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The Ups and Downs of Strumming a Guitar
One of the most basic ways you can play chords is with a strum. Strumming the guitar is the simple act of brushing the strings with a pick, thumb, or the back of your fingernails. A strum can be slow, [more…]
How to Use Left-Hand Muting to Create a Crisp Guitar Rhythm
When it comes to rhythm guitar, you need to learn how to stop the strings. Just listen to blues rhythm guitar and you'll hear that it’s not one repetitive wall of sound, but an open, varied sound with [more…]
How to Play Double-Stops on the Guitar
Guitarists begin by learning how to play only single-string melodies. Learning how to play double-stops on the guitar lets you use the whole neck to express your musical ideas. In fact, playing double-stops [more…]
How to Play Guitar in Position
Playing in position means that your left hand remains in a fixed location on the neck of the guitar, with each finger more or less on permanent assignment to a specific fret, and that you fret every note [more…]
How to Smoothly Shift Guitar Positions
Guitar music isn’t so simple that you can play it all in one position, and life would be pretty static if you could. In real-world situations, you must often play an uninterrupted passage that takes you [more…]
How to Position Your Right Hand for Fingerpicking Your Guitar
If you eschew such paraphernalia as picks and want to go au naturel with your right hand, you should try finger-style playing, or fingerpicking. Fingerpicking [more…]
How to Understand Left-Hand Fingering in Guitar Tablature
Understanding left-hand fingering in guitar tablature (or just tab) is not as hard as you might think. Most of the time, there won't be any notation in the tab to alert you to which fingers to use because [more…]
How to Play the Guitar Using Alternate Picking
Alternate picking is the right-hand picking technique that uses both downstrokes (toward the floor) and upstrokes (toward the ceiling). When you learn how to play the guitar using alternate picking, you [more…]
Notes on the Guitar Neck
This figure of the nine-fret guitar neck has the notes in letter names for all six strings’ frets up to and including the 9th fret. Use this diagram to help you move any scale, arpeggio, or chord to a [more…]
Applying Fingerboard Diagrams and Tablature to a Real Guitar
You don’t need experience reading music to use tablature (tab) and fingerboard diagrams to play your guitar. Check out these diagrams to help with finger placement on your guitar: [more…]
How to Translate Fingerboard Diagrams to a Real Guitar
You can translate the lines and circles in a guitar fingerboard diagram quite easily once you get the hang of it. The following figure, which shows the relation between a diagram and an actual guitar helps [more…]
