When you first start playing guitar, your left hand goes through a workout. The strings leave your fingertips sore, your fingers search slowly and aimlessly for the right position, and some of the stretching may seem impossible. Luckily, it all gets better. With regular practice your hand starts to remember and adjust to the new motions. Improving your technique can also make everything easier to play. Peter Vogl has two new free lessons that will teach you about proper playing position. The first lesson will show you where to place your thumb on the back of the guitar neck. A neutral position in the back of the neck allows your fingers to stretch and bend more easily. The second lesson will address how close your left hand fingers should be to the frets and how much pressure to use. Combining these tips should help improve your speed and accuracy and avoid the dreaded buzzing and muted notes.
Nic Lubber is apparently new to Youtube. He has five videos up and they’ve all been uploaded in the last three weeks. So I can’t give you much more information than these are some really good fingerpicking Christmas tunes. Watch and enjoy!. If you’re inspired check out our Christmas guitar song tabs.
Carol of the Bells (inspired by Trace Bundy’s version)
We have a new free lesson on learning how to play a guitar chord progression. The chords used in this lesson are C#m, A, E, and B. The C#m and B barre chords can be tricky for a beginning guitarist to play. If you’re having trouble with them, check out our barre chords lesson for tips on how to create them quicker and play them cleaner. In this lesson, you will also learn a couple of chord substitutions that can be used to create a different sound. Peter will then cover a couple of different strum patterns you can use to play over this set of chords. Go to the lesson page to get the chord charts and strumming notation.
Over the last couple of months we’ve released a series of guitar lessons by David Ellis that cover basic bluegrass lead playing. You can now buy those six lessons with one click as the Easy Flatpicking Songs Package and save $5.99 over the standard price. The lessons will teach you beginning to intermediate level breaks for Wildwood Flower, Old Joe Clark, John Hardy, Way Downtown, Cripple Creek, Shady Grove, 9lb Hammer, Salt Creek, and Red Haired Boy. These are twelve songs that are commonly played at bluegrass jams and would be known by most of your fellow pickers. Watch the demo below or check out the lesson page to get an idea for the difficulty level and style. If you are looking for something a little more advanced you should check out our Flapticking Guitar Songs book download which features some great tabs. In the more general songbook style we also have the Bluegrass Fakebook
A few weeks ago we talked about the inevitable moment in a guitar player’s life, where they get bored of playing the same old progression. One trick to spice things up is using bass lines to connect different chords. This technique adds a bit of melody to the chord progression. Another trick covered in Peter’s newest lesson, is to incorporate hammer ons and pull off with chords. By hammering on to a specific note in the chord you can create an additional bit of tone. It can add a changing note and a bit of volume to the middle of successive strums on the same chord. You can also use it to accentuate the switching of chords. Take a look at the demo to get a better for feel for this and also head over to the lesson page for more details.
