Students and Masters

Led Zeppelin via last.fm

I never knew. I had no idea how much help I could have received if I had just found the right guitar teacher. Someone willing to unearth their secrets of this mystical discipline. No, I had to be a rogue guitar initiate. I just sat there hour after hour trying to dissect and play along with my favorite Led Zeppelin, Metallica or Slayer songs from cassette. That's how I developed my ear. That's how I knew my guitar was tuned. There were skills I achieved and there were other, better developed players that came along and gave me some tips.

But I never found that guy who really helped me put the big pieces of the puzzle together. So instead, I developed my technique and emulated the best.

You don't have to choose the path I did. Whether it's me or some other guitar veteran, I recommend that you at least get some direction early on in your development. Someone who'll set you straight and help you fine tune your technique. It could be the difference in being an 'okay' guitarist in a year or being a pretty good one.

Chords 101

The best area to start in learning to play the guitar is chords. Chords are fundamental to song structure; once you know chords everything else will just fall into place.

There is a wealth of information all over the internet on starting from the basics but since you're here, I'll start you off on what I teach my students to do to get them going.

This chord is called 'E minor' and it is the easiest chord to learn. Let's analyze the diagram we have for you here. This is a representation of the guitar as if it were standing on end. Each vertical line represents the strings; the line on the left is the thickest, deepest sounding string. The line on the right is the thinnest, highest pitched string. The thick line at the top is what is called the 'nut' and it represents the top end of the neck. The lines going horizontal down the neck represent the 'frets'. The frets are the areas in between the metal ridges which is where your fingers will press down to sound the notes in the chord.







You see the 2 and the 3 here? These represent your fingers; 1 is your first finger or commonly referred to as the 'index' finger. 2 is the middle or 'birdie' finger, 3 is your ring finger and 4 is your pinky. Now hold that thought. So, now lets refer to the strings by number starting from left to right; 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. So with your 2nd finger you will be pressing the 5th string and with the 3rd finger you will be pressing the 4th string. The two black dots show us which frets to place your fingers on, which in this case both fingers are on the second fret. And the last thing is, the zeros on top tell which strings to play to sound the chord, in this case it will be all of them. So let's take what we've learned and apply it to this diagram:

2nd and 3rd fingers are placed on the 5th and 4th strings respectively, on the 2nd fret. All strings are played. Strumming is the term when you play up and down (back and forth) across the strings either with a pick or fingers. By all means, strum away. You may notice this chord can have a moody, Spanish sound to it.