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Learn to Play 20 Songs Using 5 Easy Guitar Chords

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Today we’re sharing a guest post from Kevin B., one of our newest TakeLessons guitar instructors in La Crescenta, CA! Read on to learn about 5 essential chords that are the basis of several easy guitar songs…

Hey everyone! Today we’re going to take a look at 5 basic open-string chords on the guitar that you can use to play dozens of popular and easy guitar songs. I’ll show you how to read guitar chord-grids, and give you tips on memorizing and playing these important 5 chord shapes. We’ll also take a look at a chord-change exercise that will help you get your chord playing chops up to speed in no time.

I. Chord-Grid Notation Explained
Along with guitar tablature (or ‘tabs’), chord-grids are an important shorthand method of notating guitar music. Although it is important for all guitar students to eventually learn to read music notation, tablature and chord grids are usually a better option for beginners who just want to learn simple rock, pop or folk songs quickly (without the hassles of spending six months just learning the notation). Remember, the notation is just a means to an end, and just another way to learn something you’ll play on your guitar.

With chord-grids, you are looking at a simple diagram, or snapshot, of the guitar neck. The guitar is oriented so that the headstock is pointing upward, horizontal lines represent the fret-wires that separate the frets (spaces), and the vertical lines are strings.

Dots inside the diagram represent left-hand fingers, which are placed over the string inside the indicated fret. For the ‘A’ chord pictured here, all three fingers sit inside the second fret. Set your fourth (pinky) finger on the 2nd string, your third (ring) finger on the 3rd string, and your second (middle) finger on the 4th string.

Often the left-hand thumb will stay anchored on top of the neck to deaden the sixth string. This is called a flesh mute and allows the guitarist to strum all six strings so that only five strings are heard.

II. The 5 Essential Open-String Guitar Chords (memorize these!)

III. Tips for Memorizing and Playing Chords
Once you understand the notation, the next step is to get the chords down by memory. In some cases, the chords can be remembered easily by comparing them to geometric shapes. If you connect the dots inside each grid, you’ll see that the ‘A’ is a straight line, the ‘C’ is a diagonal line, the ‘D’ is an equilateral triangle, and the ‘G’ chord forms an isosceles triangle.

After you have the chords memorized, it’s time to check each chord string-by-string to ensure all the notes are sounding. Pick through each string going downward from the bass strings to the treble strings. Listen closely to verify each note. If a string is muted, try resetting the fingers so they sit higher on the fingertips. Make sure the fingers do not touch against any open strings, thereby dampening them.

IV. Chord Change Drills

Practice changing between any two chords using this simple drill. Play each chord on beats 1 & 3, lift the fingers completely on beats 2 & 4, and repeat. Make sure to set and remove all the fingers together (simultaneously). By doing this for a few minutes each day, you will learn to do fast and clean chord changes in the left hand, the key to playing chord songs well.

V. 20 Common Guitar Songs Using Only A, C, D, Em, and G
Now that you’ve mastered these essential chords, you can move on to learning tons of songs. Here’s a list of 20 easy guitar songs that use only these chords:

Bad Moon Rising (C.C.R.)
Eleanor Rigby (Beatles)
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Catch the Wind (Donovan)
Clementine (trad.)
Sweet Home Alabama (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Lightly Row (trad.)
Amazing Grace (trad.)
Time of Your Life (Green Day)
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star (trad.)
Heart of Gold (Neil Young)
Old MacDonald (trad.)
Story of My Life (Social Distortion)
Louie, Louie (The Kingsmen)
What I Got (Sublime)
Free Fallin’ (Tom Petty)
Anything, Anything (Dramarama)
Rockin’ in the Free World (Neil Young)
Mary Had a Little Lamb (trad.)
Viva la Vida (Coldplay)

Questions or comments? What other tutorials would you like to see featured on the blog? Leave a comment below or on our Facebook page!

Kevin B. is a bass guitar and guitar teacher located in La Crescenta, CA. He has been a guitar player for 26 years, and is an expert in most guitar and electric bass styles, including rock (alternative, classic, rockabilly and metal), blues, folk, classical and country styles.

Photo by BrianYuen

Tags: Guitar chords, Guitar exercises, La Crescenta Guitar lessons, Practice Tips & How To's...
Posted in Guitar, TakeLessons Teachers | 7 Comments »

5 Common Mistakes of Beginner Guitarists

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Buying your first guitar and strumming your very first note can be an exciting feeling – and that’s only the beginning! Pretty soon, you’ll be mastering major and minor chords, impressing your friends and family with full songs and spouting off music theory. And of course, next comes venturing on stage, sold-out shows and hearing the roar of the crowd, right?

Before you get too far ahead of yourself, it’s important to evaluate your playing style and make sure you have good practice habits. No matter where you’re at in your guitar studies, bad habits have a funny way of getting engrained in our minds. If you’re not working closely with a private guitar teacher, those habits can be detrimental to your success. Here are 5 common mistakes that beginners tend to make, as originally posted on The Punch-In Blog from TrueFire.com:

1. Not practicing correctly.
When you pick up your guitar to practice, do you just play what you already know — or do you work on new riffs and techniques? Often the best way to progress it to find a balance between playing what you already know and working on something new. Divide up your practice time between mastering the techniques you already know and challenging yourself with new learning material.

2. Trying to play beyond one’s ability.
You cannot expect to be able to shred out Steve Vai licks if you haven’t mastered Mary Had A Little Lamb yet (the nursery version, not the Stevie Ray Vaughan song). Trying to play far outside of your current ability will only bring frustration. You have the entire rest of your life to build your guitar playing up to a level of mastery — take your time and find your own path.

