Intro

You will need to know how to read music if you want to play music that other people have written or if you want to write your own music. There are two types of music you can learn, tablature or notation. GLI will have examples that have both types but you should know how to read both of them.
The downfall to tab is that guitarists don’t get to see chord shapes like they would in regular notation music (the black dots). Also, since only guitar and bass players use tabs it is hard for a guitar player that has only used tabs to communicate with someone like a piano or horn player that uses notation.

Reading TAB

The good thing about tablature is that it is really easy to read. There are six lines, one for each string and there are numbers placed on the lines to show which frets to push down to play the piece at hand. The bottom line represents the lowest string on the guitar. The top line represents the highest string. If the numbers are on the bottom string it means the note is played on the lowest string of the guitar. When the numbers are stacked on top of each other it means to play a chord. Sometimes you will see that there are X’s stacked on top of each other instead of numbers, this means to mute the strings so that the notes do not sound and then strum them.

Time Signatures

Music can be divided up into small sections called measures. The examples in GLI will have measure numbers above the examples in red lettering. Measures are a way to organize music and show time signature. Each measure contains a certain amount of beats according to the time signature. Knowing what time signature we are in will help us to play the music at hand.

Time signature tells us how many notes we can fit into a measure before we have to start another one. If we didn’t have measures and time signature musicians would have a hard time playing together without getting lost in the music. Time signature gives us a predictable route within the music. Tab doesn’t have a real way of showing the time signature that the music is in, but in GLI there will be notation examples along with the tab so you can peer at the notation to see the time signature. Time sigs are shown as a fraction, like 4/4. This is the most common type of time signature. The number on top shows how many notes are in a measure and the number on the bottom will show how long those notes are. In the case of 4/4 there are 4 quarter notes in each measure. You will not have to know a lot of time signatures for now. Just stick with 4/4 until later.

In tab there are a lot of different symbols to know. Aside from lines and numbers there may be slanted lines between two numbers, this means to slide your finger on the fret board between frets instead of just fretting the next note. You can slide down and up depending on what the arrangement of notes is. There are also curved lines between notes that mean to play two notes but only pick the first one, this is called slurring, or hammer ons and pull offs.
At first this should feel like a ton of information. There are still a lot of different symbols, these will get you started on playing though. Like any new hobby or skill you learn, everything you read at first will seem very confusing and complicated.

Good luck!

For more Free Electric Guitar Lessons, please visit our site for Free Online Guitar Lessons
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David Coates has been playing guitar his whole life, and is presently a team member of a Free Online Guitar Lessons site. The site features free tools, lessons and resources for guitarists of all ages and stages. So if you are interested in learning to play guitar there will be an enormous variety of tip, tools and tutorials for you.

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The problem with beginner guitar chords, is that being the easiest chords to play on the guitar, they don’t cover every chord. An example of this is the F major chord, and the B major chord. The unsuspecting beginner guitarist is going along quite fine, having just recently got over the horrible shock of discovering that he would need to develop callouses on his - or her - fingers, having pushed through the finger blisters stage, mostly because that’s the only way to actually get through it, and then comes the F chord.

The F chord and the D chord only really present a problem because they require your fingers to stretch a little further than the rest of the open chords. The good news though is that it’s these two chords that prepare your fingers for what’s coming after them, namely the bar chords, or barre chords as they’re correctly spelled.

The best kind of guitar to learn on, as far as playing modern music goes, is the electric guitar.
Acoustic guitar may have certain advantages, but when it comes to getting the rest of your guitar chords down, the electric guitar is way ahead in terms of comfort, or ease of playability.
While some people may argue that an acoustic classical, or nylon string guitar has the softest strings, the limitations as far as covering modern music go, tend to outweigh its advantages as an option for learning on.

Electric guitar lessons will give you the much needed advantage to cover many different genres of music, as well as give you a headstart on the acoustic guitar enthusiasts.

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I know home work should be something that gets left behind in grade school. How ever when ever you’re buying an education product you want to make sure you’re buying the program that will provide you the best education for your dollar. Often times this is tough to know just from reading a website description or the products summary in a web store.

Before you decide on what guitar lesson program to buy take some time and research it using guitar lesson reviews. There are several sites that review different dvd, software, and book based guitar lessons. Any of these sites can be a valuable resource for you before you make your purchase.

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Learning to play guitar on your own is a quickly growing trend instead of enrolling in private guitar lessons. Why? For one thing it’s less expensive, you can buy a top grade guitar lesson dvd series for about $150 in contrast that would afford you about 15 weeks of private guitar lessons. The 2nd is When you take your lessons, when you practice, and how fast or slow you learn.

This post is going to give an overview of what you need to watch for if you want to find the right guitar lesson product and teach yourself how to play guitar.

Knowing the teacher for a guitar lesson product is qualified important, this should tell you that the lessons will be good. Understanding how the content is delivered, and that the order it’s taught is logical for a beginner is even more important.

Make sure that what ever learn guitar product you buy you can get an idea of how the lessons progress and exactly what they cover. Other wise you might find yourself lost in the process of learning guitar. The good way to compare different guitar home study courses is with a guitar lesson review site.

Structure is the key to learning guitar well. Having all kinds of videos, and cd’s to watch and listen to is great, but if there isn’t a plan to follow you won’t be able to learn very quickly if at all especially if you’re a beginner.

A good example of a quality learn guitar program can be found on our website by reading our Learn and Master Guitar review. The dvd lessons are very well organized and taught, they follow a very logical and easy to follow format. Every lesson also includes a chapter in the practice manual, and a song on one of the jam-a-long cd’s. It takes all three forms of learning into account: Hearing, watching, and reading.

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