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.
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.
Gibson Lifestyle has put together a good article that provides a brief overview of ten different types of guitar effects pedals. They provide a little background info on what the pedal does and the songs or guitarists made them famous. Here is an excerpt about delay pedals:
The original delay units were tape-driven, like the Echo-Plex used by Jimi Hendrix (“House Burning Down”) and David Gilmore (Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”) in the ’60s and ’70s. But in the mid-’80s, as digital effects came into use, the delay and early delay/sampler pedals came into vogue. While many effect connoisseurs frown on digital stomp boxes, the plusses of digital delay and sampling over tape are obvious. Primarily, there’s no tape to snarl, wear out or sputter. Today’s delay pedals can also get effects that were once produced by reverb tanks, like authentic-sounding rockabilly slap-back, and hearing The Edge play arpeggios through a delay pedal on “Where the Streets Have No Name” is a sublime listening experience.
We had Peter Vogl shoot a video awhile back running through his effects rig. It gets more indepth than the Gibson article and gives you the sights and sounds to go along with the commentary. Add both pieces together and you should have a pretty good idea on which pedals you may be interested in.
As a beginning guitarist you slowly learn tricks to spice up even the most common chord progression. Sometimes that’s using diverse strum patterns, hammering on to the chord notes, or using color chords. Another method is to use a series of bass notes to tie the two chords together. Starting with the chord you’re strumming you would often play the notes of a scale up to the root note of the next chord. This can make the common switching of G-C, C-D, D-G,etc. more interesting. This technique can also be referred to as walking up to and walking down to a chord. It provides a bit of melody and variety to a strum pattern. This is a common technique in rock ballads and country. Bass note walks along with bass strums are the backbone of bluegrass rhythm playing. In Beginner Lesson 15: Chord with Bass Lines Peter Vogl will show you 10 different bass lines that will help you switch between common guitar chords. This will prepare you to play many famous songs or help you create your own progressions. Check out the demo below or the lesson page for more details.
In two previous lessons Peter Vogl has taught you how to combine chords and riffs into Acoustic Blues Songs in Am and Em. Our third installment in this series will cover the key of E major. E Acoustic Blues – Chords & Melody is a fun progression to play and can be performed as a solo piece or as an intro to a song. Check out the demo to hear sample sections.
