Learning To Play Guitar by Knowing the Basics

• Learning Guitar

In learning to play guitar, there are a few things needed and a few basic understandings that will go a long way in helping you as you progress in your guitar playing.  First of course is to have a guitar.  Guitars range in price from insanely expensive to dirt cheap; neither extreme is advised for beginners.  All you need is a well crafted guitar that doesn’t have warped wood or is made cutting corners.

Basically you will be spending somewhere in the $200-$500 range and I wouldn’t advise anything much less.  Washburn makes very good inexpensive guitars.  Often times you’ll find discounts as new models are being brought in.  Here’s a Washburn D100DL Acoustic Guitar that is at the $150 mark.

• Learning Guitar Tuning

Aside from having your guitar, the next most important part is to understand tuning; that being how the strings on your guitar relate to one another and what pitches they need to be at.  While an entire book could be devoted to just the category of tuning, for our purposes, all we need to understand now is Standard Tuning.  What that means is that our guitar’s 5th string (2nd from the top) is tuned to A with a frequency of 440 Hz (known as concert pitch).  To interpret this frequency it’s important to have a guitar tuner.  What a guitar tuner does is to receive the pitch of a note you pluck and tell you what note you’re at.  This makes things easy so as not to have to remember exactly what frequency every note is.  This Boss TU-80C Chromatic Tuner & Metronome is a great one and has a handy metronome (time keeper) built in.

The guitar has 6 strings and in standard tuning, we tune each string to be a perfect fourth pitch interval apart as we descend strings (save for one pair).  Since the 5th string has already been tuned to A, all we need to do is tune the remaining 5 strings around that.  The top string (6th) will be tuned to E, 5th string to A, 4th string to D, 3rd string to G, 2nd string to B and lastly the 1st string will be E.

From E to A is a perfect fourth, A to D a perfect fourth, D to G a perfect fourth and now comes the exception.  We tune the 2nd string to be a major third apart from the 3rd string.  This gives us B, since G to B is a major third.  Lastly, B to E is a perfect fourth.

Now your guitar is in standard tuning and you’re ready to play some guitar chords.  All that remains is to learn just how to play guitar so that you make noises that sound pleasing as opposed to the kind that make people run away .  We have a host of resources and lessons for free here at Learn to Play Guitar TV and should you want more you can become a member.