Guitar Stuff » how-to

Not so Obvious Tips About Tuning a Guitar

Matt — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 23:55:22 +0000

Tuning is probably one of the most basic things you can learn about guitar. There is a lot of basic guitar theory that you can pick up in the process of learning to tune that can be essential down the line. For example one of the most important things you can learn is the notes of the strings in standard tuning. When reading guitar instructions quite often the writer will use phrases like “fret the A string on the 5th fret”. Once you have the string names memorized things like that will become natural.

At this point I could go ahead and write another set of instructions on how to tune a guitar, but there really is no point. There are so many resources out there which do just as good of a job if not better than I could. The tuning guide at WholeNote for example is a great set of instructions for the beginner.

Here are some quick points I would like to mention though:

A guitar can be tuned many different ways, but standard tuning refers to the most common configuration. This tuning starting from the low string to the high is E – A – D – G – B – E.

A string should always be tuned up to pitch. This means you should tune the string slightly lower than the note you want and then slowly tighten the string until it gets to the desired pitch. If you go beyond the pitch you wanted, turn the peg back below the note and tune back up again. Tuning this way will lower the chance of the string going out of tune as you play.

When you put new strings on a guitar you will have to tune it more often. As the strings get worn in and stretch a bit they will stay in tune better.

You want to make sure your guitar is always in tune when you are playing it, especially when you are learning. You want to do as much as you can to train your ear to the way the guitar should sound, and playing out of tune won’t help you there.

Once you get the hang of standard tuning play around with some alternate tunings, like dropped-d, open, or step down tuning.

If you are going to play with alternate tuning remember that your guitar is setup specifically for a specific tuning and gauge of strings. If you change the tuning of your guitar you may have to get it professionally setup, and in extreme cases you may cause damage to it. If you change the tuning and your strings become hard to play or start buzzing a lot, it’s probably a good idea to change back to standard tuning.

As I said above, the guitar tuning guide at WholeNote is a great resource. If that one doesn’t do it for you just do a simple Google search for guitar tuning and you’ll get a hundred other how-to’s.

How to use the Internet to Learn to Play the Guitar

Matt — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 17:41:51 +0000

We have all heard it a hundred times before: the Internet is a vast base of information. It is an unprecedented collection of professional and amateur documentation and advice. Chances are virtually every topic ever has been discussed in some form on the Internet. Well, lucky for us guitars are a very popular topic and there is an endless supply of learning material for beginners on the Internet. I am one of the thousands of people who are living proof that you can learn to play guitar using only yourself and the Internet.

What you will need to learn guitar on the Internet

Everyone’s situation is going to be different. Some people may have some musical experience under their belt already. In their case, learning the musical theory behind the guitar might be a good course to take. For someone like myself who didn’t know squat about music before I picked up the guitar, diving straight into learning songs was the best method. Learning songs allowed me to get a taste for music and made me want to learn more. When learning songs I would be required to study new chords and practice them in order to play the song. This is how my playing progressed. Eventually you will want to write music or play with others and you will get into things like scales and keys.

Regardless of whether you have previous knowledge or not you will need some basic personality traits to teach yourself to play guitar.

1. Patience

2. Determination

3. Passion

How much of each of those qualities you need depends on what level of playing you wish to achieve. Metal guitar gods like Zakk Wylde and Alexi Laiho have said that they would spend up to 12 hours a day practicing their playing. Their level of playing is a direct result of that determination.

How I learned to play guitar

I would consider myself an experienced guitarist. I have strengths in a lot of areas, but like every other guitarist there is always something new to learn. It didn’t happen over night. However after 8 years I am playing at a level now that I didn’t even know was possible when I started. Here is how I learned to play the guitar.

