Learn Guitar For Free

How To Learn To Play Guitar For Free by Ricky Sharples You will find many tips and tutorials for guitar players of all levels at 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. Contents How To Learn Guitar Chords Online 2 3 4 5 Using Free Guitar Backing Tracks To Learn To Play Guitar The Tools You Need To Learn To Play A Guitar For Free Download and Bookmark Video Guitar Lessons to Learn Guitar Learn The Simplicity Of Guitar Picking 6 Guitar Practice - What Do You Need? 7 Computer Guitar Lessons 8 © Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free How To Learn Guitar Chords Online Whatever musical genre you are into, you will need to learn how to play chords. There are varying degrees of focus on learning chords. In rock, country and blues you can get away with learning a few chord shapes to play the I IV V chord progression in all the keys you need to play in. In classical guitar you learn to read written musical notation by starting with simple pieces of music. There is little or no separate learning of chords. In jazz you learn many different exotic chords in your quest for the ability to express yourself in all keys and modes. The general idea for anyone starting an online guitar course is that you will be learning to play guitar chords as you progress through your guitar lessons. If you examine guitar theory you will see that learning about scales and the circle of fifths will give you an understanding of how chords are created. You will have the power to understand why chords sound good together and you will be able to make your own chords as and when you need them according to your understanding of music. For beginners, chord charts are the way they get their introduction to playing music. No sheet music or tabs to learn, just get your head around the idea that chord charts are pictures of the guitar neck, and away you go. This is when reality can bite. Making chord shapes can be painful, and learning to make chord changes can be slow and discouraging. This is where repeated practice comes to the rescue like dude on a white horse. Practicing chord changes is the magical element that turns you into a guitar player instead of a guitar fan. So let's go online to find the tools to learn chords. The first step in learning guitar chords is to find some free guitar chord charts online. They are not hard to find. Then you will need to get tabs or sheet music for some songs that you enjoy. It is not a good idea to just learn chords without also learning some songs to use the chords in. That is just too boring. The next step is to watch videos on YouTube or a similar site where people have uploaded clips of themselves explaining how to play basic guitar chords. To learn to play chords you make use of your body's talent for remembering movements. If you watch somebody in a sandwich shop or some other line of work that involves repeated small movements, you will see that they move very fast, just like a guitar player does. Typing is a good example. You learn the location of the letters, you get a basic understanding of how to hold you hands and arms. And then you type. You type until you do not have to think about where the letters are. Your body knows. This is referred to in guitar playing as "muscle memory". If you are learning to play guitar chords without the benefit of a teacher, then the idea of muscle memory is your friend. If you understand that you supply the time, say half an hour to two hours a day, practice time, then your body has the ability to learn how to make fast chord changes all by itself. You just need to give it time. There is a degree of discomfort in learning guitar chords. Your left hand finger tips will hurt until you develop callouses, your back will complain about long hours of holding the guitar and your fingers are not enthusiastic at all about stretching to make chords and scales. Just remember that no matter what it looks like when you watch a professional guitar player at work, he had to go through what you are going through. 2 Using Free Guitar Backing Tracks To Learn To Play Guitar Guitar backing tracks are audio files that you can download for free or buy online that provide you with an accompaniment to your playing. Sometimes referred to as "jamtracks", these backing tracks will be as much help to you in your guitar playing as a metronome or guitar tuner. Backing tracks do not have a vocal or lead guitar part. Just rhythm. They will help you to play in time and give you something of the "feel" of playing in a band. You will find that your guitar practice sessions will be much more fin and rewarding when you have your own backing band at your disposal. Once you have you backing tracks on your computer you will need to start using them as soon and as often, as possible. After the first excitement has worn off, you will find yourself forgetting or not bothering to use your backing tracks but you need to stay focused. The more you use them, the higher quality your guitar playing will be. Learning new songs and chord progressions can be broken into two parts. Learning where to put your fingers to make the chords, and practicing the chord changes. Once you have the actual chord shapes in your memory, you should start using your guitar backing tracks to get you playing the chords along with the band and practicing arpeggios and riffs. You will have to start off at a very slow speed but using the backing will keep you in time and stop you from getting into a rut. For the guitar player who has gone beyond learning basic chords, there is a temptation to get too carried away with extended guitar solos. A six minute backing track will tempt you to stretch your solos but it is better to concentrate in learning a few riffs and licks at first. You may feel that you jamming with the backing tracks is letting your creative spirit soar but you really need to collect some solid material from the CDs of the great guitarists. To keep your head out of the clouds while you are practicing with your backing tracks, you should be recording your guitar practice. It is a reality check that we all need on a daily basis, so it is a good habit to get into. 3 The Tools You Need To Learn To Play A Guitar For Free Learning to play guitar is like any other journey in that you need some equipment and luggage. You need a regime of daily practice and you need to keep the spirit of experimentation alive in your practicing. All without the help of a teacher. The equipment you need to learn guitar for free is available on the internet. All you need to do is