Guitar For Dummies
Overview
The bestselling guide now updated with video demonstrations and audio tracks online The guitar is one of the most versatile instruments in the world, which is why it's so appealing to musicians. Guitar For Dummies, 4th Edition gives you everything a beginning or intermediate acoustic or electric guitarist needs: from buying a guitar to tuning it, playing it, and caring for it. Fully revised and updated, with online video and audio clips that help you learn and play along, you'll explore everything from simple chords and melodies to more challenging exercises that are designed to satisfy players of all levels. Additionally, new players can dive into the basics of guitar and accessory selection. Whether you prefer the cool sounds of the acoustic or the edgier tones of the electric, your guitar will get a lot of use as you play your way through the lessons presented in this integral book. But your journey doesn't stop at the last page! With an updated multimedia component, you have access to more than 80 online videos and 35 audio tracks that help build your talent.
- Play along with online videos and audio tracks to develop and reinforce your new skills
- Tune your guitar, change strings, and make simple repairs to keep your instrument in working order
- Choose the right guitar and equipment for your needs
- Explore numerous musical styles, including rock, blues, jazz, and country
Guitar For Dummies, 4th Edition guides you in the development of your strumming talent—and who knows where that can take you!
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About The Author
Mark Phillips is a guitarist, arranger, author, and editor with more than 30 years in music publishing.
Jon Chappell is a multi-style guitarist, arranger, author, and journalist, and former editor of Guitar magazine.
Sample Chapters
guitar for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
On this Cheat Sheet, you find handy reference material that you can print and place conveniently in your practice area. Included are an explanation of guitar notation as it translates to actually playing the guitar, 24 common guitar chords, a fingerboard diagram showing all the notes on the guitar up to the 12th fret, and a list of essential tools and accessories that facilitate trouble-free and versatile music-making on guitar.
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One of the best reasons to pick up the guitar is to play a song that most everyone knows and can sing along with. Following are ten songs that are ideal for playing and singing, either alone or with other people around to help out. All the songs here can be played in a number of keys, using just a few simple chords.
No musical instrument offers a greater variety of appearance, function, and sound than a guitar. Whether it’s the quietly elegant Ramirez, the smoothly debonair D’Angelico, or the raucously funky Telecaster, each guitar presented here has left an indelible mark on the guitar-playing canon and will forever be known as a classic.
Regardless of style, certain guitarists have made their mark on the world of guitar so that any guitarist who comes along after them has a hard time escaping their legacy. Presented here, in chronological order, ten (or 12, but who's counting?) guitarists who mattered and why.
Andrés Segovia (1893–1987)
Not only was Andrés Segovia the most famous classical guitarist of all time, but he also literally invented the genre.
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The following figure shows 24 common, easy-to-play guitar chords that you can use in many different songs in a variety of styles — including folk, country, rock, and blues. Left-hand fingerings appear immediately below the strings (1 = index, 2 = middle, 3 = ring, and 4 = little). An O above a string means to play the open string as part of the chord; an X above a string indicates it isn’t part of the chord and shouldn’t be played.
After you master the techniques of playing chords and notes smoothly and cleanly on the guitar, you can turn your attention to the external processing of your sound through effects — those magical little boxes that can transform your tone from nice and neat to gnarly and nasty or any point in between. Following are four essential effects that should find a place in any electric guitarist’s arsenal.
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The pentatonic minor scale is the principal scale used in rock and blues guitar soloing. As its name implies, it consists of five notes (unlike common major and minor scales, which consist of seven notes). On the fretboard, the finger pattern of the pentatonic scale resembles the shape of a box, so pentatonic minor scales on the guitar sometimes are referred to as boxes, or box positions.
Following are chord diagrams for 96 of the most widely used guitar chords. The chords are arranged in 12 columns from C to B, for all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Each of the eight rows shows a different quality — major, minor, 7th, minor 7th, and so on. So if you're looking at a piece of music that calls for, say, a Gsus4 chord, go over to the eighth column from the left and then down to the sixth row from the top.
A guitar case is so important to your guitar that many manufacturers include the case in the price of the guitar. Many manufacturers make cases specially designed for particular models and ship the guitars inside these cases to retailers. This practice makes buying the guitar without the case difficult — and rightly so.
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Appointments are the fancy stuff that have no acoustic or structural effect on the guitar. They exist solely as decorative elements. Some people find fancy appointments showy or pretentious, but a great guitar is a work of art to behold with the eye as well as the ear. So go for the bling.
