You might not be itching to get out and see the Michael Jackson movie but a guitar player of Oriani’s calibre should not be ignored. She started playing when she was a little kid and by the time she was in her teens her guitar playing had given her a direction in life. As well as Michael Jackson she has been invited on stage with Prince, Carrie Underwood and Steve Vai, and here is Orianthi sharing the stage with Carlos Santana:

Orianthi is also included in the Elle 12 Greatest Female Electric Guitarists.

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First, make a folder in your bookmarks to keep your guitar lesson links in. You are certain to find some sites that you need to visit more than once, so keep the links all in one place and just separate them into folders like “Videos”, “Theory”, “Fingerstyle”, “Tabs” or however you prefer to classify the elements of your guitar learning. You could make one folder for video lessons and subfolders for genres if you are learning to play more than one guitar style.

When you are searching for guitar lessons or information on how to play guitar, be as specific as possible. Many people phrase their internet searches in the form of questions like, “how can I learn to play guitar for free?” If you use this form of searching you will get results containing the words “learn”, “play”, “guitar” and “free”. Words like “to”, “I”, “for”, “and” are commonly used words that are not included in search results.

A more effective way to search is to ask yourself what it is you want exactly. If you want free guitar lessons, you type the phrase into Google and you get millions of pages that contain the words “free”, “guitar” and “lessons”. The first few pages will contain results that are relevant to your search but as you progress down the page you might find pages that contain the words but do not have anything to do with what you are looking for. For instance, you could find a news report saying, “a flock of zebras escaped from the zoo today so that they could run free, play the guitar and take surfing lessons“.

To get more focused results you can type the same phrase into the Google search box but inside quotation marks: “free guitar lessons”. This will give you a bunch of pages that actually contain the phrase you are looking for.

Also, when you are using Google to search, take a look at the bottom of the page of search results. You will find a list of search terms that are related to the term you typed in. These will contain more useful results. And don’t forget to use the “more” link at the top of the search page. This will give you blogs and group discussions to search through. Here is an example of a guitar lessons blog called Free Beginners Guitar Lessons

YouTube is a great source of free guitar lessons. There are amateur guitarists showing what they have learnt for the benefit of beginners and there are guitar teachers using free video guitar lessons as an intro to their paid guitar lessons.

The same principle applies to YouTube as for Google: you get different results if you type “guitar lessons” from what you get if you type guitar lessons without quotes. The search box at YouTube actually tries to help you with what you are looking for by dropping down a list of popular searches that contain the words you are typing in. So, if I type in “guitar lessons” a list of phrases like, “guitar lessons for beginners” and “guitar lessons acoustic” will drop down for me to select them if they are closer to what I am looking for.

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IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library is involved in making a virtual library of all public domain music scores plus compositions from composers who don’t mind making their work available for free.

The Mutopia Project has over 1600 classical compositions from composers like Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart including works for piano, violin, guitar, cello and organ. Mutopia also includes contemporary music from composers offering their works for free.

freesheetmusic.net has a comparatively small collection of free sheet music but has a great library of articles with titles like: Guitarists - Use your neck!, Ten Chords for a Beginner Guitarist, Guitar Effect Pedals - Compression, Guitar Effect Pedals - Distortion, Guitar Effect Pedals - Chorus, Movie — The Mixolydian Scale for the Guitar and Movie — The Locrian Scale for the Guitar. You can also download pdf files of blank sheet music and tab.

freescores.com has nearly fifteen thousand free music scores searchable by instrument, composer or genre. Some music also has midi or mp3 files.

Here is a video tutorial on making your own sheet music from midis using Noteworthy Composer software. If you don’t read sheet music you can use TablEdit which is a free trial download. The only restriction on the trial version is if you make your own tabs you can’t save them so when you convert midis to tab, you will need to print them out as soon as you make them.

More interesting articles and music at find-freesheetmusic.blogspot.com and the Free Sheet Music guide which also features free guitar tabs.