remember to use it daily. If you don't, your playing will gel stale and your interest will wane. If you are learning to play guitar without a teacher or guidance from a seasoned guitar player, you are going to need to join some guitar forums. You sign up and introduce yourself and let people know what you want from guitar playing and how you are going about getting it. The members or these forums range from beginners like yourself to guitarists with fifty years' experience. YouTube is an important place to look for free video guitar lessons. There are many other sites that feature guitar lessons on video but everybody seems to post on YouTube, so you may as well start there. If you are clear on the style of guitar playing you want to do, just type the name of the genre into the YouTube search box. For instance you might want to learn bluegrass so you type in "bluegrass guitar" into the box. As you gain more knowledge or the music you will learn more search terms to look for, for example you might want to look for videos featuring flat picking or finger picking or clips showing the technique of particular players like Doc Watson. There's a wide range of sites that archive the work of guitar players who write out tabs for songs and instrumentals. You should be able to find and download free tabs and chord charts for songs you want to learn. Sometimes a guitarists who posts a video of himself playing a song on YouTube will provide a link to his site where you can find the tabs to his version of the song. Other tools you can get for free are metronomes and guitar tuners. One important piece of equipment you will need is a tab editor like Power Tab which plays tabs as MIDI files as well as enabling you to read and write your own tabs. 4 Download and Bookmark Video Guitar Lessons to Learn Guitar The twentieth century sole the guitar become a very popular musical instrument. Under the influence of rock 'n roll and the folk music boom in the 1960s, the guitar became the obvious choice for young people looking to express themselves musically. Not everybody is able to pay for lessons to learn guitar. Nor are they able to subject themselves to the discipline of a fully regimented guitar lessons course. The internet has given these people a choice of ways to learn guitar. If you do not have the desire to take a guitar lessons course you can download video guitar lessons from the internet. The fact is there is a bewildering array of video guitar lessons to suit all musical tastes and levels of technical ability. There are also websites that charge a small fee for downloadable lessons or tabs for individual songs. Okay, that's not free, but it's peanuts compared to what you would pay for guitar lessons at your local guitar teaching studio. As a matter of fact, you could probably buy two or three comprehensive downloadable guitar courses for the cost of one-on-one guitar teaching for a month. So, if you want to download video guitar lessons, start by doing a web search for "video guitar lessons", "learn guitar online", or "free guitar lessons". During the course of your search you will find some of the big paid internet guitar courses such as Jamorama, Jamplay or Learn And Master Guitar. If any of these courses appeals to you, rather than sign up right away, type the name of the course you are interested in into the search box on YouTube.com. You will find free video lessons placed on YouTube by the owners of the courses or people wanting to sell the courses. Set up a special folder in your bookmarks and bookmark all the video lessons you are interested in. I've given up trying to keep track of all the browser plugins and programs that claim to enable you to download videos from YouTube but if look for them there is usually something available. Of course, if you don't pay for the guitar lesson course, you don't get the extra tools that come with them. These include guitar tuners, backing tracks and other gadgets that will help you learn chords and the notes on the fretboard. But, if you are prepared to take care of that stuff for yourself, then you have got yourself a bunch of video guitar lessons. If you find some of the videos so appealing that you are actually thinking of buying a guitar course, your next step is to do a web search for reviews and testimonials about the course you are interested in. 5 Learn The Simplicity Of Guitar Picking Most serious guitar pickers recommend quite a heavy pick. I recently read about a guy who used a dime for guitar picking, that is heavy. Or you can buy picks from the guitar shop and cut them to a size that suits you. You can go to any lengths to suit your own individual style. One thing you must always do though, is hold the pick between your index finger and your thumb. As you practice your picking exercises you need to pay strict attention to how you are holding the pick. You get a much cleaner sound if you hold the pick parallel to the strings. If you angle the pick the attack will be soft and mushier. To develop picking speed just work on your alternative picking. Start with downstrokes and alternate with up strokes, not paying any attention to have last your picking at this stage. Once you can do even strokes without hurting yourself start practicing with the metronome set at the lowest speed. If you look at your peak you will see that one part is pointier than the other two angles. That's the bit you apply to the strings. What you should be mostly working on as a beginner guitar pick up is your down and up strokes, daily practice will develop your speed. Different guitars have different attitudes to how to practice speaking. Some say that you should keep your wrist very tight and rigid so that the movement is coming from your elbow. Your body is probably going to be telling you to do the movement from the wrist, and the you will probably end up striking a happy medium. All guitar practice involves some kind of discomfort, but if you find that your wrist, arm, back or shoulder is getting painful, then stop. Do not play through the pain, that is for movie heroes. If you start to hurt then stop playing. If it's starts again when you begin playing tomorrow, maybe you should see a doctor. Even if you're not a serious metal guitar player, you will probably want to learn palm muting technique. Rest the heel of your hand on top of the strings, in front of the guitar bridge. If you have volume and distortion turned up try varying amounts of pressure with your hand to get subtle nuances of heavy metal chugging. You can even use very light pressure to let the strings