Think your hands are too small for the guitar? Try these tips! One common complaint I hear from students is that they feel like their hands are too small. The first thing I usually tell them is that one of the most famous rock guitar players ever had pretty small hands – Angus Young of AC/DC. There are plenty of …
Fingerstyle guitar arrangement of “Your Mother Should Know”
“Your Mother Should Know” arranged for fingerstyle guitar This is a song off of the “Magical Mystery Tour” album and has a really catchy melody. It wasn’t too difficult to incorporate the melody into the chord changes, and so here is the arrangement that I did: Some things to note about this arrangement: Measure 1 – Use your thumb to …
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 …
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 …
What Chords Do I Need To Know?
Learn how many chords you need to know The short answer is, you don’t need to know ten thousand chords to be able to play the guitar, so those books that have that many chords are sort of overkill. On the other hand, you shouldn’t stop after learning seven chords like Marc Bolan did, although he did manage to write …
Barre Chord Exercises for Beginners
Master the B major chord with these lessons! The chord that gives beginner guitar players the most problems is the B major chord which looks like this: A couple notes about this picture: I’m only pressing down on the strings with my first and third finger, and my third finger is sort of bent backwards. Though it may appear that …