Learn Songs You Like
When I started playing guitar I wanted to learn to play Nirvana songs. I knew a friend who played guitar already and I had seen him using online tablature to learn songs. Tablature is a form of music notation that is very simple to read. It tells you directly what strings to pluck and what frets to press. That day I went home, picked up the guitar we had and searched the Internet for come as you are tab. I was able to learn how to play the verse of the song pretty well in about half an hour.

That night I went through my musical collection listening to songs trying to find others I could learn. Many sounded too difficult to me. Some I tried to learn and gave up because they were obviously beyond my playing ability on the first day. Although I don’t remember many of the songs now, I know I learned some parts of different Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, and Collective Soul tunes. By the end of the week I had a few songs I could show off to my family and friends.

Challenge Yourself to Learn More
Eventually in learning I became aware of chords. Initially I only learned power chords because they were the choice of Kurt Cobain. Power chords are 3 notes that have the same finger formation. All you do is move them to a different location on the guitar to make a different chord. When I began playing some Classic Rock I learned the concept of open chords. These chords all have different finger formations and are usually played near the end of the fretboard. As I would try and learn new songs I would have to study and practice different chords.

Through learning songs from tab files there were a lot of symbols like “/”, “^”, “h”, and “p” that I didnt understand. Searching the Internet for an article on how to read tab files I found that / was slide, ^ was bend, h was hammer-on, and p was pull-off. These guitar playing techniques were all new to me and again I had to search the internet for tutorials on each technique.

A few months into playing guitar I started playing songs with other friends who played guitar. While jamming with my friends they would often improvise in their playing and I wanted to learn to do that. It was confusing to me how people could learn what notes to play so that it would sound in tune with the other guitars. Again I searched the internet for “how to improvise guitar”, “how to solo guitar”, and “how to jam guitar”. Through the articles I read I became aware of the world of scales. I think this is where things really started to make sense for me. I learned a lot of things over the next few months. The basic scale to learn seems to be the pentatonic scale. So I learned that one and was improvising in no time.

The next thing I learned was barre chords. Barre chords are difficult to learn because they usually require all of your fingers to fret them, but once you learn them you arent limited to open chords when you want to play rythm. Barre chords really improved the strength in my fretting hand and allowed me to play with more precision and speed.

At this point I had a bag full of techniques and chords under my belt and I was finding songs were much easier for me to learn. I think I began to plateau at this point and really focused on perfecting the skills I had learned. Eventually I grew tired of playing acoustic guitar and started lusting after electric guitar. My musical tastes had moved from Classic Rock to Thrash and Metal. I was listening to Metallica, Pantera, and Ozzy and I wanted to learn to play Metal.

I started focusing a lot of my attention on my soloing skills. I learned several solos note for note and practiced my speed and precision.

Resources

So enough talk, simply what can you find online to help you play guitar? Probably the first thing you want to find is tabs. Find a song that you like, that in your opinion doesn’t sound too hard musically and search for a guitar tab for it. If you find a tab and you don’t know how to read it, search for “how to read guitar tabs”. Once you get the hang of reading guitar tabs start searching for guitar lessons. Most guitar lessons use tab notation to teach you, so you will need to know how to read them first.

Tablature and Chords
Tablature (or tabs) and Chords are another guitar player’s interpretation of how to play a song. Tablature ranges in detail but will tell you where on the fretboard to put your fingers. Chords tell you the names and the order of the chords in a song. Learning the rhythm or picking pattern is up to the player.

There are millions of tab and chord files online and depending on the popularity of the song may be multiple different versions from different guitar players.

Lessons
Lessons are also easy to find online. Many guitar related sites offer lessons written by site members. Some sites provide video or audio to go along with the lessons. Some just are plain text. Lessons range from beginner to expert. One note, you should never have to pay for lessons online. There is an abundance of free lessons and nothing you pay for will be any better than these.

Offline Resources
Although the Internet is an excellent source for guitar information, sometimes sorting through it all can be difficult. Many online material is written by amateur writers and therefore can be hard to grasp. For that reason, I think it’s a good idea to also look into books and guitar magazines for learning material. Since they are written by professional authors they should be easy to read and not too cryptic. Guitar magazines are also a great source of tabs. Each magazine usually comes with 5 or 6 tabs of recent and classic songs.

