How to Tune a Guitar by Ear

Tuning By Ear Tuning by ear is the best way to really, really get your guitar perfectly in tune.  When you tune by ear, you can hear when the notes line up perfectly, but more importantly, you can also listen to how strings that aren’t adjacent to each other are in tune. Relative tuning Relative tuning is a process of …

twelve string guitar

Picking On The Twelve String Guitar

How the tuning of the 12 string can confuse picking patterns There are two very popular songs with intros played on a 12 string acoustic guitar that have a few notes that sound different from what you hear on the recording: More Than a Feeling by Boston, and Wanted Dead or Alive by Bon Jovi.  Below are the tabs for …

Which G Chord Is Right?

Learn about the different kinds of open G chords There are a few different ways to play the open G chord, and the truth is, there is no right or wrong way to play this chord.  All of the different versions are real G chords, but there are songs where one version is more appropriate.  It’s good to be familiar …

Natural Notes

Learning the Fretboard

Tips on learning the notes on the guitar Memorizing the notes on the fretboard is helpful for a lot of things.  The two most important reasons to do this are to be able to easily find barre chords up and down the neck, and to know where to play scales when improvising.  The good news is, you don’t have to …

Bolero for Guitar

Maurice Ravel’s Bolero arranged for lead guitar This is a lead guitar arrangement of classical composer Maurice Ravel’s famous composition “Bolero.”  This is not a full transcription of the entire composition, but the melody transcribed here gets repeated multiple times in the song.  This is a good piece to start with if you’re interested in learning to play classical melodies …

Alternate Picking Exercises

Beginner’s Guide to Alternate Picking Basic Technique Why should you pick down and up?  Hopefully, you’re not actually asking that.  You need to do alternate picking because you won’t get very far in life just using all downstrokes – just watch, oh, any guitar player from the past 50  years.  The foundation of your alternate picking technique should be based …

Arpeggios for Beginners

Improve your pentatonic solos with arpeggios Arpeggios are like scales, but with fewer notes, and are based on specific chords.  If you’ve just started trying to improvise your own guitar solos, you should probably hold off on learning arpeggios and keep working on pentatonic scales.  On the other hand, if you’ve gotten bored with the pentatonic scales, then learning what …