Guitar How-To» Guitar How-To

A Songwriting How To – Guitar Songwriting Tips

gyorgy — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 06:04:18 +0000

When you listen to other people’s songs you probably think that writing your own songs should be easy. But sit down at your keyboard or with a pen and paper. Wait for the ideas to come. Got any yet? I thought not. But do not despair because there are ways to start your creative thoughts moving and tools to make up for shortfalls in your language skills.

Let’s look at how you can structure your life as a songwriter starting today. First you need a goal. If your initial goal turns out to be too ambitious you can always adjust it later. Just think about how much time you think you can devote to songwriting and decide how many songs you will write in a week.

Having a goal is important because if you fail to meet it you will be immediately aware of your shortcomings and how to address them. Even if you don’t have a clue how many songs you can write, just pick a number and make a sincere effort to meet it.

Now that you are a songwriter you need to listen to lots of songs. Maybe you already do but now it’s with a professional interest. If you don’t know where to start, just go with the kind of songs you enjoy but here is a list of some of the greatest songs of all time: “Islands in the Stream”, “I Just Called to Say I Love You”, “Time After Time”, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Hey Jude”, “Bésame Mucho”, “Blackbird”, “Fixing a Hole”.

Writing songs can sometimes be just a matter of expressing something you are feeling at the moment or sitting down and waiting for the words to come, but that’s mostly for people who have actually practiced the art of songwriting. To start off as a songwriter, you need to have in the back of your head the basic structure of a song.

You don’t need to try to write your songs in this order but this is just a list of the basic elements of a finished song:

The Chorus. This is the central element of the song. It contains the catchy part – the “hook”. The chorus gets stuck in your audience’s heads and hearts.

The Verses. A song contains at least three or four verses. They carry the sentiment of the song. More or less. They don’t need to make a lot of sense or have rhymes in them. But they need to express something.

The Bridge. The bridge of a song relieves tension or creates interest. It’s a break from the main thrust of the song but should lead back into the chorus seamlessly.

You Were On My Mind is a great example of a song with very simple lyrics, the verses don’t particularly link together, in the sense of telling a story but they build up the listener’s anticipation of the chorus.

Creating A Winning Song Structure has some more information on the elements of a song plus analyses of some popular songs.

Here are some tools you may need to help you with your songwriting:

FREE Rhyming Dictionary Software for Windows

The Free Dictionary

WikiRhymer Rhyming Dictionary

And here is the Wikipedia entry on popular songwriting

Here is one of many great videos on writing songs that you can find on YouTube.

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Fast Guitar Picking Technique – Economy Picking

gyorgy — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:34:27 +0000

Alternate picking means you alternate between up strokes and down strokes when you play single note solos. This means you keep alternating even when you change strings. If you move from the D string to the G string, your hand is moving down to play the G string but if your last note on the D string was a down stroke, you maintain the alternating pattern by moving your hand down and over the G string and picking upwards. To save time and energy when changing from one string to another, you can adopt a technique called economy picking.

Economy picking is a method of changing from one string to another quickly while playing a solo using alternate picking. If you are moving from the low E string to the A string your first note on the A string will be played down stroke even if your last note on the E string was a down stroke. If you are moving up to the E string from the A string, your first note played on the E string will be an up stroke. This eliminates the time and effort needed to maintain the alternate picking sequence when you are changing strings

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How To Play An F Chord

gyorgy — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:03:14 +0000

Any kind of music you learn, you will be better off learning barre chords. When you are playing barre chords you are basically using your index finger to shorten the guitar fretboard. If you just place your index finger across the guitar’s neck and press down, you will see that it will take some practice to get all the strings sounding cleanly. But nobody who has ever devoted a reasonable amount of time and effort to guitar practice has ever failed to learn how to play barre chords.

The first barre chord most people learn is based on the shape of the E major chord:

e—————–0—————————|

B————–0——————————|

G———–1———————————|

D——–2————————————|

A—–2—————————————|

E–0——————————————|

To play the F chord in the first position, you simply move the chord up one fret as you can see in the first tab on this page featuring tabs for the F Major Chord in several fingerings moving up the guitar neck. So the notes are changing from E B E G# B E to F C F A C F.

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Guitar Intonation How To

gyorgy — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:12:48 +0000

When your guitar is in tune according to your tuner, but it does not sound in tune when you play a chord, you probably need to adjust the intonation.