What You Won’t Find
The Internet can’t teach you everything. Because playing the guitar is a hands on activity sometimes there will be things that will be difficult to learn from print. There are just some techniques that would be much easier to learn if there was someone to guide you and give you feedback.

Since everyone and anyone can put a guitar lesson on the Internet it is hard sometimes to tell which technique is best or “proper”. Some really bad habits that will be impossible to break can be picked up by teaching yourself. However, some of the best guitarists were self taught and their “bad habits” have become something that amateur guitarists aspire to perfecting.

In Review

The Internet can be a great resource for learning all sorts of new skills, including playing the guitar.

What You Need

Patience and Determination
A working guitar to practice on
An interest and a passion to learn

What the Internet Can Offer

Tab and Chord files
Lessons on scales, chords, and techniques
Lessons on guitar care and maintenance

What the Internet Can’t Offer

Hands on teaching
Guarantee of “proper” technique

Links

WholeNote – The Online Guitar Community
Ultimate Guitar.com
Guitar Noise – Online to On Stage
Cyberfret.com – Your source for free online guitar lessons

Please, feel free to comment with your online learning resources.

Last.fm – Where to Find New Music Part 3

Matt — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 13:30:49 +0000

I think this is going to be my last post in this series for now, but I have been saving the best for last. In my first post on AllMusic I was talking about different (non-internet) sources for finding new music and probably the most valuable for me is my friends. I found out about most of my favorite bands through friends.

What is Last.fm

Last.fm is a huge database of music fans. Each user has a music profile that outlines their favorite bands and songs. After signing up you can install a plug-in called Audioscrobbler for your media player that will tell last.fm all of the music you listen to. The site uses that information to build a profile for you that includes your recent tracks, top artists, top tracks, and top albums. The profile keeps track of your overall stats and each week updates your weekly listening stats.

Last.fm also provides a radio player similar to Pandora’s which supports all major operating systems including Windows, OS X, and Linux.

How do I use Last.fm to Find New Music?

The great thing about Last.fm is unlike the handmade database that Pandora uses, the users on Last.fm are what build the database. The plug-in users install into their media player tells the site all of the songs they like. Then when people use the site to do a search for a band or song, Last.fm can tell you all of the other bands and songs that are liked by people who liked the song you searched for.

When I do a search for Children of Bodom for example, there is a lot of information provided. We are given a description and history of the band, a list of the top albums with cover images, the top five songs which are available for preview, user tags, related journal posts, related artists, and much more. Let’s say I already listen to Children of Bodom but not Arch Enemy. I can click on the Arch Enemy link under similar and Last.fm will tell me the songs and albums I will probably like from that band. In the same way, I could click on the death metal tag and it will give me a list of bands, songs, and albums that Last.fm users have tagged as death metal

The defining factor of Last.fm is that it is a community. One of my favorite features is the Charts. This gives you the truest weekly top 10 songs and artists possible. Obviously it is skewed because only people who have access to Last.fm and the internet can participate, but it is still a pretty accurate chart.

I have been using Last.fm for a few weeks and it’s pretty cool to look back and see my listening trends over that period.

If you want to read my previous posts on how to find new music, follow the links below.
Allmusic.com – Where to Find New Music
Pandora – Where to Find New Music Part 2

Guitar Strings – How and What to Buy

Matt — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:42:40 +0000

As with many things pertaining to guitar, the type and size of strings are all preference. At most guitar stores there will be a selection ranging from $5 strings up to maybe $35 for premium strings. Strings come in all sorts of different thicknesses and are made from different metals, so how do you choose what type is right for you?