Typical appointments include intricate neck inlays (such as abalone figures countersunk into the fretboard), a fancy headstock design, and, on an acoustic guitar, the rosette, or decorative design around the sound hole.
For more expensive guitars, you can really bring out the white glove and get fussy. Prospective buyers even bring in a dentist's mirror to inspect the interior of an acoustic guitar.
For acoustic guitars in the mid-priced to expensive range, you should expect to find gapless joints — solid wood-to-wood connections between components, especially where the neck meets the body.
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How a guitar is built defines what type of guitar it is and (generally) what type of music it's used for. Consider just two examples:
A solid-body electric guitar is used for rock. It has no holes in the body — which adds to its sustain (the guitar's ability to increase the amount of time a plucked note rings).
Before you walk into your local music store ready to plop down your hard-earned dough on a new guitar, you need to take stock of what you're doing. You need to ask yourself some tough questions about your pending purchase — and you need to do so now.
Don't simply wait until you get to the store to develop a buying strategy (which, by that time, usually translates into no strategy at all).
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A note's shape helps tell how long you need to hold it. Notes can have a hollow note head (as in the case of the whole note and half note) or a solid note head (quarter notes, eighth notes, and 16th notes), and the solid note heads can even have vertical lines (called stems) with flags (curly lines) dangling off them.
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Beyond choosing the principal actors in your setup — guitar, amp, effects, and cases — you still have to decide on a whole cast of supporting characters. These are the little things that, while inexpensive and easily acquired, are vital to keep your main gear happy and healthy.
Guitar strings
You always need to keep extra strings on hand for the simple reason that if you break one, you need to replace it immediately.
Following is a list of 12 essential tools and accessories that will help you keep your fingers and your guitar in tip-top shape and in good working order and provide you with the hardware to create a variety of music. All the following items are fairly inexpensive; they can fit easily in a resealable plastic bag and be stored inside your guitar case.
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Expression and articulation deal with how you play the music. The table, in conjunction with the figure, tells you about the symbols and terms that deal with these issues. The table deals with the symbols numbered 20 to 26 in the figure.
Music for "Shine On Harvest Moon."
Expression, Articulation, and Miscellaneous Symbols
Number in Figure
What It's Called
What It Means
20
Dynamic marking
A dynamic marking tells you how loudly or softly to play.
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Dozens of different types of effects are available for your guitar — more than you could possibly own, not to mention use all at once. The price of these individual units varies, too, with distortion boxes as cheap as $45 and digital reverbs and delays as much as $175 (or more).
To help you sort through the myriad of flavors and types of effects, following is a list of some of the most popular ones:
Distortion: This effect simulates the sound of a guitar signal driven too hard for the amplifier; the device overdrives the signal to the point that it breaks up — but in a musically pleasing way.
On this Cheat Sheet, you find handy reference material that you can print and place conveniently in your practice area. Included are an explanation of guitar notation as it translates to actually playing the guitar, 24 common guitar chords, a fingerboard diagram showing all the notes on the guitar up to the 12th fret, and a list of essential tools and accessories that facilitate trouble-free and versatile music-making on guitar.
In the not too distant past, a new guitar's cost was based on its list, or retail, price (set by the manufacturer), which the retailer then discounted to the selling price, or the actual amount you, the buyer, paid.
Needless to say, the list price was much higher than the discounted price, from several hundred to even a couple thousand dollars more, especially if you were dealing with a high-end instrument.
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.
Intonation refers to the accuracy of the pitches produced by fretting. For example, if you play the 12th fret, the resulting note should be exactly an octave higher than the open string. If the 12th-fret note is slightly higher than an octave, your string is fretting sharp; if the 12th-fret note is slightly lower than an octave, the string is fretting flat.
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Assemble a permanent tool kit containing all the tools you need for your guitar. Don't "cannibalize" this set if you're doing other household fixes. Buy two sets of tools — one for general use and one that never leaves your guitar case or gig bag.
Look at your guitar to determine what kind of tools you may need should something come loose.
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Most movable barre chords on the guitar are either E-based, meaning they get their names from the notes you play on the 6th (low E) string, or A-based, meaning they get their names from the notes you play on the 5th (A) string. To find the correct fret for any E-based barre chord (whether major, minor, or seventh), refer to the following fretboard for the correct frets for notes on the E string.
If you need to take your guitar out into the world that requires protection, as you discover here. Never leave the house without putting the guitar in some kind of protective case.
Protect your guitar on the road
Most people don't even think about the guitar's health as they toss their favorite acoustic into the station wagon and head for the beach.