I also just got news of a new free guitar lessons site called Pick Up Your Guitar You will find free video guitar lessons and guitar chord charts and a whole lot of articles and interesting stuff, so check it out if you want to

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The more we get to know the way our bodies, minds and feelings work, the more efficient we are at learning new skills. But there are some areas of learning that we need help with. One of these areas is muscle memory. The idea that the body learns movements from repetition is commonly used in many areas of life. But the fact that the more relaxed our muscles are and the more attentive we are when we practice routine movements does not readily jump out at us. The concept of muscle memory is available to us through books and websites.

The basic idea goes like this: you learn a posture or series of movements such as a chord fingering; you then put your fingers in the chord position and take them away and put them back again, returning to the chord position many times until your fingers simply take their places whenever they are needed to. Of course, the way we practice chord shapes is to learn a few chord shapes at first and practice moving from one to the other.

The thing about muscle memory is that our muscles record things that our minds don’t notice. If we are tense in the jaw when we play a barre chord, then that tension will appear as part of taking the chord. If we hold our breath when we play a scale, or grunt every time we make a mistake, those things gradually become habits and it usually takes someone else to draw our attention to it. So a part of learning the movements necessary to play the guitar is attention to how precise and relaxed we are when we learn new chord shapes and scales.

Here are some tips on how to learn chord changes from greenguitarguy.com

“Visualize. Before playing, close your eyes for a second and visualize the chords you’re going to be playing. See where your fingers are going to go and see yourself moving from chord to chord gracefully and economically. Do this for a minute before practicing the song.

Find a ’sliding’ finger. A sliding finger is finger which stays on the same string during the chord change. For example, switching from E to D involves sliding the first finger up the G string from fret 1 to fret 2. So there’s no need to lift the finger off the string. This is great news for us lazy guitarists! Sliding fingers are most useful when moving from a high to a low fretting position or vice versa.”

Here is an article on How To Practice by Rod Hampton, a guitar teacher from Seattle.

The video shows a very simple exercise for training your fingers to play designated frets:

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Here is a video explaining the simplicity of using the CAGED system:

Here is the first of a series of free lessons on the CAGED system by Ty Quinn.

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So resign yourself to some slow, careful scale practice. The major scale has a fixed “space” between each note. The distance of one fret separating two notes is called a “step”. If notes are next to each other on the guitar neck, they are a “half step” apart. For example, if you play the open sixth string to sound the note E, a half step up will be F which you will find on the first fret.

Here is a simple video lesson on the major scale:

And to progress a little further, here is an article on learning blues guitar scales.

Guitar notes are shown on tabs as numbers on lines. The lines are the guitar strings. The numbers represent the guitar frets. The guitar tab shown is of the C major chord. The top line is the thinnest string on the guitar, so if you are holding the guitar in the playing position, the thinnest string will be near your leg. The bottom string on the tab is the thickest string which will be at the top of the guitar as you are holding it in playing position.

You probably already know that the guitar strings, from the thickest to the thinnest, sound the notes E A D G B E. The first string on the guitar is designated with a lower case e. The top e string is played open in the C chord, so there is a zero on that string. The second string, or B string, is stopped at the first fret, the G string is played open, the D string is fretted at the second fret, the A at the third, and the E string is usually not played even though it sounds the E note which is part of the C major chord.

e————-0———|

B———-1————|

G——-0—————|

D—-2——————|

A–3——————–|

E———————–|

Every guitar tab writer has his individual way of showing left hand fingerings and techniques in tab. This video focuses on a common method of adding fingering to tab:

Here is another article on reading guitar tabs.

You can use your notes to make up a tune over the chords of the song. Maybe forget all about impressing your audience with your fast playing, concentrate on doing justice to your improvised melody and use the length of your notes and the silences between, together with your bends, vibrato and whatever else you have in your techniques.

Here is a nice tutorial on improvisation

On a completely different note, this video gives another method of adding interest to your chord playing:

If you don’t want to go to the trouble of downloading a feature-heavy tab and music editor, you have some online alternatives. The gootar.com tab generator will play any tab you paste into the box, or you can write your own tabs on the spot and hear them played back. You will need the latest Flash Player, though.

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 tabs 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 the notes you were playing and where your fingers were placed.

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