Part 1 - Root Chords

Learning root chords is probably the hardest thing you'll have to do. Expect it to be slow going and frustrating and it should take several months before you feel comfortable forming the chords. Don't give up! It took me forever until I could make any kind of clean sound, let alone play three chords in a row at a decent pace.

It is important that you keep your fingers curled above the fret board to avoid touching other strings and muting them out. In order to learn chords, you'll need to learn how to read Tab. Let's start with the E chord.
Now imagine this diagram is actually a picture of your guitar's neck from the top. The numbers correlate to your fingers with the index being 1 and so forth. Just rotate it clockwise 90 degrees and this is how it should look.

Now let's try an A chord, I would ignore the fingering on this particular chart and just copy my fingers.
Try to keep your fingers together and arched over the fretboard. Just like the piano, you don't want to lay flat sausages down on the keys.

Ok, your fingers should be hurting! That is fine, hard part about starting out is that you are building up muscle finesse and also literally training your nervous system into a pattern your eyes can see but your fingers cannot. Expect some pain as you begin to build callouses on the tips of your fingers. Don't worry, they'll be invisible. Let's finish with the D chord.

Here is how this one looks, it is a hard one!

Just practice your fingering and moving from chord to chord. Here is a standard progression: E (8 beats) - D (8 beats) - A (8 beats) - E (8 beats) and repeat.

There! You've just learned half of the Rolling Stone's repetoire.

Intro

Hi mom! Welcome to your slightly uninteractive online guitar tutorial! As far as I know, you are the only person with access to this site. There might be some odd occasional visitors who happen to mispell the name of another blog, but basically this is all yours. Don't worry about leaving comments...you have to have membership to do so. Also, as webmaster of this blog I will be able to tell when you visit and for how long. (insert evil laugh) So, I will know if and when you are practicing and will up date accordingly.

Here we go!

STEP I - Meeting your guitar

It is important that you learn how to hold, fret and strum your guitar. Also learning the names of the strings and parts of the instrument are essential. First of all, pick'er up and rest it on your leg. Remember that the guitar should rest against you, not the other way around.

Next, look at the fretboard. This is the top of the guitar neck and is divided into frets. These are separated by metal posts. There are 12 of which you need to worry about. Do you see the dots? There are 3 of them and the a pair close to the body of the guitar. They are to help you count frets. The first is the 5th fret, second is 7th, third is 9th and the double is 12th (this is the octave). Don't worry about it, but note it for later.

Now, the strings. The one closest to your face is called the low E. It is called low because of the frequency and not its location. The rest are, in order, E A D G B E (eat a darn good breakfast everyday).

STEP II - Strumming

Place your pinky finger near the base of the bridge. Like this:

Your pinky and ring finger will help to stablize your thumb which does all of the work.

The key to rhythm is making your hand as fluid and relaxed as possible. More on that later! Just try to run the tip of your thumb down and up along the strings. It will sound horrible but just feel the strings and try to hit them evenly.

STEP III - Fretting

This is how you can hold the guitar with your fretting hand. Remember that you have to let your wrist and thumb do the work. Push the neck into your fingers. This is the position for the chords I will show you in the next lesson.

This is how you will want to hold you hands when I show you some scales and modals in future lessons. You will appreciate the similarities to piano in that you have to really curl the last knuckles of your fingers over the note to get a clear attack. This can only be done by flattening your wrist and forearm as much as possible (difficult at first!).

Well, all for now. Next time we hit the chords!