To check the intonation, first make sure your guitar is in tune, then play the sixth string at the first fret, then the fifth string, fourth, third, second and first. Be careful just to press the string hard enough to sound a clear note without bending the string. Do the same at each fret all the way up the neck. As you do this, you are listening for extraneous noises, buzzing or a dull sound at any of the frets.

Another way to check you guitar’s intonation is to play an open E major chord, then an F major at the first fret and move that barre chord shape all the way up the neck, strumming the chord at each fret. As with the other test, you are looking for any crappy sounds.

Here is a video lesson on checking and fixing the intonation of an electric guitar. The video gives you another method of checking the intonation by playing harmonics.

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The Acoustic-Electric Guitar

gyorgy — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 08:00:27 +0000

If you have the urge to buy an acoustic-electric guitar but don’t know a good one from an average one, here are a few pointers on making your choice. If you already have some experience with acoustic or electric guitars, you might have some questions about how to judge the quality of the acoustic-electric.

To make your decision, think about what you are going to do with your new guitar. Is it going to serve as an acoustic that can be plugged in or as an electric with an acoustic-y sound? You could take a look at some of the Takamine guitars with the laminated top. Very good sounding electric guitars. Or if you are going to be switching styles a lot, try out some of the guitars in the Alvarez Artist series.

If you want to have a guitar that sounds more acoustic than electric, avoid the Ibanez and Epiphone brands. Another brand I should mention is Washburn which has a varied line of acoustic-electric guitars including the EA16 Festival, Washburn EA20SDL Festival, and Washburn D10SCEDL Solid-Top Cutaway acoustic-electric Guitars.

Here’s a Washburn demo:

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How Long Does It Take To Learn Guitar?

gyorgy — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 02:59:42 +0000

At a rough estimate you should be seeing definite results after three or four years consistent practice. That’s if you are taking your sweet time about it. Another way to look at learning to play guitar is as work in progress that can occupy your whole life.

Many people feel that they are still guitar beginners after twenty years of playing. You can feel that in a good way as your horizons are expanding the more you learn. Or it can be a simple fact that you got to a certain stage and stopped trying.

Of course, you could say you have been playing for twenty years but the reality is the guitar sat in a corner gathering dust for a large chunk of those years. Real progress is measured by the effort you put into the instrument. And for those efforts to have meaning, you need an aim. You need to put some work into achieving definite goals. You need to learn to strum and to pick and to read music or tabs. These are elements of successful guitar playing that need to be attended to separately.

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Heavy Metal Guitar Lessons – Who Needs Them?

gyorgy — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 09:29:43 +0000

Heavy Metal Guitar Lessons – Who Needs Them?
Heavy metal music was a long time coming and it looks like it’s here to stay. From Link Wray in the nineteen fifties to The Kinks and The Yardbirds in the sixties through Led Zeppelin and Def Leppard the loud and dangerous guitar sound still captures the imagination of fans around the world.

If you want to learn to play heavy metal guitar, you need to know which guitarists to listen to. No matter how much music you have listened to, there’s bound to be some big names that you have ignored. Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath are the true masters of the looming doom guitar style.

Jimmy Page, founder and lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin did not really play metal but he invented many classic riffs and contributed to the folklore of onstage posing. James Hatfield of Metallica is the master of the down-stroke picking style. Eddie Van Halen gave the world two-handed fretboard tapping in a big way.

There are many other great metal guitar players – Randy Rhoads, Dave Mustain, Adrian Smith and Michael Schenker to name a few. Zakk Wylde, Yngwie Malmsteen and Jimi Hendrix to throw in some who contributed greatly to loud guitar.

You can learn so much from just watching a great guitar player but if you are going to take heavy metal guitar lessons you may as well define what you are going to be learning.

For a menace-laden music, minor scales like the minor pentatonic will be the order of the day. Learn the minor pentatonic in A, B, D and E. Techniques you will be using to play the music will include hammer-ons, tapping and alternate picking.

Harmonics are a well-used feature of heavy metal. You can get the idea of harmonics by placing the tip of the first finger of your left hand over the sixth string at the fifth fret and pick the note.

One technique that requires a bit of practice is palm muting. It means you rest the heel of your right hand on the strings as you strum them. The description doesn’t evoke what you hear when the technique is used on an electric guitar.

Here is a video lesson on palm muting:

Another important element of heavy metal music is the power chord. A power chord is made up of the root and the fifth of a chord. It can be used in any context as it is neither major or minor. But it sounds great through distortion and is easy to play.

