Muscle memory is a term we use to describe the process our body uses to learn new skills. So as guitar players we can improve the learning process by taking a special kind of care when we practice with our guitars. Read Full Story

If you already know how to play guitar but you play mostly by ear or with the help of tabs, you might be wondering if there is any advantage to learning music theory. Many guitarists who think about learning theory just want to be more complete, rounded musicians but an experienced player without theory will know that the bottom line in what is musical is what sounds good. Essential, music theory is a method of communication. Musicians use musical notation and theory to pass ideas from one p... Read Full Story

There are two reasons you need to give some thought the songs you are going to learn to play on your guitar. When you are just beginning to learn how to play guitar you will need to learn songs that help you with your technique. Your repertoire of guitar songs should give you opportunities to learn the basic chords and work on changing from one to the other. Learning to play a number of songs is a great way to lift your level of guitar playing. The basic idea is to learn one song well so tha... Read Full Story

There’s a question that comes up for guitar players learning finger style techniques. Do we assign each finger to a specific string permanently or assign fingers to strings as the piece of music you are learning calls for? The answer is that you will find yourself using both ways of deciding which finger plays which string. To start the ball rolling you should probably follow the discipline of giving your thumb the sixth and fifth strings and the first, second and third fingers to the ... Read Full Story

If you want to be a guitarist who can play solos, you will need to understand scales. The work of practicing scales is boring but after a few weeks of practice you will start to experience watching your fingers move over the fretboard as though they have a mind of their own. Read Full Story

A double-stop is when you play two notes at the same time. Some people might say that’s a chord but a lot of guitar players only consider a chord to be more than two notes, so we call two notes a double-stop. The basic effect of playing double-stops is of harmonizing with your solo playing. This technique was used by many lead guitarists in bands of the fifties and sixties. Chuck Berry was a champion of double-stop playing. One way of playing a double stop is to play two adjacent strin... Read Full Story

Let’s look at things we should all be doing in our guitar practice time. This is regardless of whether we play acoustic or electric, pick or fingerstyle, whatever. You need a space where you can practice at any time of day or night. Your space should be free from noise that might distract you and it should be somewhere that you won’t disturb other people. You need your guitar sitting on a stand, ready to play - not in a case that you need to drag out from under the bed and open a... Read Full Story

I was reading a CNN article about Orianthi Panagaris which reminds us that: “live, you’re reminded that Ori herself is playing lead guitar, and that the searing guitar riffs aren’t courtesy of an anonymous studio musician who’s been hired for his or her chops.” - “Jackson guitarist Orianthi taking spotlight” by Denise Quan, CNN You might not be itching to get out and see the Michael Jackson movie but a guitar player of Oriani’s calibre should ... Read Full Story

If you want to learn how to play a guitar for free, you will find the internet is your biggest source of free guitar lessons. To make the best use of the net you will need to know how to search without wasting too much time. First, make a folder in your bookmarks to keep your guitar lesson links in. You are certain to find some sites that you need to visit more than once, so keep the links all in one place and just separate them into folders like “Videos”, “Theory”, &... Read Full Story

Experienced guitar players will know you can get guitar tabs from a number of tab archives and most will also have songs written in standard musical notation but this mostly applies to popular music genres. If you want some free sheet music for classical, folk, jazz or some exotic style of music, you will need to trawl the archives of free sheet music. Here are some of the best places to get free sheet music: IMSLP / Petrucci Music Library is involved in making a virtual library of all publi... Read Full Story