Getting Started With Guitar

When we start to learn anything, starting out right in the first place will save a lot of problems and hard work later on. We humans are impatient and just want to go from that point of knowing little or nothing to becoming very familiar with the subject in the shortest time possible.

People get into playing guitar in lots of different ways and sometimes the way that you are introduced to guitar playing can have a big influence on the style you choose and how successful you become.

So let's look at some of those processes and maybe give you some useful pointers to assist your guitar playing.

Lots of children get introduced to guitar playing in school now and have a reasonably open choice as to what style of guitar we choose.

Often times though people buy a second hand instrument from a local classified ad without any real understanding of the different types of guitar and whether the one they have chosen is any good for the style they want to play.

Choosing a guitar

There are many different types of guitar but they basically break down into acoustic or electric.

The oldest type of guitar is an acoustic instrument known as the Spanish or classical guitar. This means that it creates its sound by the vibrations of the string which are amplified inside the hollow body. It has nylon strings and has a smaller body than the other types that we will look at. It also has a much wider neck than the other types of guitar. This has some advantages when you are just starting out in that it makes it easier to play chords without the annoying buzzing or touching the wrong strings that are a real pain at first. The wider neck does also mean that you have to stretch your fingers wider to form the chords which can be difficult for children.

I personally think it is a good idea for everyone to start out on a classical guitar and learn the basics of chords, how to form them, some music theory and how to play melodies with both the fingers and a pick.

However, for those of you that want to play rock guitar with all kinds of electronic effects, starting out with a classical guitar will probably not be very appealing. All I will say here is that if you study the great rock guitar players as I have you will find that almost without exception they started out learning the basics on a classical guitar.

The steel strung guitar is also an acoustic guitar which is generally bigger in the body and has a longer neck. This is the style of guitar that folk singers and country singers tend to use. The strings are closer together making it harder to form clean chords and push down on the neck. When you are starting out you will get very sore fingers playing with these steel strings while the ends of your fingers harden off.

Finally we have the many types of electric guitar which generally have sold bodies and rely almost entirely on the electrification to create the sound which is pushed out through an electric amplifier.

I said that often the type of guitar we choose has an effect on our playing experience and this is true. As a guitar teacher, I often found that a child would come to me for lessons with a classical guitar that his or her parents had bought them and would get discouraged when it didn't sound like Eric Clapton.

I had to explain that you can only play a certain style on a classical guitar but that learning the basics would set them up for life. Some of them accepted this and moved on to electric guitar as they got to know the instrument better but the bulk of them would quit.

The choice of guitar for you is really down to the style you want to play and the budget you have to spend. When you are starting out I would recommend that you visit one of the larger music stores with lots of choice and knowledgeable staff to help you.

In the specialist music stores you will always find that the staff are not only very helpful but that most of them are good players too and will be able to demonstrate what the instrument is capable of in the hands of someone that really can play.

Go along, take your time to try some out and don't worry that you sound like a beginner. We were all beginners once and the guys in the store won't laugh at you.

Go to http://www.guitarmembers.com for more help and advice from Trevor Greenfield. As an Internet marketer for 11 years Trevor Greenfield has been able to combine his passions of helping people make money online with his other great loves, one of which is the guitar.

Discover the secret to mastering the guitar fast

Some people seem to get good at playing guitar so fast that you wonder if there is a secret they know that others don't. There has to be some secret that they are using otherwise everybody would be great guitar players, right?

Well in my view you're right, there is a secret. There is a secret that they know and use everyday that I thought you would like to know. Well if you really want to know I'll tell you - its lots and lots of practice.

Now OK, I know that's not what you wanted to hear but before you move swiftly on to see if anyone else has the magic pill, bear with me for a moment or two and I'll explain what's going on here and how you can use it to skyrocket your guitar playing.

Let's go back to when you were a small child, when you were just born in fact and look at an analogy that I think will clear up a lot of frustration.

I liken learning to play guitar to learning to talk. Think about it for a moment, when you were first born you couldn't speak a single word. You could yell at the top of your voice to let Mom or Dad know you needed feeding or changing but that was about it.

What's more it didn't matter what language your parents spoke, you couldn't speak it at that age. However, by the time you were 5 years old you had mastered almost the entire structure of your language and thousands of words and phrases. It didn't matter whether that language was Spanish, English, any of the Chinese dialects, Arabic, Jewish or any of the hundreds of languages on Earth.

You developed that level of expertise by listening to your parents and copying what they said and how they said it, over and over again. In other words you practiced constantly until you perfected speaking your mother tongue.

No matter what you want to do, practice is the real key. There is an old saying that practice makes perfect and it is as true today as when it was first uttered. If we look at some of the great guitar players we see that they were just totally dedicated to getting as good at playing the guitar as was humanly possible.

Great players like Eric Clapton are so obsessed with playing guitar that they practice continually. Eric was known to even practice at the bus stop! Tommy Emmanuel got his first guitar at age 4 and practiced so well that by the age of 6 he was touring with his family band, and by the age of 10 had played his way across Australia.

Even though practicing is key, if we go back to our example we notice that we didn't learn to speak on our own. We didn't have to figure out what language our parents spoke and set about learning that by ourselves so we could talk to them. We had lots of our own people around us to listen to, to work on our speaking skills with and to encourage us to get better.

Tommy Emmanuel had his family to play with. His mother bought him his guitar at age 4 to accompany her while she played steel lap guitar. He was playing in a band almost since he was born. All great musicians start playing with other musos early on in their playing career.

Practicing seems far less boring when you are playing guitar along with other people. Today we are fortunate that with all of the modern technology available we don't have to miss out on this great experience of playing in a band if we don't have any fellow musicians around, we can use backing tracks.

Backing tracks are a great way to practice your skills with a live band feel any time you get even a few minutes to practice. They are basically tracks of music without the lead guitar but recorded with the drums, bass, keyboards and all the other instruments present in the original song. Some tracks also have the rhythm guitar while others leave it out to allow you to play rhythm yourself until you get better at playing lead.

Practicing guitar on your own can be one of the most soul destroying things you can do. Guitar backing tracks are the modern secret that allows you to bring out the true guitarist inside you that is just waiting to get out and show what it can do. This is because backing tracks produce the same output no matter how many times you play them. They are there over and over again to provide you with the support you need to try again to learn and master new skills.

In many ways you feel that you don't want to let you new band down which encourages you to try again when without the band there you might just give up for today!

Having a full band behind you with those backing tracks leaves you free to concentrate on creating better solo work for when you're on stage. By having a rhythm section behind you, with all the spots open for you to solo, you can practice and work on experimenting with improvisation and creating better and better solos. Being able to improvise is an extremely important technique for a guitarist to learn, and it takes a lot of practice. But guitar backing tracks can help you to get the most out of your practice time as well as make it much more fun.

The golden rule for practicing is to do at least 20 - 30 minutes every day. Developing a habit of practicing a little and often is far better than doing an hour or more once a week. Once you get used to working with backing tracks you'll find that whenever you get a few minutes you can be playing with a full band and not only getting a lot of pleasure but improving your ability faster than ever.

Keep strummin'

Trevor Greenfield
Guitar Members