Learn to Play Guitar (eBook)

A Comprehensive Guitar Guide for Beginners to Intermediate Players

Gareth Evans (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
130 Seiten
Intuition Publications (Verlag)
978-0-9576506-4-0 (ISBN)

Infos

''Covers a wide range topics essential for all guitarists. Plenty of information and solid advice that a player can dip into as needed. There are many examples to practice with the backing tracks. A very useful tool to help you progress with your guitar playing.' Hedley Timbs BA(Mus), Grad.Dip. Teaching (New Zealand)
Learn to Play Guitar is comprehensive and clear with over 180 photographic examples, illustrations and purpose made diagrams. This guitar book includes 42 downloadable mp3 tracks of full band demo and backing track with the guitar removed for you to play over. Learn to Play Guitar bridges the gaps, explaining guitar techniques that can be taken for granted by more experienced guitar players.
Melodies - To get you straight into playing music, numbers have been added underneath guitar tablature to assist with the rhythm. Later on, the rhythmical aspect of conventional music notation is covered so you can use it in conjunction with tablature.
Rhythm Guitar - Changing between chords and strumming are presented as separate subjects initially, so that you can develop coordination in each hand independently. They are then brought together starting with basic exercises, getting more advanced until there is a rhythm guitar musical piece to play.
Music Theory - The major scale, minor scale, major and minor pentatonic scales and basic major and minor chord construction are explained in terms of the fret-board and reinforced by musical pieces in various styles to make the learning process practical and enjoyable.
What Else? - Fret-board layout, power chords, barre chords, how to string a guitar, how to practise guitar, palm muting and basic lead guitar techniques.
Please Note: The eBook includes musical pieces so is not suitable for smaller screens.
'We loved the book. The information was well paced and concise enough not to overwhelm. Any beginner would definitely benefit from having this book, and it's a great reminder for those who might have forgotten details or are looking for them.'Nimal De Silva, The Music Garage (Singapore)
'Plenty of detail that goes into posture, hand position, thumb position, etc. The notation and strumming is really good here because it builds up in stages. In a lesson, you can introduce it in this way piece by piece and not overwhelm the student.' Michael Hanna, Grade 8 RS.Guitar - Larne Guitar School (N.Ireland)'

Textauszug

ISBN 978-0-9576506-4-0

Written by Gareth Evans

Photography, Diagrams and Cover design by Gareth Evans

Additional Illustrations by Chris Evans

Copyright © 2012 by Intuition Publications

www.guitar-book.com

International Copyright Secured. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Audio Tracks

These can be downloaded for free from this link at the bottom of the eBook

Introduction

This book is designed for beginners to intermediate players. It explains in a simple way the fundamentals of areas such as technique, theory, and fret-board layout, some of which you are better off knowing now, rather than after a few months, or even years of playing.

Depending on your experience some of the subjects, particularly earlier on, may already be familiar although there may be something you have missed and whatever your strengths are there might be other areas to be brought up to speed. This book looks at technique in some depth.

Music theory is reinforced by musical pieces in various styles, which should make the learning process more practical and enjoyable. The pieces are designed for beginners but can be adapted by more experienced players by making their own melodies and / or improvising using the scales.

Each audio track has two versions, a demo track to show how the piece should sound, followed by a backing track where the guitar has been removed for you to play over.

Stretching is particularly important in the earlier stages as the hands are more prone to injury and annoying pains before they have got used to playing. At the back of the book are some stretching exercises and tips on how to practise. You don’t need to wait until you have finished the book to read that section as the advice can be useful from the beginning.

Some parts of the book refer to and are linked to other parts, to return to your previous location just use the back button on your eReader.

Chapter 1 - The Beginning

The Guitar

* The Pickup selector switch is to choose which pickups to use. Ranging from a sharp heavy sound with the switch back for the pickup near the bridge, to a softer mellow jazzy sound with the switch set forward for the pickup near the fret-board. * The Tone knob controls the volume proportion between the high and low frequencies, in other words it’s the treble and bass.

Basic Technique…Holding the Guitar and using a Pick

When sitting to play the guitar you should be upright with the guitar upright on your lap and its neck tilted upward slightly. It can help to have the guitar as balanced on the lap as you can, as this leaves the hands free to play it rather than have to hold it upright too.

With an acoustic guitar you can hold the body of the guitar under your strumming arm. Using a music stand at eye level for reading can make it easier to maintain good posture and is more comfortable than crouching over your guitar to read music off a table or desk. Pegs can be used to hold pages open.

Sometimes when standing up to play, the guitar is slung low, usually for style. For the best position to play in however, it’s better not to have the guitar slung too low otherwise it becomes difficult for your fretting hand to reach around the neck. Wearing a strap while sitting can also give extra stability and comfort.

