Ricky Sharples asked:


Now you have your guitar and you have found that if you are going to get any music coming out of it, you will be needing some basic guitar lessons – sooner rather than later. But you do not want to go signing up with a guitar teacher or buying a packaged course on the internet without having some idea of what’s in a guitar lesson, so here is a general overview.

The very basic thing you need in your first guitar lesson is to learn how to hold your guitar. Playing the guitar is a physically demanding activity and if you do not learn to hold your guitar properly you could be making your guitar practice a dreary and painful routine. You also need to learn the basics of how to hold your plectrum and how to strum the guitar.

Any guitar course is structured to teach you how to read some form of written musical notation, either tablature or sheet music. Tablature, or tab, is based on a picture of the guitar neck with the frets you have to finger to get the appropriate notes marked on it. It takes a few minutes to get the basic idea behind tab and maybe half an hour’s playing around to make sure you have got the principle well enough to start reading tabs for your favorite songs.

Sheet music is the conventional music notation that has been around for hundreds of years and is used for all musical instruments. The advantage with sheet music is that you can pick up any piece of music written for any instrument and pick out at least the basic melody on the guitar. The downside of sheet music is that it takes a little time and effort to learn because it entails learning some musical theory. If you are anxious to start playing your guitar real quick you probably think learning music is a bad idea, and many guitarists will tell you they do not miss knowing musical notation. But at the same time alot of guitarists will tell you that they are glad they took the little extra time and effort to learn theory and sheet music.

Basic guitar lessons are all about playing chords. Chords are written in the form of chord charts which tell you where to put your fingers to play the notes, and which strings are included in the chord. Some chord charts even tell you which fingers to use to fret the chord’s notes. Chords can also be written in tabs or in sheet music notes. If you want to play accompaniment for songs, you will probably only need to learn your basic chords and how they relate to each other. This info will enable you to get together a collection of chords which will let you play thousands of songs. You will also learn about chord progressions which is how chords interact with each other in songs.

So that is it. The guitar is a chord-oriented instrument and if you are taught chords and how to read them, that gives you the basic lesson content for the guitar. Of course, the guitar has alot more to offer than just basic chord playing but once you learn chords and strumming you can decide where you want to go from there.



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Ricky Sharples asked:


Many guitarists are adamant that the only way to learn guitar is by learning to read sheet music. Some even go so far as to say that if all guitar tab was removed from the world the level of guitar playing would be much higher. The main objection to that idea is that many famous guitar players never learnt to read sheet music. Some even have trouble with tab. Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Tommy Emmanuel and Jeff Beck are shining examples. Of course, all these guitarists were following their own idiosyncratic ways of expressing themselves through the guitar rather than learning a broad range of music but there are still those who are thinking of a whole world of music that is closed to people who have not learnt to read notation. What would possibly be raised if tab were eliminated would be the level of communication between guitarists because we would all be speaking the same langusage.

But it is highly unlikely that guitar players who have more of an instinctive approach to the guitar will ever take the trouble to learn theory and standard music notation. At the same time the people who have made the effort to learn to read music will continue to feel that they have a greater understanding  of the guitar and the ability to learn new music faster than guitarists who do not have a background of theory at their fingertips.

You could say that the bottom line is what works for the individual. If you can play guitar but can’t read music, does that make you an inferior guitarist? A weakness with learning from tabs is that timing and rhythm can’t be learnt from tabs but some people write tabs incorporating the elements of sheet music notation that show note values and timing, and this kind of notation is very easy to learn.

There are those guitar players who see sheet music notation as a language that was invented by keyboard players and is not very well suited to the guitar. It should be noted that without learning musical theory as well, learning to read music is just a part of the language of music and is not a great deal more useful than tabs. Also the amount of music theory a guitarist learns is in proportion to his interest in music in general but will not necessarily make him a better guitar player than a guy who doesn’t read music.

It has often been pointed out by guitar players who play in an open or alternate tuning that if you are used to reading and playing music in standard tuning you might find it very difficult to sight read a piece written in an alternate tuning using standard musical notation. If this is true it would suggest that reading standard music is not the key to universal understanding of the guitar.



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