Learn to play guitar
This article is intended for people who are new to learning guitar, or have limited experience with the instrument.
Let’s start with a little theory, have a look at your guitars fretboard. You may notice a series of dots or markers. These aid the player in finding the desired frets to play. Fret numbering begins with the fret closest to the headstock. The first markers represent the odd frets, on the guitar pictured there are markers for the 1st, 3rd, 5th , 7th and 9th frets. There are normally two markers at the 12th fret, so why does this fret get special treatment? The reason is the 12th fret is exactly one ‘octave’ above the open string ( when you don’t put you finger on any frets it is said to be an open string.) You may notice that the 12th fret is exactly half way between the bridge and the nut. This is how the octave is created, as the string length is halved, the wavelength of the note is halved and therefore twice the pitch.
As you may have guessed the term octave refers to 8 notes, but our frets let us play 13 notes including the open string within the octave, so what gives? This is due to the naming of notes, where only 8 letters are assigned to notes, the remaining 5 notes are given additional sharp or flat signs.
Octave on the E string
| Note | E | F | F# | G | G# | A | Bb | B | C | C# | D | D# | E |
| Fret | Open | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th | 11th | 12th |
After the 12th fret the same series of notes are repeated, with markers at the 15th, 17th, 19th,21st and sometimes 24th fret.
The 6 strings on a guitar are numbered from the 1st string ( the thinnest and highest pitch) to the 6th string (the fattest and lowest pitch. ) The standard tuning of guitar strings from lowest to highest is E, A, D, G, B, E. From this you can see the top and bottom strings are the same note (E), they are not the same frequency though. The frequencies of the strings are (roughly) 82 Hz, 110 Hz, 147 Hz, 196 Hz, 247 Hz, 330 Hz. From this we can see that 82 Hz multiplied by 4 gives roughly 330 Hz. The bottom string is therefore 3 octaves below the top string.
To tune your guitar you may wish to buy an electronic guitar tuner. These allow you to plug in your electric guitar, and often have a microphone for tuning acoustic guitars. With these tuners it is simply a case of plucking a string, and turning your tuning heads until the display reads in-tune for the desired string. If your guitar is way out of tune you may need to tune roughly by ear to get the strings in a region close to the desired note so the tuner can find them easily. Alternatively you could play a piano or tuning fork, and match you guitar strings by ear. The standard guitar tunings are included below, by clicking on each note you can tune your strings by ear.
Once you have tuned you guitar it’s best to play a few chords to check the tuning. Some common and easy to play chords are on the charts below. Most chord charts including these ones show the highest string on the top line. The nut is shown as a solid thick black line, the frets are the thinner lines. Some dot markers are included for reference to your own guitar. The numbers on each string refers to a suggested finger number to play that fret.
Taking the G chord as an example we can see the 2nd finger is on the 3rd fret of the bottom E string, the 1st finger is on the 2nd fret of the A string, and the 4th finger is on the 3rd fret of the top E string. The ‘o’ signs at far right denote that the string should be played open, so for the G chord all 6 strings are played. For other chords there are some ‘x’ signs at the far right, this shows strings which are not played at all.
G Chord
Here are some more chord charts for you to work on. If they don’t sound amazing straight away don’t worry. It’s important to put quite a bit of pressure when holding down the strings or you may experience buzzing problems. Also try to make sure your hands and fingers don’t touch open strings as this will make them buzz or mute them altogether. It’s really a case of spending some time strumming, find some easy songs to learn and play along, you can find chord charts for most stuff on the internet.
C Chord
E Chord
A Minor Chord
D Chord
Where you place your thumb can make things easier to get a clean sound without buzzing. With the thumb on the back of the neck it is possible to get more pressure on the frets. People like Jimi Hendrix are famous for playing with their thumb and often had it hooked round the neck. You should feel free to experiment but remember if you are having trouble getting clean notes, see if moving your thumb helps.
Thumb on back of neck for more pressure to fingers
Thumb hooked around neck Jimi Style
Well that’s probably all I should say for now, have a play !
Posted on Sun 6th Sep 2009 12:13:05
