mastering the guitar

Basic chords.

2009-03-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

Now, let's move on to the chords. There are few most fundamental chords that are suitable for the beginner to begin with. You can see the chords in picture below.

So these are the most fundamental chords. If you can master it, then I bet you can play the rhythm part for many songs. For those who confuse how to read it, here how it goes. The most right part of the neck is your is your tiniest string 'e'. If u have your guitar in place, it should be the most bottom one. You can see above the bold line, which is called "nut", we can see both "X" and "0". "X" means don't play that strings while "0" means play that lines without pressing any strings with your fingers. And the numbers below it, it represents your fingers as described below:

1 - Index finger
2 - Middle finger
3 - Ring finger
4 - Baby finger

I'm pretty sure at the first stage, you might feel uncomfortable playing the guitar. This is because your fingers are still soft. So it's kinda hard to put enough pressure on the strings. But trust me, the tip of your fingers will eventually get used to it and will start to become more hard and rough. From then on, you will notice it becomes easier to press the strings down without any uncomfy feeling.

Another problem that beginners encounter is that it's kinda hard to change from one chord to another. Yup, I couldn't agree more with you guys. But don't worry about it. Try to learn one chord at a time and I'll teach you how to take care of that problem later. Now you just need to learn how to perform each chord correctly.

One more thing guys, don't worry about the strumming patterns. As long as you get your fingers right on place and produce a great sound, that can be considered as a success.

Know your guitar.

2009-03-17T08:38:00.000-07:00

Just in case you guys wondering about the part of the guitar, here I include the picture of a guitar with labels of its parts. This is important so that if you come across the jargon throughout this blog, you have the big picture of what I'm talking about. You also might not want to waste your money to buy a new one, if only one of its parts broken. Sometimes in the future, you might want to try to make your own accustom guitar that really suits your style of playing.

As you can see, all type of guitars primarily built with same major parts. But depending on its type, there might be some minor modification made to meet its purposes as you can see from picture below.

You might wondering what is "pickups". Actually, pickups is the device that collect the sound made by the strings and transfer it to the amplifier. There are two different type of pickups which are magnetic and piezoelectric. I'm not going to go deeper about this matter as it will create more confusion but the main difference is, the magnetic only deals with steel strings while piezoelectric can deal with steel, nylon or gut strings. Fyi, the sound of the guitar will be different, according to where the pickups are placed. Hard to believe, isn't it? There are also switch and tone control to get a different kind of sound based on your preference. If we go into details, there are a lot of explanation will be involved but I want to make this blog simple. So as long as you guys know the basic parts of the guitar, it's enough so that you know basically what your guitar parts are.

Buy the right one.

2009-03-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

To begin with lesson we first surely need the guitar. For the beginner, I strongly suggest you guys to avoid those expensive guitars that can burn a big hole in your wallet and don't go for something that so cheap neither. Go for something in between for learning purposes. Nowadays, it's easy to get cheap guitar in stores or online. There are pros and cons between those two. You can notice that most of the guitars sold online are cheaper than the same products you can find in nearby stores, but the down side is you never know how it sounds. Whether the frets are properly in place and stuff like that. My suggestion for this is, go for the nearby stores, try the one they have there, take note on the model name and buy it online.

That is my first ever guitar Ibanez AEL10E cutaway. I got it at a pawn shop for only 200bucks, together with mini amp when I bought it few years back, which I guess kinda great deal for me. You might go for the cheaper one. I bought it because when I saw it at the pawn shop, it was in a really great condition and it's normal price exceed 400bucks I guess. You can easily find cheap guitars with a great deal everywhere on the internet.

Some might also ask, which one is better for the beginner, electric or acoustic? This kinda hard question to be answered but for me, I recommend acoustic guitar. Reason? It's just my own preference.

Introduction.

2009-03-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

Hey there, I'm Peter. I'm not saying that I am the best guitarist in the world or what so ever. But music and entertainment are my passion and I would really love to share it with you guys. I was once a beginner guitarist and all I want to do back at that time was to find the most effective ways to master the guitar in short period of time. Of course, the guitar skills are something that we acquired. There's no single musician in the world knows how to play guitar without having any basic about it. I want to keep my introduction short so I will jump straight into my main purposes of creating this blog. First, I really want to share with you guys what did I do to acquire all the guitar skills (of course the effective ones). Second, share my interest about music and entertainment with others and last but not least, to find some new friends, no matter you have the same interest or completely a different one. Who cares about the differences, right?