there is nothing to protect them from being bumped which causes them to turn and get out of tune. Also, if there is any kind of impact while loading and unloading the guitar, this could cause cracks or actual punctures in the body of the guitar. A hard shell case prevents these things from happening as there is space between the neck and body of the guitar and the actual case. The case is designed to take impact while holding the guitar securely on the inside protecting the actual body and neck of the guitar and keeping it in tune. It is a bit more of an investment than a gig bag but in the long run it will help to make your guitar last much longer.


Another item that should be considered for care of the guitar is a guitar stand. You need this to put the guitar on while you are not playing it. Many people lean the guitar against a wall or couch or some other stationary object when they are not playing it. There are a couple of reasons why this is not a good practice. The first would be that if you do not lean the guitar in the correct manner you can very easily warp the neck of the guitar which makes it much more difficult to play. Warping of the neck increases the distance between the strings and the neck which causes you to have to apply more force on the strings while playing. This can make for some very sore and blistered fingers! Also, leaving the guitar laying around makes it much more available for accidents to happen. Having a stand keeps the guitar in the same location when you are done with it and also supports the neck close to the body of the guitar which totally prevents warping of the neck – a small investment solving some big problems.

The last item that should be considered is an actual tuning device for the guitar. You will find that the longer you play the guitar the better you will become at tuning it by just using your ear. But for starting out, you will want to use something that gives you the exact sound and gives the guitar an accurate tune up. There are many devices that you can get that are very easy to use which will give you the exact tuning you need. When your guitar is not tuned correctly this can be very embarrassing – especially if you are singing along with the guitar!

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Easy Guitar Tabs

easy guitar tabs

If you’re just starting to learn the guitar, you should go to Google and type ‘easy guitar tabs’. There are tons of free guitar tabs out there, ‘guitar tablature’ or ‘guitar tabs’ allows you to see exactly how you read guitar tabs.

Guitar tabs, or tablature, is a musical notation method that was designed so that instruments can be played just by looking at where you place your fingers on the strut of the guitar, for example. Although it’s generally used more for the guitar or bass, in theory it could be used for any instrument including the ukulele, the mandolin, the banjo or any other stringed instrument which has a fret.

Musical notation is the process you generally see when you look at sheet music. With Musical notation, the notes are shown as a pitch that has rhythms of that note. Guitar tabs, on the other hand, are a way of physically representing the fret of the guitar. I shows exactly where you place your fingers on the fret. The frets are on the fret-board, which , in case you don’t know, is the long stem that sticks out of the top of the guitar. It usually has little white pearl circles, in-laid, that helps you when you’re placing your fingers.

It’s showing you the instrument’s fret-board, which is what the whole set of frets is called. It’s much easier for a beginner to pick out finger placement than it is to try and transpose Musical notation into where to place your fingers. Probably nobody would ever play the guitar if you had to do that.

Even if you come from a background where you’ve played musical instruments all your life, you’ll still find it easier to learn how to play a guitar with tablature than you would without it. To produce, a middle-C on a piano, for example, you simply press the C key. A guitarist, on the other hand, has to hold down the fifth string, pressing down on the third fret with their left hand. This is a lot to remember and has little relationship to the letter ‘C’. When they strum the strings, or pluck that particular string with their right hand, there is the letter C or a chord with the letter C in it.

So, because a piano has a straight-forward ‘you press this key for this note’, and guitar you have many complex things to do with both hands all at the same time, reading tabs can be better than trying to interpret musical notation on a typical sheet of music.

 

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beginning guitar

beginning guitar

If you’re just beginning guitar, then you need to understand where you are in the whole process of guitar playing. At the very beginning is, What’s a guitar? and at the end of the beginning is, I now have a guitar, and how do I begin?

So, beginning has many different meanings. If you know nothing, whatsoever, about a guitar then you’ll first need to learn the different parts of the guitar such as the head, the neck, the body and then there’s the pin. The head has the tuning knobs on it, the neck has the fret-board, which has the frets where you put your fingers, and the body has the sound hole that lets the sound come out if it’s a classical guitar.