When you first learn to play guitar you will learn about concert pitch. It’s the pitch that all guitarists tune their instruments to so that when they play together they will be in tune. Metal guitar players tune their guitars down between a half step and two steps. Some guitarists will just tune the bottom E string to D. This is called Drop D Tuning.

This is just a quick look at the main elements of heavy metal guitar playing. Listen and watch some of the guitarists I have mentioned and try some of the techniques before you go looking for a teacher.

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How To Play The Guitar Without Looking

gyorgy — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:35:31 +0000

There are many bad habits you can pick up when you learn to play the guitar. You can find yourself smacking your lips and grunting when you make a mistake, you can hold your breath while you attempt to play difficult passages, you can pull faces while you play, and you can be always looking at the neck.

Of course, when you are playing the guitar you need to look somewhere and the guitar neck is as good a place as anywhere but usually looking at the fretboard is just another expression of muscular tension. Also, if you are compelled to look at the neck you are not able to look into the audience or look at the people you are playing with.

So, to play the guitar without looking at the neck you must practice without looking. When you are at home practicing you need to find ways to free up your body when you are playing guitar so that you can CHOOSE where to look.

First, let’s make it clear that you do not need to look at the guitar neck. Your fingers, hands and arms have a memory that is much more accurate and fast than our thinking brain. If you practice your music slowly and precisely, your muscle memory will take over and your body will play the guitar without your eyes needing to look or your brain needing to think about where to aim your fingers.

If you play the guitar from music or tab, looking at the guitar neck will not be a problem. If you need to stop and look at the guitar while you practice a new chord or a difficult chord change, then stop playing and practice the difficult bit. Once you can play through the bit that’s slowing you down, continue playing from whatever is on the paper in front of you.

Many guitar players practice in front of the television to break the spell of the guitar neck. Others play in the dark. Playing in the dark will take some time and effort but once you gain the confidence in your muscle memory it won’t be too hard.

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Free Video Guitar Lesson – Playing Rhythm Like Keith Richards

gyorgy — Fri, 28 May 2010 21:48:03 +0000

by Anders Mouridsen of GuitarTricks.com

In this lesson we break down the rhythm guitar playing style of Keith Richards from The Rolling Stones.

Keith Richards often played in Open G tuning, and many of the classic Stones hits have the signature sound of Open G.
In Open G tuning, both E strings are tuned down to D, and the A string is tuned down to G.

In Open G the strings in sequence from low to high are tuned D – G – D – G – B – D.

Practically speaking, it is not always possible to re-tune your guitar to get this sound. So in this lesson,

we look at how riffs and voicings originally played in an open tuning can be played in a standard tuning and adapted to any given chord progression.

This lesson is intended for an intermediate audience. It can be quite a hand-stretch and fingering workout.
If you are having trouble with the stretch, you might try practicing up around the 10th fret, where the frets are closer together.
Then you can gradually bring your fingers down to the first position as you get used to the pattern.

The mutes in this lesson can also be a challenge for beginning guitarists.
The muting gives control over the rhythmic elements of the sound. Note that you need to mute both with the left and right hands.

This lesson examines the techniques used to create the classic sound of Keith Richards. It is part of a larger series of lessons from Guitar Tricks called “Playing Rhythm Like the Masters” that includes profiles of Jimi Hendrix,
Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton, James Hetfield and more great guitarists.

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Instructor: Anders Mouridsen

Speciality: Blues and Rock

Website: GuitarTricks.com

For over 3000 lessons on every guitar style and technique visit Guitar Tricks.

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Music Theory for Guitar: Major Scales

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For Beginners – How To Play The Guitar

gyorgy — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:29:52 +0000

Today I’m going to tell you about one of the great guitar tuition books. It’s called How to Play Guitar: Everything You Need to Know to Play the Guitar
and it’s written by Roger Evans. This book has all the basics. You will learn about how to approach buying a guitar, how to tune it, reading sheet music and tab, finger picking, chords, left hand techniques and transposing songs between keys.

If you don’t have a budget for guitar lessons this book will start you off on playing so that you will be able to look for lessons in the specific areas you need. One thing about Roger Evans’ method of teaching is that it takes away the mystique behind guitar playing that sometimes puts people off learning to play.

The songs that the book teaches you are well and truly out of date but they serve the purpose of teaching you basic chords and strumming.

To show you another approach to learning basic guitar songs, here is a video teaching you how to play a variety of songs using only three chords.

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