Learn Beginner
Guitar
So you want to learn beginner guitar, how exciting! The best thing about learning
the guitar is that no matter what method or style you choose, you can rest assure that you will be
learning fundamentals of the instrument that will last you a lifetime.
The first things you’ll need to tackle to learn beginner guitar are the parts of
the guitar. Do get to know them well. This will take you about five or ten minutes. Let’s walk you
through its main parts.
All guitars have a body. Acoustic guitars have a sound-hole. The six strings are
attached to the body with a bridge. The long thing attached to the body where you play notes is the
neck. The darker wood on the neck is the fretboard. The fretboard has thick wires across it called
frets, which are numbered from one onwards starting at the other end of the guitar near the head.
The thick carved bone where the neck and head meet is the nut. The head has six tuning pegs on it
which you use to tune your guitar. That is the parts of the guitar in a
nutshell.
The next thing you’ll need to do to learn beginner guitar is to tune it. Get
yourself an electronic tuner – this will make it easy and will tune the guitar properly. Find a
guitar playing friend to help you or simply find an article online that gives you step by step
instructions. Take a few moments to memorize the names of the strings – it’s easy and we can do it
right now.
The strings are numbered from one to six, from highest to lowest. The strings are
named according to their standard tuning in reverse order from the sixth string to the first one: E
A D G B E. Play into the tuner and adjust the tuning pegs (gently) until the tuner indicates that
the pitch of the string matches these six notes.
While you learn beginner guitar you will probably want to learn how to read guitar
tabs. Tabs are a kind of shorthand guitar players use for notating a particular song. The six
horizontal lines of a tab represent the six string of a guitar from highest to lowest. The numbers
tell you in order where to play notes and on which string.
The tab below tells you to play three notes on the first string: open (without any
frets pressed down), then to press down at the first fret, and finally the note found on the third
fret.
In your journey to learn beginner guitar, you may want to learn traditional musical notation as
well. Where tab is specific to the guitar, music notation can be played on any instrument. Here is
what the above tab looks like written this way:
Finally, while you learn beginner guitar, you’ll be learning lots of chords and will need to read
chord diagrams to do this. Again, you have a picture of the guitar, but now it is facing you with
the nut at the top. The vertical lines represent the strings from lowest to highest, left to right,
and the horizontal lines give you the frets. The dots tell you where to place your fingers, which
are numbered 1 to 4. An 'o' indicates an open string. Here is the common C major chord written this
way:
Well that's about it for how to learn beginner guitar. Happy picking!
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