a few FAQ's
 
 
 

Here are a few quick things you will need to know about before we get down to playing. If you've already been playing for awhile you probably won't need this, but if you're just beginning this will most likely answer a lot of questions...

HOW SHOULD I HOLD MY GUITAR? There will be variations on this depending upon what kind of guitar you're playing, but generally, I hold my guitar on my right thigh. I keep my back straight, and I keep my arms & hands positioned in such a way that my fingers point straight up towards the ceiling from underneath the neck.

HOW SHOULD I HOLD MY PICK? I hold mine between the first finger (index finger) and thumb of my right hand. I hold it so the pointy end of the pick is aimed straight at the guitar. One thing that I am fairly militant about with my students is not having too much of the point sticking out. The more pick you have sticking out from your fingers, the less control you're going to have. Hold it so that there is no more than 1/8"-1/4" of pick protruding from your fingers. Once you are holding your guitar and pick correctly, go ahead and pick each open string a few times. An open string is one that you pick without pushing down on any frets.

WHAT ARE THE NAMES OF THE STRINGS? From the closest to the floor they are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. By letter name they are E, B, G, D, A, E. An easy way to remember this is "Easter Bunny Goes Dancing After Easter". One of my students made that up a few years ago. Pretty wacky, but it works!

HOW MUCH SHOULD I PRACTICE? How good do you want to get? I wanted to get really good, so I practiced accordingly (six hours a day, give or take) and I got there. I still practice a lot. I'm currently working with two bands rehearsing and or gigging 5 nights a week, plus I teach 50 students a week. Playing the guitar is all I ever wanted to do, just for it's own sake. Obviously, not everyone starts out with that motivation. However, if you want to improve steadily, a diet of one half hour a day, five days a week will be enough to keep you rolling along. As you get more advanced you may need to practice more in order to maintain what you've already got while you're still learning new stuff, but at first the half hour a day five days a week regimen should work fine. As time goes on your practice schedule should tailor itself according to your desire to improve.

HOW DO I PRACTICE? Excellent question. Basically I define practicing as locating something that gives you problems, and doing it over and over again until the problems go away. Where most people fall short is in locating the difficult parts. You have to keep your ears open! Listen to yourself at all times, and you will find all kinds of things to work on. Do you like what you hear? Then practice what you don't like. Say you're playing a song and everything's going along fine until you come to a G note. This may seem obvious, but YOU'RE NOT DOING YOURSELF ANY GOOD BY PRACTICING THE WHOLE SONG!! Practice the G note, practice the approach to the G note by playing from a few notes back. Then play the whole song, when that is no longer an issue. Identify and isolate challenging sections and make them non-threatening. Do this and you have improved for that day. Do this every time you sit down with your guitar, and you'll literally never stop improving!!

WHY AREN'T I GETTING ANY BETTER? Of course you are! Let me tell you something right now... NO ONE EVER LEARNED TO PLAY THE GUITAR IN 5 MINUTES, 5 DAYS, 5 WEEKS OR 5 MONTHS!!!! Never. Quote me on that. The guitar is a very difficult instrument. Every musical instrument is very difficult to play. Every little bit of progress is monumental!!! Savor every morsel of it, and you will get exactly as good as you want to be. Music isn't something that you learn, and then one day you wake up and you're done. It is an art that you will still be learning 10, 20, God willing even 50 years from now. That's the beauty of it. Embrace it!!

WHAT IF I'M LEFT HANDED? Frustrating isn't it? Unfortunately, all of the fingering charts that have been developed for the guitar were invented with a right handed bias. On this site I promise to refer to things in broader terms in my explanations. In other words, I'll use terms like fretting hand and picking hand as opposed to right hand and left hand. All diagrams will be drawn in the traditional fashion.

That's about all for the intro. I'll most likely think of about 100 other FAQ's in the future that will end up on here, but for now why don't you dig into Lesson One!