The pick should be held between the thumb and the index finger. The parts in contact with the pick should be the sole / tip area of the thumb and the side of the sole of the index finger. You could put your hand out in front of you and hold the pick as shown in the photo below. There only needs to be a small bit of pick sticking out from your grip. Too far out and we don’t have as much control causing it to flap about within our grip as we pluck the strings.

When writing we hold the pen nearer the tip while resting the side of our hand on the paper, this way we can get control over the pen and write neatly. If we were to hold the pen further away from the tip without resting our hand on the paper our writing could look pretty messy! Similar applies to using a plectrum. Unless you are strumming it is best to rest your hand on the guitar, this way you can get more control and accurately play the strings you intend to.

On the picture below left the “wrist / muscle at the base of the thumb” area is resting on the guitar. Use this technique. Below right the hand is hovering over the guitar. This isn’t very easy to control and makes it likely you will accidentally play strings that you didn’t intend to.

When playing the higher strings the hand moves down and the wrist / muscle at the base of the thumb area rests on the lower strings. This mutes the lower strings when we don’t want them to sound. It also maintains the same posture for the hand across all six strings rather than bending the wrist down and stretching the fingers to reach the higher ones. If you have a movable bridge try not to rest the hand on it and move it while you are playing.

Some players like to have the remaining fingers tucked in, others like to have them fanned out. To get more control when playing the higher strings you could also rest the little finger on the guitar just below the high E string.

The metal bars on the guitar neck are frets. You push the string down just behind these with fingers from your fretting hand to get different notes when the string is plucked by the other hand. Avoid bending the string up or down as you press so that the note doesn’t go out of tune. If the string makes a buzzing noise then you might need to press down a little harder.

Having said that you shouldn’t press too hard either because whether you press quite hard or just hard enough the note will still be clear! You can find out by pressing a finger very lightly on a fret while plucking the string, gradually increase the pressure until you hear a clear note, that’s all the pressure you need. If you practise like this so it becomes how you play, then eventually you’ll move around the fret-board easier without your fretting hand getting tired.

Try this on various strings and frets using all fingers from the index to the little finger (and don’t forget to use the technique from the last section for the hand that plucks the strings). You’ll probably find the little finger more difficult than the rest but don’t worry, as this is something that can be worked on over time.

Tuning the Guitar

First we need to understand the strings of the guitar. They are named according to what note they sound when played open. Open means a string is played on its own without the fretting hand pressing down on any of the frets.

Even though the low E string is positioned on top of all the other strings it is the lowest in pitch, which is why it is called the “low E” or “bottom E”, while the string that is physically below the other strings is the highest in pitch hence its name “high E” or “top E”. To make the string names easier to remember a mnemonic can be used such as “Every Angry Dog Grows Big Ears”. The strings can also be named numerically from the high E to the low E as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th string.

There are a number of ways to tune a guitar. The easiest and most accurate is with an electronic tuner. An Electronic tuner can be plugged directly into the guitar. Most also have an internal microphone so they can be used to tune an acoustic guitar too. Another kind of electronic tuner is the clip-on tuner, which reads vibrations from the instrument. Distraction from other sounds will be minimal compared to using a microphone tuner. A clip-on tuner can be used for electric guitar or acoustic guitar, wherever the clip will fit.

Using a tuner is accurate and good for situations like exams or performances. Another way is to tune the guitar by ear, which can develop your sound perception. Below is how you would refer to the keys of an in tune piano or electronic keyboard to tune a guitar. Listen to the note played on the piano while tuning the corresponding guitar string so that it sounds the same…

You could also tune your guitar to another one that is already in tune.

Relative Tuning

Finally, the well-known relative tuning method, which shows how the strings relate to each other.

When you play the 5th fret of most of the strings, it gives the same note as the next string up played open. The diagram below shows how this works. Providing that the low E string is in tune, we can play its 5th fret to give us the note of A and tune the open A string so it sounds the same. Once the A string is in tune, its 5th fret can then be used to tune the D string. You can work your way up through the strings tuning them in the same way.

The only exception to this method is the B string. Rather than being tuned to the 5th fret of the G string it needs to be tuned to the 4th fret of this string. The different tuning of the B string will play an important role in a later section of this book so it’s worth bearing in mind.

A potential problem with the relative tuning method is that the margin of human error might be times six by the time you have got to the high E string, so you would need good ears.

One last thing worth...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.10.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Instrumentenunterrricht
• Schlagworte: Guitar lesson • Guitar tuition • guitar tutorial • learn guitar • Play guitar for beginners
• ISBN-10: 0-9576506-4-7 / 0957650647
• ISBN-13: 978-0-9576506-4-0 / 9780957650640