Following are all the parts on your guitar that are most likely to wear out or break and need replacing. You can perform any of these fixes yourself without doing damage to the guitar — even if you screw up.
Tuning machines on your guitar
Tuning machines consist of a system of gears and shafts, and as the clutch on your car usually does eventually (or the automatic transmission if you never got that whole stick thing), tuners can wear out.
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The thumb-brush technique is an accompaniment pattern that has a "boom-chick" sound. Here, the thumb plays normally (plucking a bass string downward), but the fingers strike (brush) the top three or four strings with the backs of the nails in a downward motion (toward the floor). The fingers actually strum the strings as a pick does, but you don't move your arm or your whole hand.
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A guitar is a system of moving parts, many of which are mechanical, and as anyone who's ever owned a car can attest, moving things come loose. In guitars, the hardware connections are what typically work themselves loose, such as the nuts on the bridge post or the screws that hold down the pickup covers.
If you hear a rattle, try strumming with one hand to recreate the rattle while touching the various suspects with your other hand.
Jazz guitar can be difficult to master because improvisation (making up music on the spot) is such an important part of the style. Normally, making up the music is the job of the composer. But in jazz, the performers are (usually) expected to improvise.
Jazz is a form of music that instrumentalists created when they began taking liberties with existing song forms, improvising off composed melodies, and varying harmonic structures.
A guitar isn't limited by what it's made of any more than a sculpture is. Don't judge a guitar only by its materials, but consider that a guitar with better materials (abalone inlays as opposed to plastic ones) tends to have commensurately better workmanship — and is, therefore, a better guitar — than a model that uses inexpensive materials.
Individual pedals are a great convenience because they enable you to buy effects one at a time and use them in a modular fashion — you can choose to include them in your chain or not, and you can rearrange their order to create different effects. But many guitarists opt for a multi-effects processor, which puts all the individual effects into one housing.
You can treat yourself to a number of other little doodads and contraptions that make guitar playing a lot more painless and convenient. In no particular order, consider some of the following gizmos, which are often worth their weight in thumbpicks. The figure shows these items, which are defined in the following list:
Credit: Photograph courtesy of Cherry Lane MusicSome helpful accessories designed to make guitar life just a little easier.
The following neck diagram shows the notes for all the frets on the guitar up to and including the 12th fret. Use this diagram to find individual notes on the guitar or to transpose any movable chord or scale to a different starting note. Sometimes you see two notes at the same fret; these notes, called enharmonic equivalents, have the same pitch.
Performance, in this case, means anything from cutting through three friends in a garage jam to making yourself heard over the antics of the overly zealous drummer and bass player at Slippery Sam's Thursday Night Blues Bash.
After you decide to take the plunge into higher-quality amplifiers, you have a galaxy of makes and models from which to choose.
Guitar
The table explains what the various symbols dealing with pitch mean in music notation. Refer to the figure and this table for the meanings of the symbols. The table refers to the symbols numbered from 1 to 6 in the figure.
Music for "Shine On Harvest Moon."
Pitch Symbols and Their Meanings
Number in Figure
What It's Called
What It Means
1
Staff
Composers write music on a five-line system called a staff.
If you have limited funds, start out with a practice amp — one that has a decent feature set (tone controls, reverb, and two or more volume controls so you can sculpt your distorted sound) and that delivers a good sound but at low volumes (5 to 25 watts is typical on practice amps). This type of starter amp accustoms you to hearing the electric guitar as it's designed to be heard — through a guitar amp.
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Comping is the term jazz players use when referring to playing the background or accompaniment. For the guitarist, comping translates into rhythm guitar — playing the chords. Jazz guitarists generally employ inside chords, outside chords, and full chords.
Inside chords
Inside chords are chords that don't use the 1st (high E) string.
Slide guitar is an important addition to blues-guitar technique. In playing slide, you don't use your left hand to fret the guitar by pressing the strings to the fretboard, as you normally do. Instead, you hold a metal or glass bar (the slide) over the neck and stop (shorten the vibrating length) the strings by pressing the slide lightly against the strings at a given fret.
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If you're just starting out as a novice guitarist, you may ask the musical question, "What's the minimum I need to spend to avoid winding up with a piece of junk?" That's a good question, because modern manufacturing practices now enable luthiers (the fancy term for guitar makers) to turn out some pretty good stuff for around $200 — and even less sometimes.
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Guitar
Your toughest decisions in buying a guitar may come not with your first instrument at all but with your second. Admit it — your first time out was probably a blur, but now that you know a little bit about guitar playing and what's available out there, you face perhaps an even more daunting prospect than before: What should you choose as your next guitar?
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