Steve Robinson asked:


You can learn the guitar fast if you understand a few easily absorbed steps. Now to be clear becoming expert takes time but you can be quickly enjoying your favorite songs quickly. After all isn’t that what we all want to learn to do?

The first step is to check is that the action on your guitar is set properly for you. A good guitar shop will do this for you but if you have purchased a new or used guitar the action may be too high and cause sore fingers and stress in your hands.

**Note – The ‘action’ is the distance between the underside of the guitar string and the guitar fingerboard. Not having this set properly can result in sore fingers and that will definitely result in less practice and playing.

The second step is to understand that the music is in you and no amount of spending on fancy equipment will overcome what you put in to it. Your effort should be put into technique not the latest equipment. You are the reason your playing works or it does not. A good guitar player can still create great music on inferior equipment. Great equipment can’t make a bad player sound good.

The third step is to concentrate on your rhythm. Keep the pace with your foot so that you have a consistent flow in your playing. Spend more time and effort in developing rhythm when playing as that is the most important item when people are listening. Once this becomes second nature then you can start to expand your other techniques.

The fourth step to learning guitar fast is to use simple chords first..If you are trying to master complex chords before you have the rhythm down to being an automatic reflex you will stop the rhythm because you are concentrating so hard on where to place your fingers that you lose the pace.

The fifth step is again to stay with basics in your strumming pattern. This will help you in two ways. You won’t lose the rhythm because you are using just a basic strum on the first beat of the measure. You also will begin to memorize the sound of the chord. This will allow you to easily start to play by ear down the line because you will recognize the chord automatically in the songs you are copying.

The final concept to learn to play guitar fast is to stick to two chord songs initially..Again by keeping it simple you build up your confidence and your abilities much more quickly. After all when you were an infant you crawled berfore you walked and you mastered walking before you could run.

Getting up and going when learning guitar fast can be easy and quick but…

Staying to the very basic until they become second nature will allow you to improve your playing much quicker than trying to gather complex items all at once. That tends to teach you bad habits that will be exceedingly hard to correct to get you playing from the beginner level to expert.



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Ricky Sharples asked:


If you are one of the many people looking to learn guitar notes, what are you going to do with these notes when you learn them? There is an idea alive and well in alot of people’s heads that if you want to learn how to play the guitar, all you need is to find out where to put your fingers to play the notes, and there is nothing more you need to do. In fact, learning the guitar notes is a very small but important part of guitar playing. So let us take a look at the other pieces of the puzzle.

Guitar playing is based more on learning chords than on playing single notes. If you listen to solo guitar playing, it usually consists of a combination of single melody notes, bass notes and chords. Anyway, having established that there is much more to guitar playing than learning guitar notes, let us take a look at these notes we are so anxious to learn.

Standard tuning for a six string guitar is, starting at the lowest note, E  A  D  G  B  E. If we take an acoustic guitar without a cutaway body as having the minimum number of reachable notes, that gives us twelve frets worth of notes to play. But the guitar can only give us a total of thirty-seven different notes, so that means we have lots of different positions on the guitar neck to play the same note.

Now let us go back to basics for a bit. You probably know that musical notes are named after the first seven notes of the English alphabet. At least, they are if you play the guitar in English. So starting with the sixth string that plays the note E, on the first six frets you have F G A B C D, then you start again at E on the seventh fret, right? Wrong! The steps between notes are not uniform.

Starting with the open string E, the first fret is F, but the second fret is not G but F sharp there are sharps after A C D F and G. There are no sharps between B and C or between E and F. So if we look at the sixth guitar string again, instead of starting the next octave with E on the seventh fret, we start with E on the twelfth fret.

So let us look at the notes on all the strings of the guitar up to the twelfth fret:

E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E

B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B

G G# A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G

D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D

A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A

E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E

So the notes at the twelfth fret of each string on the guitar are the same as the notes sounded by the open strings. You can use this diagram to pick out tunes if you already know how to read music. If you do not know how to read music yet, you can start finding out how to learn the guitar notes by finding recurring patterns up and down the fretboard.



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Nick seigal asked:


TAB, which is short for tablature, is a good way for many people to learn to play the guitar. When learning to play the flute, piano, saxophone, violin, and other types of music, a person uses written music. However, the guitar is different in that chord diagrams are used instead. Now, some people have the ability to read chord music quite well while other people struggle. Because of this, a different method of learning was devised whereby a person can learn guitar TAB.

Tablature is simply a way in which a series of notes are written so a person can learn a riff or run on the guitar. For many individuals, the option to learn guitar TAB is a blessing, helping them learn quickly and with much less frustration. However, you need to understand that while TAB has many benefits, a few drawbacks do exist.

First, when playing the guitar, you are playing not only notes but also rhythm. With TAB, transferring information specific to an intended rhythm is difficult, if not impossible to do. For instance, if you play a musical instrument using sheet music, part of the music shows the rhythm so you know how fast or slow a song should be played. However, when you learn guitar TAB, this rhythm information is not there. For this reason, most people will choose a song they already know the rhythm to so all they have to learn are the notes.

A major difference in how a person would learn guitar with TAB is that the lines on the sheet music have lines that represent the guitar strings. In addition, the music would have dots on the lines, which is the appropriate finger placement. With this, you simple look at the fingers and place yours on the guitar string to match. Again, for many people to learn guitar TAB is the only way they can grasp this particular instrument.

Another important thing to know about TAB is that as you read the TAB, the line on the bottom is the sixth or deepest pitched string on the guitar while the top line is the first or highest string. You will also find when you learn guitar TAB that the dots may or may not be accompanied by a number, which is a reference to the fret on that particular string you need finger. For this, you would make the decision as to the finger used.

Then, as you learn guitar TAB, understand that if a song has two or more notes needing to be played simultaneously, they would show up on the TAB with one directly above the other. Additionally, when looking at a tablature, anything that shows up as an “O” means an open string or no finger placement on that particular string.

For most people who learn guitar TAB the beginning is a bit awkward and confusing but with time, it will soon become extremely easy. Many people learning to play guitar prefer this method for a number of reasons. In addition to being visually easier to learn, hundreds of TAB songs are now available online, giving them a much greater selection of songs to learn without having to pay for expensive DVDs, CDs or instructional material.



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