The picture above shows the parts of the electric guitar. This explanation of the parts of the electric guitar gives you the basic knowledge you need before you start playing. The production, amplification and distortion of the sound made by the electric guitar is an art in itself, but the basic principles are easy to understand. The guitar in the picture is a solid body electric called a Stratocaster. The guitarist picks or strums the strings, and the pickups – microphones situated near the bridge – transfer the sound to an amplifier. The BODY of the guitar is made of wood, and is much heavier than an acoustic guitar. There are electric guitars with hollow chambers which makes the instruments much lighter. In the early stages of development of the electric guitar, feedback was a problem when pickups were fitted to hollow body guitars. The solid body eliminated this problem. The guitar PICKUPS are situated just above the bridge. There are usually three pickups which can be used together or independently. When the strings vibrate, a current is created in the pickup which creates the sound in the amplifier. The guitar is connected to the amplifier by a cable plugged [...]

A Diagram of the Parts of the Electric Guitar

This is a picture of the parts of an acoustic guitar. The BODY of the acoustic guitar is the large part to which the bridge and neck are attached. An acoustic guitar body is hollow, and made from cedar or spruce – both of which possess the necessary acoustic and aesthetic qualities for guitar making. The HEADSTOCK at the top of the neck, holds the MACHINE HEADS which change the tension of the strings to get them in tune. The strings are anchored at the BRIDGE (which also transmits the sound to the body of the guitar) and are held at the required tension by the machine heads. The part of the bridge that actually holds the strings is called the SADDLE. The saddle is made of bone or plastic and is the point where the sound is transferred from the strings to the body. The SOUNDHOLE plays a role in producing of the sound of the acoustic guitar. Not a lot of sound actually comes out of the sound hole but the presence of the opening allows the wood in the body to vibrate without restriction. The NECK – which is flat at the top and curved at the [...]

A Diagram of the Parts of the Acoustic Guitar

If you want to learn to play guitar, you will occasionally need to write your own guitar tab. It can be done using a text editor but it is a long job. There are free and paid guitar tab editing programs available that can allow you to write the tabs and play them back as MIDI files. TuxGuitar is one of the best examples of this kind of tab editor, and it’s free. This video gives you a little info about Tuxguitar: For $19.95, at gootar.com, you can buy a six-pack of music notation tools consisting of a tab generator with sound, a guitar chord generator, a tab splicer for joining tabs, a program that makes a list of chords from any scale, a blank chord chart generator, and a piano chord finder with sound. If you don’t need to hear the tab played back, go to the tab generator at The Guitar Files for a simple and quick tab writer. I should also mention Easy Tab Maker Pro 4.31 which writes guitar tab as you play. You plug your guitar into your computer and play. While you are playing, the program analyzes the sound to convert into tab form [...]

Learn to play guitar online with guitar tab and music tools

Blues guitar can be tricky because, for a simple style of music, blues generates a lot of heated debate on how to listen to it, how to play it, and who is any good at it. There is even argument about the blues guitar scale. The starting point for playing blues is a scale containing “blue notes”. An example is the E minor pentatonic scale with a flattened fifth. Using the I IV V progression, the chords would be E A B. There are many ways to approach blues guitar soloing, and one alternative to the minor pentatonic is the Mixolydian scale, which is almost the same as the major scale. One difference is that the root note of the Mixolydian is the fifth of the key you are working with, so in the key of E the scale starts at B. The other difference is the Myxolidian has a flattened seventh. Here’s a video showing how to use the Mixolydian scale: One of the problems with discussing blues guitar playing is that we start explaining things using theoretical terms, and this makes translating theory to playing music a little difficult. If getting your head around scales and modes does [...]

Blues Guitar – The Basics

Here?s a few tidbits from an old article that seems to have vanished from the internet, called ?How to Fail at Learning the Guitar?: ?If you?re just starting out on the guitar, it?s important to find one that?s either really cheap or really flashy.? ?Cultivate poor posture techniques early on, so that they become a learned behavior.? ?Practice irregularly.? ?Start playing the guitar really fast before you?ve learned how to fret and change chords properly.? ?Give up when your fingers start to hurt.? ?Assume that you can learn how to play the guitar without anybody?s help.? ?When you discover that changing chords is too hard and that a couple of week?s worth of time investment hasn?t made you sound like Clapton, make sure to give up immediately and never touch the guitar again.? Assuming you can learn how to play the guitar without help should be close to the heart of anyone who wants to learn to play for free, but the author of this article, Jonathan Dewbre, who does not appear to be a guitar teacher has hit the nail on the head on many points. Increasing the speed and accuracy of your guitar playing is not possible if [...]

