Getting Started

Why is it that you want to play the guitar? Perhaps you are into guitar-based music, e.g. rock and metal, or perhaps you like the idea of being able to pick a guitar up and impress your friends. You may have a specific type of guitar that you want to play, such as the heavily distorted electric, or the 12-string acoustic. The basics are the same, no matter what guitar you play, and a player with a solid grounding in these basics will be able to play whatever type of guitar he/she so desires.

To my experience, the best way to get introduced to this wonderful instrument is to buy the cheapest, second-hand 6-string steel-stringed acoustic guitar you can find and stick to that for a while. This has the added advantage that if you decide that the guitar really isn’t your scene, then you haven’t wasted any money. Moreover, if you can make a pleasant sound out of a crappy old plank, you will sound that much better when it comes to playing the real thing.

The basic equipment, then, for any starting out guitar player is:

a) a cheap (second-hand) 6-string steel-stringed acoustic guitar
b) 2 plectrums (one always gets lost)
c) a spare set of strings (one always snaps at the crucial moment)

It is worth bearing in mind that, although books and web-sites can provide a lot of valuable help to the guitar student, it is also important to find other people, whether teachers or just friends who can play well, to learn from. I always found that even just watching people play, and occasionally asking them a question, helped me no end.

Song = chords + melody

This is, of course, an extreme over-simplification of the truth, but nevertheless the vast majority of most songs can be broken down into these two simple elements. Songs like The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’, Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’ or Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ are all based on a chord sequence with a vocal melody over it. The first step for a guitar player is to be able to play chords

a) well and
b) in time

Remember: keeping time is everything in music! It is better to play a bad chord in time then a good chord early or late.

Get yourself any kind of timekeeper – a metronome, the drum machine on a Casio keyboard, anything – and play to it in time. It can even help getting a friend with a good ear to judge whether or not you are playing in time, as very often we hear ourselves playing better than we actually are.

As with everything else, some people will find it easier and more natural to play in time than others. The only thing that can improve your timing is more and more practise. Rather than repeat this several times later on, I will try and emphasise this just once: with any aspect of guitar playing whatsoever, there is no substitute for practise. Whether you are finding that your fingers are too stiff, your ear too tone deaf or your left hand too slow, persistent practise is the key to improvement.

Practise will never quite make perfect, since there is no such thing as a perfect guitar player, but it can, and will, improve your guitar playing immensely.

Before moving on to chords, we need to look at basic notation and tablature. The table below represents the guitar fret-board, with the first row marking the fret position (0 = open string), and the next six rows representing the six strings (from thinnest to thickest).

Each fret is a semitone apart from the one above and below it. Remember that any sharp (#) note is also the flat (b) note of the one above it (e.g. G# = Ab). A few things should make themselves apparent from this:

You can see that the note on the 5th fret of every string is the same as the next open string; for example, the 5th fret on string 6 is the same as the open string 5, i.e. A. The 5th note on string 6 is the same as the open string 4, D, etc. The only exception to this is string 3, where it is the 4th fret that is equal to string 2.

This is what enables a guitarist to tune the instrument to itself: so long as the 5th fret of string 6 plays the same note as the open string 5 etc. the guitar is in tune with itself. You will find that different bands, different albums, and even different songs within the same album are tuned to different pitches. That is to say, the instruments are always in tune with themselves, but not with the instruments in other songs etc. There is no real right or wrong pitch to tune the guitar to. If you are playing along to a record, it is of course essential that you are tuned to the same pitch as the guitars on the record, and if you are in a band, it is essential that you be in tune with the other musicians! As a general rule, it is a good idea to tune the guitar to a standard keyboard or piano or, if you so desire, to a standard tuning fork or electronic tuner.

Most importantly, this should give you a feeling for octaves. Every note can be found several times up and down the fret-board – the open string 6, for example, and the 12th fret of string 6. If play these notes you will notice that although they are the same note, one is far higher than the other – an octave above in fact (they are called octaves because they are eight notes apart: E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E).

We can now move on to chords.

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