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How To Fret The Guitar
Frets are any of the ridges of metal set across the fingerboard of a guitar that helps the fingers to stop the strings at the correct points. A fretboard is a fingerboard that is fitted with frets. The nut of the guitar is the ledge, as of ebony, at the upper end of the fingerboard,…
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Guitar Pick Tutorial: How To Pick Properly
This guitar pick tutorial will show you the proper use of a guitar pick. Don’t start out on the wrong foot. Learn how to use a pick the right way from the beginning. A pick is to be held with the thumb and 1st finger only. If you are right-handed, your picking hand will be…
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How To Read Guitar Tab
Traditional music notation is better suited to show what happens on a piano, not a guitar. The guitar’s fretboard is drastically different than a piano’s keyboard and requires a different sort of notation called tablature (or tab for short). Unlike traditional music notation, tablature doesn’t take years to master, it only takes minutes. Tablature gives us a visual representation…
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The 12 Notes In Western Music
The key to learning the notes on the entire fretboard is first memorizing the 12 notes and their appropriate order. There are 12 different notes in music. Imagine them as blocks: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 7 of these are primary notes called A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. If…
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The Dot Inlay Roadmap
The 12th Fret Memorizing the name of the notes on the entire fretboard can be a daunting task. A standard guitar has 21 or more frets. That’s 126 or more frets to memorize… or is it? Realize that the 12th fret is the same note as the open string. This is called an octave. An…
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Naming The Strings
The most common way to refer to a string is its alphabet name. The 1st string is the highest string on the guitar (it’s the thinnest string). It’s an E note and we call it the “high E string”. The 2nd string is B. The 3rd string is G. The 4th string is D. The…
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10 Ways To Break Free Of Your Guitar Playing Rut!
A rut is a fixed, usually boring routine. As guitar players, we sometimes find ourselves in what can only be called a guitar-playing rut. This is when we get to the point that we feel that we’re just going over the same thing time and time again. In other words: not growing as a musician.…
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Rhythm: Note Values and Rests
Rhythm is concerned with the duration or length in time of individual sounds. The relative lengths are indicated by a set of symbols called notes. Silence is similarly shown by symbols called rests.
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Fretboard Inlay Exercise
Here’s a great way to really drum the fingerboard’s inlay system into your head! It’s an exercise we’ll simply call the “Inlay Exercise”. Here’s how to do it: On the high E string play the open string then the E at the 12th fret. Go up to the first fret and play that note and then…
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Chord Families
Knowing how to play a lot of chords is one thing, but knowing where to use them is the trick. That’s why we’re going to spend a little time in this lesson learning about chord families. Most people might not realize it, but songs and scales have their own built-in chord families. By using the…