Learning to play guitar without damaging your body

For many years, the bass guitar player was the guy in the background. He played the bass lines but had nothing to say and no technique to show off. Here is Victor Wooten to show that is not true: The bass guitar was first used in the nineteen thirties but did not become popular until the nineteen fifties. This was when the familiar format of rock groups emerged, with a lead singer backed by lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drums. Over the years, the bass has occasionally been featured as a solo instrument. In 1938, two members of the Bobcats jazz group recorded “Big Noise from Winnetka” which featured double bass player Bob Haggart whistling the tune accompanying himself on bass, while drummer, Ray Bauduc hit the bass strings with drumsticks. Since the emergence of the bass guitar, a few interesting bass solos have hit the charts. American record producer, Jack Nitzsche composed an instrumental called “The Lonely Surfer” which featured a bass guitar playing the melody, backed by an orchestra. In the early sixties, British bass player, Jet Harris had several instrumental hits with the bass taking the role of the lead guitar. The Shadows – Harris’ [...]

On Becoming A Bass Guitar Player

The basis of your efforts to play a blues solo will be the minor pentatonic scale. In the key of E, the scale is: E G A B D. Just five notes, but they are all good ones! If you are new to guitar playing you may not be aware of how many different ways you can play five notes. e—————————–0–3–0——————————-| B——————–0–3——————-3–0——————–| G—————0–2—————————–2–0—————| D———–0–2————————————-2–0———–| A——0–2———————————————–2–0——| E-0–3———————————————————3–0-| Here is a diagram of the A minor pentatonic scale, and here is a similar diagram with a tutorial on improvising with the pentatonic scale. You could start the ball rolling by trying to copy riffs by your favorite players, but the sooner you start moving away from what is known, the sooner you begin to put your own stamp on your playing. Take a look at where the notes are on the neck. You can play in straight lines or you can cross from one string to another or move from down low on the neck to up high. Try some variations and see what you like. As you work your way up and down, and in and out of the minor pentatonic scale, you will get an understanding of the way the [...]

Learn How To Play A Blues Solo

Well, really there are no beginner guitar scales, just guitar scales. They are all easy to play, but there are some that you should learn as a beginner in order to help you understand the guitar and music in general. It is very important to learn to play guitar scales since they are a fundamental element of music. Learning to play scales on the guitar will help your progress as a guitar player in a number of ways. If you would like to learn to write your own songs and to improvise guitar solos, an understanding of scales in guitar music will be crucial. Practising scales will change the way you hear music. If you practise every day, you will involuntarily begin to recognize how note patterns sound, and eventually you will be able to tell which scale these patterns belong to. A very important aspect of learning guitar scales is how it helps you physical relationship with your instrument. Your hands will be able to move faster and with more precision after some time of regular scale practice. This video will take you through some scales without giving you note names so that you can begin playing right away. [...]

What Are Beginner Guitar Scales?

There are big differences between guitar strings for acoustic guitar. Their thicknesses are different, the stuff they are made of is different. As a result, guitar strings can SOUND quite different from each other. There are mellow strings, and bright strings. You can experiment with different kinds of strings and choose the best guitar strings that fit in with how you want your music to sound. There are acoustic guitars that use nylon strings and there are those that use steel strings. Nylon string acoustic guitars, which are called classical guitars or folk guitars, have a very mellow sound. Steel string acoustic guitars have a much louder and crisper sound. The first and second strings are made from steel wire, but the low E, the A the D and G strings are wire with more wire wound around them. The windings could be made from nickel, stainless steel, brass or bronze. When you look at a steel string acoustic guitar you can see that the high E and the B strings are silver and the rest of the strings have more of a golden or bronze colour. There is also a difference between the high strings and the low strings [...]

The Best Guitar Strings For Acoustic Guitar

Many newbie guitar students want to know how long they need to practice before their practicing becomes playing. The short answer is practice every day for say, half an hour and you will notice you will gradually get some command over your hands and your guitar. But the way we practice varies from person to person. Here’s a video that discusses the question of how long it takes to get good on the guitar: Kaizen is a practice that originated in Japan and involves going about our daily lives in a way that produces continuous improvement. You make your work more enjoyable and find ways to eliminate waste. This practice, or group of activities can be applied to our guitar practice. If you think about it now, you can probably see lots of ways you goof off during your guitar practice time. We all tend to daydream to some extent, or doodle around with old, familiar material when we should be working on new stuff. Or, sometimes we find excuses to cut the practice time short. We can implement Kaizen in our guitar practice by looking for small ways we can improve. Maybe you could take a few bars of [...]

Kaizen And Guitar Playing