guitar

How Beginner Guitar Players Should Practice, Part 1

Want to learn guitar the right way?  Read more . . . This series of blog posts will focus on the psychological aspects of learning guitar.  There can be mental blocks that can slow down a beginner guitar player’s progress, and these blocks can be overcome by just being aware of your mental state, and recognizing how they are interfering …

Open G Songs

Classic rock songs you can play in Open G Once you get your guitar into an open tuning, it’s nice to be able to stay there and play a few songs before going back to standard tuning.  Plus, the more you tune and re-tune a string, the more likely it is to break at the tuning post – I’ve experienced …

Guitar Classes at the BCAE

New format for the “Beyond Beginner” guitar class Starting in the January-February 2014 term, I’ll be making some changes to the way I teach the Beyond Beginner guitar classes.  There will now be three different versions of the class: one that focuses on strumming, one that focuses on guitar riffs, and one that focuses on fingerpicking and arpeggiation.  Each version …

Modern Country Guitar Songs

Easy songs for fans country music! My band has decided to start learning more modern country songs, due to all the college girls asking for them, so I decided to do a blog post about country guitar songs for beginners based on the songs I’m currently working on.  I have to say that I’m quite impressed with the guitar riffs …

C Major Pentatonic Scales Video

Practice the C major pentatonic scales with simple rhythm guitar The video I made consists of two parts.  In the first section, I’m playing the pentatonic scales in C major starting with the position 4 scale at the 3rd fret.  Then I play the minor pentatonic scale, then the major, and so on.  There are annotations in the video telling …

Recital for Guitar Students

Another Great Recital! Lots of Beatles songs, and one fantastic Jeff Beck cover! So this year, I had mostly beginner students playing Beatles songs, which was great, and then one student playing a Jeff Beck song who’s been taking lessons for about 3 years.  That student, Robert Gibson, did a fantastic cover of Freeway Jam by Jeff Beck that was …

What is an easy song for a beginning guitar player?

Easy songs for guitar players?  Define easy! I’ve spent the last 20 years of my career as a guitar teacher trying to find gold in the stacks of cds that I have and my various roommates owned.  “Gold” refers to songs by popular artists that are easy for beginners to play, and they’re gold because easy songs by popular artists …

Extra G Chord exercises

Other open chord exercises to practice with G Once you’ve mastered the G chord and are ready to start working on songs using A, D, E, and G, there are of course more chords that you’ll run into.  I’ve compiled a list of extra G chord exercises you can work on to prepare you for some of the different chord …

Easy Led Zeppelin Guitar Songs

Led Zeppelin For Beginner Guitar Players This month’s post will focus on songs by Led Zeppelin guitar riff  songs, like Whole Lotta Love or Misty Mountain Hop.  I’m actually going to do a few posts about Led Zeppelin since they’re my favorite band, and there’s a lot of great songs to do by them in a few different playing styles …

Easy U2 Songs to Play on Guitar

U2 Songs for Beginners A lot of U2 songs require the use of a delay pedal, but most of the ones on this list can be played without one.  I tried to find songs that were basic strumming songs, or had some sort of guitar riff. Staring At The Sun This one is a good one for acoustic guitar players.  …