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 …
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 …
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 …
Rondo Alla Turca by Mozart
Rondo Alla Turca arranged for lead guitar I arranged this for lead guitar, meaning I took out the bass clef part of the composition. I’ve only embedded the first page, as I’m still double-checking my work on the rest of it. What is on this page will get you through a great deal of the song, but not the “solo” …
Guitar Lessons for Adults
It’s never too late to learn guitar! In the past few years, I’ve had a lot of new students sign up who are over 50 and are either retired or semi-retired. It’s never too late to start taking guitar lessons, or lessons on any instrument for that matter, so don’t let the fact that you’re not a kid stop you …
Beginner Fingerpicking Songs
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 …
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 …