Once you’ve become familiarized with the different parts of a guitar, you then have to decide whether you want to play acoustical (also called classical) or electronic guitar. Many don’t buy an electronic guitar right off, because they don’t know if they’re going to stick with it and an acoustical guitar costs less. So, oftentimes, people learn the guitar on an acoustical guitar and then move on to the electronic guitar.

However, there are those who believe that isn’t the way it should be done. Why? Well, the way you play a classical guitar are different than the ways you play an electronic guitar. An electronic guitar is generally used in a band, and classical guitars are used by folk singers. Folk singing has gone out of fashion, so nobody much plays a classical guitar any more. Thus, some think you should just begin with an electronic guitar.

So, beginning guitar, means that you make the decision whether you’ll start with an classical guitar, or an electronic one. One disadvantage of starting with an electronic one is, you start off by making noise. And kids will oftentimes just make noise thinking they’re playing a guitar. There’s less regimentation and a will to study when you have a loud blaring fun-to-just-get-sounds-out-of-it guitar.

The reason that electronic guitars cost much more than a classical guitar isn’t necessarily just because of the guitar, itself. An electronic guitar can actually be pretty good even if they are cheap ones because it isn’t the fancy way they make the guitar that gives you the quality of sound, as much as that’s true with a classical guitar. You also need an amplifier.

A Fender Starcaster Strat Pack Electric Guitar with Amp and Accessories can go for $200 and gets four stars. So, both can be about the same price. Many think that you just won’t take the time to learn on an electronic guitar. If you go through the effort it will take to learn music, and tablature, and sheet music, then you tend to do that more often if you buy a classical guitar than if you start with an electronic guitar. Thus, one of the decisions you’ll have to make when you’re beginning guitar is, Do I want an electronic or acoustical guitar?

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advanced guitar lessons

Advanced guitar lessons won’t be gotten to until after you’ve been playing the guitar a very long time. Musical instruments aren’t a thing that it takes ten minutes to learn. In fact, they might be one of the things which caused our ancestors to become far more intelligent. The human being doesn’t figure that they need to learn difficult things. We’re basically lazy, at heart, and probably would just sit there and do nothing if it was our own say in things. However, another thing that happens with humans is, we get bored.

If we see another human pick up a guitar and play things that are amazing, we don’t know that it really took them thirty years to get that good. Let’s say that you’ve been going to school since you were in Kindergarten, and now you’re in the twelfth grade. Would you have done that on your own, probably not? It’s only through study that you get good at things, and sometimes study that takes decades.

When you’re looking at the sheet music, you use the treble clef to read the notes. The clef. There are three kinds of clefs.

The treble clef, or G-Clef, is that curly thing that looks like an ampersand to the left of a staff on the sheet music. It points out the name and pitch of the notes on that line. The line that passes through the exact center of the encircled end of the curl of the clef is the G4 note.

The C-Clef is a strange looking one. It has two horizontal bars on the left and a thing that sort of looks like a backwards-capital-E to the right of it.

The C-Clef shows where the Middle C, or C4 is on the staff. The line that passes through the center of the clef is Middle-C.

The F-Clef looks like a backwards-C with a dot at the top of it with a colon to the right of it.

The F-Clef shows where the F3 note is on the staff. The line between the two dots is the F3 note.

The reason you have three different kinds of clefs is so you can write for different kinds of instruments. If they use a C-Clef, that’s for middle parts. An F-Clef is for low parts like the Tuba, and the G-Clef or treble clef, is for high parts or instruments like the flute.

Now that I’ve told you all that, know that as a guitar player you need not worry about any clef other than the treble clef, or G-Clef, generally.

Next, realize that these clefs can be placed anywhere, up-and-down, the sheet page. That defines that that particular line (which I just defined, such as the C4 with the C-Clef, etc.) is not fixed on the staff line. If you take one sheet music, the G-Clef might be down so that the curly-Q passes through the very bottom line. That would mean that the G line would be the bottom line, and you’d shift all other lines up or down accordingly.

At the beginning, do you think you can do that? Of course you can’t. At the beginning they will only tell you one clef, and they’ll pass very quickly by the fact that it might shift up and down like that because it’s too confusing to realize at the early stages of the game. However, I believe that a person should understand where they’re going, then rein back in.

 

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