The Guitar Magician

Learn to Play the Guitar

Can you learn to play the guitar? Of course you can! Young, Old, man, woman, girl or boy. You can learn to play the guitar and you
should! If you feel you have no musical talent at all don’t worry about it. Familiarity itself will increase your ability.

One of the best ways I know of to learn the guitar is TO USE IT !. Thats right…touch it, feel it, hold it, strum it, tune it,
play it, clean it, restring it, play catch with it, whatever you can anything but USE it.

Almost every interview or article I have ever read dealing with a guitarists work, eventually leads to the subject of “Tone”. And rightfully so.

Definition
Tone [French. ton; German Ton; Italian-Spanish tono]:(3) the character of the sound achieved in performance on an instrument (The Harvard Dictionary of Music).

In other words it is the way the note sounds, the quality of the sound, the color that it has, the pleasantness or harshness or fullness, the brightness or bite that the note might possess. It is what makes you either like it or hate it.

Do you know how the guitar got it’s name? Do you know where the guitar originally came from ? Do you know what the oldest guitar still in existence is? Do you know when then first “modern” style guitar was made. Do you know when the first electric guitar was patented?

I was just reading a great article at Wikipedia about all this information. It is really interesting to see the different evolutions the guitar went through and to see that it has always been a very popular instrument .

That is a good and timeless question. I have some suggestions:

1. Have a friend that plays guitar show you a few chords and some songs to go along with them.
2. Go online and search for the song lyrics,chords and guitar tab to your favorite songs. Because you are already familiar with the songs you can work out how to play them rather quickly!

These are both good solid workable ways to get started. By doing this you will build up familiarity with the guitar. You’ll get used to holding and strumming, you’ll start to see some patterns in the way certain chords are grouped together and you will start to feel comfortable with your guitar.

A few hints on kicking it up a notch.

Whenever you feel like you’ve hit a plateau in your guitar playing use the following tips to move your playing up to the next level

The first is to use a metronome. The regularly maintained beat will help you refine your timing and bring it completely under your control. Use the metronome as a tool to increase your dexterity and playing skill as well. When you have a guitar piece mastered at say 84 Beats Per Minute, crank up the metronome try 104 then 144 Beats Per Minute and so on. Do the same with scales until you can rip though them with ease. Believe me this will bring you to a new level for sure.

What are guitar Tabs? Tabs (short for tablature) are a great simple way to “read” where the notes of a song are even if you can’t “read music”.

Tablature is drawn as a chart using the fret board of the guitar as the background. Six lines are drawn on the chart to represent the guitar strings. Small circles with numbers in them (representing the fret at which the string is fretted) are placed on the “strings” in the sequence that they are played. This allows the player to see at a glance where his fingers should be in order to play the next note!