The Absolute Basics Of Playing Guitar

1. This section covers the basics of the guitar and should be the choice destination for beginning guitarists, but there is a lot of material here that even some intermediate or advanced players may benefit from.

Before You Start Playing

In this chapter we’ll learn about the parts of the guitar, how to hold the guitar, how to use a pick, how to tune your guitar, and the names of the open strings.

• 1. Parts Of The Guitar
• 2. How To Hold The Guitar
• 3. The Pick And It’s Use
• 4. The History Of The Guitar Pick
• 5. Naming The Strings
• 6. Tuning Your Guitar
• 7. How to Fret The Guitar
• 8. Guitar techniques
• 9. Open String Ear Training Exercise
• 10. Drop D Tuning

Getting To Know The Fretboard

It’s highly important that you begin to get familiar with the names of the notes on the frets of a guitar. Knowing them will serve you to a great degree in the future when learning chord and scale systems.

1. Mapping Out The Fretboard: The 12 notes in music and how they relate to guitar.
2. What Are Dot Inlays?
4. Dot Inlays And The 12th Fret
6. The Notes On The Guitar
7. Primary Notes Chart
8. How To Read Tablature
9. Fretboard Exercise
11. Fretboard Flashcards: If you are having
    trouble remembering the names of the notes on
    your guitar fretboard, then these handy printable
    flash cards will definitely do the trick!

Playing Guitar Chords

Chords are a fundamental element in music. One of the reasons that the guitar is such a popular instrument is it’s ability to play chords. If you think about it most instruments don’t have this ability. Of course keyboard instruments like pianos have this ability, but what about trumpets, or saxophone, etc.?

1. All About Guitar Chords Here we discuss what a chord is and how a chord is formed as well as intervals found using steps in chords.
2. How To Read A Chord Diagram: In order to learn chords, you must first understand how to read a chord diagram.
3. The 5 Basic Chord Shapes: There are 5 basic chord shapes featuring both major and minors. Here we show you each of the 5 chord shapes, which actually allow you to learn ANY chord you ever want to know using these 5 basic shapes.
4. Changing Chords Exercises: Before you begin tackling more intricate chords and changes involved within them, we need to first make sure we
   understand how to change chords using the major chords you learned previously.

Rhythm And Strumming

In this chapter we will work on playing in time and strumming basic chords to the beat.

1. What Is Strumming? Strumming isn’t just a simple concept. Sure there are elements of strumming that might seem simple, but that is ONLY the beginning!
2. Introduction To Rhythm: Here we will discuss the two main elements of strumming, which are rhythm and pitch. We also expand our vocabulary by learning about measures, standard time, and tempo.
3. Strumming To A Beat: Before you begin learning to strum on a more intermediate level, you must make sure that you understand how to follow the beat when provided.
4. Quarter Note Strumming: Now we’re going to play a series of chords that you’ve already learned using quarter notes.
5. Strumming Patterns: While you will find that strumming patterns are rarely necessary (or even recommended) to use when playing a song, this section details a few of the more common ‘templates’ one could use when learning to strum a song based on the genre of music it comes from.