Jon Chappell

Tuning a guitar to itself using the fifth-fret method is an important and useful guitar skill. The fifth-fret method is the most common type of relative tuning, and it's all you need if you're planning on playing by yourself.The fifth-fret method derives its name from the fact that you almost always play a string at the fifth fret and then compare the sound of that note to that of the next open string.

An arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord (kind of like the pictures you see in the owner’s manual to a piece of build-it-yourself furniture). It won’t surprise you that in Italian, the word arpeggio means “broken chord.

Guitarists use power chords — built on the lowest notes of a regular open-position or barre chord — in rock music to create a low sound. Power chords are easier to play than are their full-version counterparts and don’t contain a major or minor quality to them, so they can stand in for either type of chord. Plus, they’re loads of fun to play!

You can use hammer-ons to add articulation to your guitar playing. Articulation refers to how you play and connect notes. Articulation gives your music expression and enables you to make your guitar talk, sing, and even cry. As you start to incorporate articulation in your playing, you begin to exercise more control over your guitar.

Slide guitar may have become a stylistic choice over fretted guitar out of necessity by players who didn't have the skills or patience to fret the guitar and found it easy to slide a smooth, rounded object over the strings to achieve a similar effect. But for the greatest blues practitioners, such as Charlie Patton, Sylvester Weaver, Blind Willie Johnson, Son House, and Robert Johnson, slide guitar was an unparalleled mode of expression evocative of the human voice as well as the wail of train whistles — a sound near and dear to country blues guitarists.

A slide is a guitar articulation technique in which you play a note and then move your left-hand finger along the string to a different fret. This technique enables you to connect two or more notes smoothly and quickly. It also enables you to change positions on the fretboard seamlessly. The name of this technique, slide, gives you a pretty good clue about how to play it.

“The First Noël” is a Christmas carol that you probably know, so you can use your familiarity with it to help ensure that you’re playing the song correctly on guitar — hitting the right pitches and in the correct rhythms.You use two major scale patterns to play “The First Noël”: major scale patterns #1 and #4, discussed elsewhere.

Playing rock guitar starts with having a vocabulary of chords of different types, including basic, as well as barre forms (6th-string root and 5th-string root) and a few other movable types.24 common open-position chordsFollowing is a collection of 24 basic chords you need to know to play a wide variety of songs.