Interested in fingerstyle guitar? Check out these easy songs! Different Styles of Fingerpicking Fingerpicking, or fingerstyle, is a guitar style where the player uses his or her fingers to strike the strings of the guitar instead of a pick. The standard way of doing this is to use the thumb and the index, middle, and ring finger, but not the …
How Beginners Should Practice, Part 2
Learn how to play guitar faster! Focus on chord changes Before trying to play the strumming patterns, make sure you can actually switch between all the chords in the song. I see this a lot with students in their first few months of guitar lessons when they’re learning their first easy guitar songs. Let’s use a song with the following …
Guitar Lessons, September 2014
Advice from a Boston Guitar Teacher I found 3 new songs to add to the list of easy songs to show to beginner guitar players in September: Nothing More by Alternate Routes, Bottom’s Up by Brantley Gilbert, and Skinny Love by Bon Iver. Also, one of my students brought in a songs that’s good to learn if you’re starting to …
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 …