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Essential, music theory is a method of communication. Musicians use musical notation and theory to pass ideas from one person to another. An experienced guitar player learning musical theory for the first time will probably see endless possibilities branching out from the musical ideas and technique he already has as he fits his knowledge into the wider context of music.

When you are learning a new piece of music, knowledge of theory will give you more choices in the matter of where to play on the fretboard, whether to use barre chords or open chords and how to put harmonies together. Knowing music theory will give you a framework which might inspire you to try ideas that your playing experience alone might not have presented you with.

Here is a video lesson on music theory from Allen ‘ROBOT’ Van Wert of MusicHopper.com

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Learning to play a number of songs is a great way to lift your level of guitar playing. The basic idea is to learn one song well so that you can play it without rushing but don’t spend weeks and months on it. Learn when to move on. There is a fear that learner guitarists feel that if they stop practising a song they will forget it. The reality is that if you learn a variety of songs and revise them once in a while, your overall guitar playing skills will be much better than the guitar student who won’t move on until he knows a song “perfectly”. Really, when you are just learning guitar, you will not do anything perfectly until you have had some broad experience at playing.

When you start on a new song, it’s a good idea to pick one that helps you learn a new chord or technique, like learning one of the basic barre chord shapes. You can get together a list of songs you want to learn whenever you have a minute to go on the internet and search through the tab archives.

The second thing you need to have in mind when you are getting together a list of guitar songs is playing in public. You can play your songs at local venues like coffeehouses. You will probably need enough songs to fill about ninety minutes. If you think that learning so many songs might take an overly long time, you could probably get away with setting up a music stand in most venues and playing from sheet music.

This video will help you get started on learning simple guitar songs:

Technorati Tags: learn how to play guitar, guitar songs

Giving your fingers permanent assignment to certain strings gives you a starting point. You use this finger assignment on every song you learn and as you learn you will feel from how your fingers are handling playing the piece, whether you need to depart from your rigid finger assignment.

Another thing to consider is how the music sounds. Sometimes you are going to decide that you like the way a single note scale passage sounds when it is played with the thumb or that a melodic phrase on the bass strings sounds right when it is played with the first and second fingers.

You will understand the ideas involved in finger assignment if you watch this video:

One way of playing a double stop is to play two adjacent strings at the same time. Another way is to play two strings that are not next to each other by strumming with your plectrum and muting the string in the middle. Or you can put your pick between your teeth and pluck the two strings you want to play.

Here is a C major scale played up the fretboard on the first and second strings using double-stops:

e–0–1–3–5–7—8–10–12—————–|

B–1–3–5–6–8–10–12–13—————–|

G——————————————–|

D——————————————–|

A——————————————–|

E——————————————–|

And here is the same scale played in the open position across the fretboard:

e———————–0———————|

B————–0–1–3–1———————|

G——–0–2–0–2–4————————|

D–2–3–2–3———————————|

A–3–5—————————————|

E———————————————|

Here is a video showing you how to play double-stops:

This lesson on Guitar Diads or Double Stops has some tabs for double-stop exercises.

You need your guitar sitting on a stand, ready to play - not in a case that you need to drag out from under the bed and open and then put back again. This is all wasted time and effort. An alternative to a stand if you have an acoustic guitar is a piece of guitar string threaded through the headstock and hung on a picture hook on the wall.

You need a tuner. Your guitar should be in tune all the time, and when you are new, you need to practice tuning your guitar. It is part of learning. So if you have not bought a guitar tuner you should have your computer handy to your guitar practice space so you can make use of an online guitar tuner or one you have downloaded from the internet.

Same goes for a metronome. Have one on your computer or get one from a music store. Again, using the metronome is essential to practicing the guitar, and practicing using the metronome is a discipline in itself.

One thing that will hold you back in learning how to play guitar is neglecting these basic ideas on having your tools and your practice space ready. So if you recently bought your first guitar, instead of sitting down and practicing today, get your practice space ready with your guitar, tuner and metronome. It will make your life and your guitar learning more easy and enjoyable.

Here is an article from The Classical Guitar Blog on Goal Oriented Guitar Practice. Don’t be put off by the blog’s name - guitarists in any genre will benefit from these tips.

The video illustrates some guitar practice tips from betweenthelicks.com

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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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