Type of Guitar

The type of strings you are going to get first depends on what type of guitar you have. You will need a different type of strings if you have an electric guitar, an acoustic guitar, a classical nylon string guitar, or a 12 string guitar. There is usually a large selection of strings for each type, depending on what store you go to.

String Gauge or Thickness

Strings come in a range of standard and custom gauges (or thicknesses). Usually they range from extra light, to light, to medium, to heavy, and in some cases extra heavy. The gauge of strings you choose depends on a few things. The first is the strength of your fingers. A heavy gauge string will be much harder to fret and bend than a light gauge string. If you have been playing guitar regularly and it only takes a little bit of playing to hurt your fingers, you might need a lower gauge string. The another difference between a heavy and light string is sound. A heavy string will have a much sharper bright tone where a light string will be softer. The type of string you settle on may have more to do with your musical preference than the strength of your fingers. Stevie Ray Vaughn used heavy strings which is what gave his music that unique sharp clear tone. Lighter strings are more common among metal players because it gives them an easier instrument to play when playing shredding solos.

The setup of your guitar

When a guitar comes out of the factory it is setup to use the stock strings. Usually, depending on the manufacturer, the strings will be a medium gauge. If you decide you want to start using lighter or heavier gauge strings, you will eventually have to take your guitar in to have it setup for that gauge. Because the tension on the neck is set to hold medium strings, if you go to a lower gauge or a higher gauge the pull of the strings can change the straightness of the neck. The best way to do it is find the strings you like sound and feel wise, play them on your guitar for a few months, and then take your guitar into your local shop to have them set the intonation and bridge height. This will give you the best possible action and sound with your strings. The only exception I would say is if you are going to go from a heavy string to a light or vice versa you might want to get a shop to do some initial adjustments first and take it back in a few months for some fine tuning. The last thing you want is a bowed neck on your guitar.

String Materials

Acoustic, electric, and classical guitar strings all use different materials. The different materials effect the tension, the tone, and the feel of the strings.

Acoustic Strings
Acoustic strings are typically made from bronze wound steel. This type of string is very bright and clear when new, but will quickly loose its tone the more they are played. Bronze strings are the most common for acoustic guitars. Other options for acoustic guitars are phosphor bronze strings. This type of string has a warmer tone which lasts far longer as opposed to a bright tone that fades over time. A third option is also silk & steel strings. This type of string has a nylon coated core and is wrapped in silver plated brass. It will typically be the most expensive of strings, but will have a much lighter nylon like sound and will last longer.

Electric Strings
The most common type of electric guitar strings are nickel plated strings. Other options include pure nickel strings, where the wire wrap around the string is pure nickel as opposed to nickel plated. These strings will produce a softer tone and will have less output on the electric guitar.

Classical Guitar Strings
Classical guitars use nylon strings and should never have steel strings put on them. The nylon name refers to the core material. The three low strings will have a silver plated copper wound around them to add mass to the string, but the core is still nylon. Like steel strings should never be used on a classical, nylon strings should never be used on a steel string acoustic. The nylon strings do not provide enough tension for the neck of a steel string guitar and will cause it to bow.

For the health of your guitar it’s not a great idea to be constantly switching from light to heavy to medium strings every time you change. Because of what I said above with the tension on the neck, the constant change of pull on the neck could cause damage to your guitar. Once you decide on a set of strings you should stick with that set. The only exception is if you find a gauge you like that another company offers, you should be able to use them without affecting the setup of your guitar.

Final notes

Feel free to ask the guitar tech at the store any questions you have about the strings or your guitar. Remember the following points when choosing strings:

Whether your guitar requires acoustic bronze, electric nickel, or classical nylon strings
What gauge or thickness strings you want (sound/action tradeoff)
How much you are willing to pay – ($10 to $20 = good quality strings)
The cost of having your guitar re-setup if you are changing gauges

Some strings are better than others depending on what materials they are made with. Some strings are made to last longer and some are made with sound and performance in mind. In the end it all comes down to personal preference.