ring a little. Let's not forget the Duane Eddy twang. You get that twangy sound by playing near the bridge, if you want a more mellow sound move your picking hand towards the neck. 6 Guitar Practice - What Do You Need? When you decided to become a guitar player you thought guitar practice would be fun, right? But you have discovered that the process of learning to play guitar involves climbing a mountain or two. If you have persisted in your efforts to learn guitar you might have just decided to grit your teeth and knuckle down to solid hard work. Hours of it. Hours on end. The reward is in the future. Well, the work is necessary but if there is no fun then much of the work is wasted. Every guitarist should work out a practice regime that helps develop technique, widening repertoire, performing a variety of music, and in getting your songs into your memory. If your aim is to do one hour of guitar practice per day it would be good to focus a little on getting value for money out of all that sweating. One hour's guitar practice should not be one hour's continuous playing without a break. Guitar practice time is the opportunity to renew your view of the guitar and of yourself. You need to have an aim or two every time you sit down to practice, but none of these aims should be set in concrete. It is true that constant playing makes you a guitarist, but trying to play scales and chords your hands are not ready for just makes you grumpy. If you find yourself worrying about how your speed is not improving or you are just not getting the chord change you have been working on, then you need to take a step back and try to have more fun while you practice. At least once a week make a point of playing the songs you really enjoy playing. Maybe you can start by having several things to practice on any given day so that when you get sick of practicing one thing you can move onto something else. Let us take a look at some areas we could aim to work on: Warming up your hands Working on technique Learning and memorizing new songs Taking time to work on musical interpretation Improving technique by reviewing music you are already familiar with. The actual practice of working on these areas entails asking yourself if you really know what it takes to learn new songs without getting stuck, or if you need to ask someone else what aspects of technique you need to attend to. Opening up questions about your playing is far more useful than mechanically repeating a practice regime based on what you thought you needed six months ago or last week. Part of guitar practice is examining your attitude to your practice time. If you are the type of person who has trouble getting down to work, make a set time to practice and make yourself stick to it. If it is natural for you to sit down to practice regularly you should spice up your routine as much as you can because your biggest danger is going stale. Or you could simply take some rest breaks during a grueling practice session. An ideal way to break up practice time is to be always making sure your guitar is in tune. Divide your guitar practice time into portions, say 10 minutes practicing arpeggios, 5 minute tuning break, 15 minutes scales, 5 minutes on a tricky chord change. Another hazard for a guitarist is regarding your practice as "only" practice. If you have lessons with a teacher or occasionally play for friends and family, prepare in advance as though you were preparing for a formal performance. You need to see what you need to work on to sound your best. To make the most of your guitar practice time, allow your problems to drop away. Take a holiday from your life. 7 Computer Guitar Lessons Maybe you have thought about computer guitar lessons. If you could order your own tailor-made guitar lesson course for your computer, what would you request? It might help to think about the basic requirements of computer guitar lessons. Basically your lessons need to show you how to hold and play the guitar, how to read guitar tabs, sheet music or both, and some way of checking your progress. So let us look at some of the computer guitar lessons out there and see how they fulfill our requirements. Learn And Master Guitar has a one-hundred page book, twenty DVDs, five CDs featuring backing tracks plus they offer free support. The structure of this course follows the basic principles of all computer guitar lessons: you have your learning material that you get from the book and from the DVDs, and you practice what you have learned using the backing tracks as a guide and reality check on your emerging guitar skills. Another computer guitar course is called Amazing Guitar Secrets. Once again you have a book and DVDs containing your guitar lessons and backing tracks to play along with. You can track how you are progressing using a section of the book which allows you to have a visual record of what you have learnt. If you have been looking around for computer guitar lessons you have probably come across Jamorama. Jamorama is for the guy who does not take music particularly seriously but thinks it might be cool to be able to play some songs and riffs on the guitar. Not that there's anything wrong with that. To be fair, Jamorama does give you plenty of substantial material in the books, audio and video which you download to make you a "real" guitar player should you so desire. The three guitar lesson courses I have mentioned are meant to be shipped to you in printed form and on discs or downloaded and kept on your computer. There is another alternative: the membership site. The most comprehensive and so far the most successful is Jamplay. With Jamplay you get access to a number of guitar teachers who are experts in their own style of music. These teachers are videoed giving lessons illustrating techniques and how to play particular songs. The lessons cover all stages of guitar learning. So with Amazing Guitar Secrets, Jamorama and Learn And Master Guitar you get to keep all the guitar lessons at your house, your Jamplay membership gets you access to any improvements, revisions and updates that occur. Jamplay also has progress reports, a forum and support through video answers to your questions. Jamplay is probably the most economical option as you can pay by the month, and your fees drop drastically if you pay by the quarter or annually. I should mention that none of the above computer guitar lesson courses lack for quality. The printed material, downloadable audio and video, CDs and DVDs are all first class. The difference between the methods is the varying approaches to the guitar. 8