3. Choosing the wrong gear.
When you’re first starting out, it is easy to get caught up in what a guitar looks like or how much it costs. These days, well-made instruments are available at virtually every price point. The best thing to do when going shopping for that first guitar is to bring someone who knows the ins and outs of guitar shopping. Let them help you choose the best guitar for your budget and the playing style you’d like to learn.

4. Playing an out of tune instrument.
Learning to tune is your first job as a budding guitarist, and you should tune your instrument every time you pick it up. If you are always playing a guitar that is out of tune, your ear never really gets to learn what each of the notes and chords should sound like. Plus, an out-of-tune instrument will always sound bad no matter how well you’re playing.

5. Learning in a vacuum.
These days there’s an abundance of online guitar lessons, videos, guitar books, DVD’s and other materials that allow you to learn at your own leisure. Given all the available tools, you could gain a ton of chops and know-how. But someone who spends all his time learning in isolation can be at a total loss when it comes to performing or to playing with other people. Everyone can benefit from constructive feedback, so taking private guitar lessons is a great way to ensure your success from all angles.

Do you make any of these mistakes, or have you made them in the past? If so, how did you correct the bad habits? Share your own tips and thoughts with the TakeLessons community on Facebook! Like these posts? Sign up to receive daily updates right to your inbox! Click here to subscribe.

10 Tips to Amp Up Your Electric Guitar Tone

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Blink-182 announced last week that in honor of – um, what’s their age again? – oh yes, their 20 years together, they’ll be kicking off a 37-date world tour starting in May. Will you be picking up tickets?

As one of the quintessential punk-pop bands of the 90s, Blink-182 has worked their way into the hearts of angsty teenagers for two decades, and now they’re promoting their first studio album in either years. And if you’re ready to jump in and amp up your own volume, there’s no better feeling than playing the electric guitar. To start you off right, here are 8 great tips for improving your electric guitar tone, as published on MusicRadar.com:

1. Use fatter strings:
If you’re after fatter tone, try using heavier strings. It can add juice and weight to your tone, especially if you play with a higher action.

2. Understand your speakers:
You might not give them much thought, but speakers are where your sound comes from! And boy, do they sound different. The key points to understand are:

- Power rating in watts: The higher rated your speakers are, the less they will distort under heavy volume. Too powerful and they can sound very squeaky clean; not powerful enough, and they can become a flabby mess, or fail entirely.
- Efficiency: This is measured in dB, at a distance of one meter. This has more to do with how loud a speaker sounds than its power rating.

3. Be clear:
Excess handling noise can spoil the clarity and tone of your playing. Here’s a general tip: if you’re getting unwanted string noise coming from a string lower in pitch than the one you’re playing, it’s the picking hand’s role to mute it with the palm.If it’s coming from a higher string, it’s the fretting hand’s role to mute it with the underside of one or more fingers. Using spare picking-hand fingers to mute strings can be particularly useful when sustaining a note with vibrato.

4. Go unplugged:
Buy a good acoustic and play it a lot. Not only do they sound fantastic, but it’ll promote sure, strong fingering when you switch back to electric, thus improving the clarity and sonority of your playing.

5. Play fewer notes:
In all seriousness, try it. The next time you go for a blues solo, instead of trying that fast run that you always fluff, try constructing a simple melody, one or two notes per bar. Be disciplined and concentrate on the feel and emphasis of each note as you play through chord changes. Watch how the audience responds better to that than a barrage of 32nd notes. Why? Because you sound better.

6. Play with dynamics:
You don’t have to play everything at full tilt. Try easing back the guitar volume during a solo and switching from pick to fingers to offer an extra tonal dimension to your performance. Variation is the key to keeping the audience interested and engaged.

7. Use two amps:
Ever wondered how somebody’s tone is distorted yet still clean and clear? It might be that they’re using two amps; one set to be very distorted, the other much cleaner, or emphasizing a specific set of frequencies. Mixed together, the sound becomes massive. Try it.

8. Tune your guitar:
The single biggest improvement you can make to your sound comes from playing in tune. Buy a quality tuner and use it. No excuses!

9. Take guitar lessons:
It doesn’t matter how good you are, you can always improve. A good teacher or mentor will help you see the things you can’t, in order to improve your articulation and fluency. They’ll help you work on tone – crucial techniques such as vibrato, string bending, phrasing and so on.

10. Be yourself:
Every single top guitarist in the world will tell you this. The slightly uncomfortable truth is that the very best tone comes from inside you, and it’s a complicated mash-up of physical and mental factors. Your gear can only get you so far The best advice is to spend your practice time practicing, but when it comes to the gig or the recording, put all that to the back of your mind and commit yourself only to the music and the moment.

Guitarists, what other tips would you add to this list? Leave a comment below! Like these posts? Sign up to receive daily updates right to your inbox! Click here to subscribe.

10 Easy Tips For Beginning Guitar

Monday, February 13th, 2012

For music lovers, there’s nothing quite like the Grammy awards, and last night certainly didn’t disappoint. But it was one simple quote from Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl that really made an impression on us. In his acceptance speech for Best Rock Performance, Grohl said humbly, “To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in the computer, it’s about what goes on in [your heart] and it’s about what goes on in [your head].”

We couldn’t have said it better. Passion, inspiration, motivation – that’s what it’s all about. Forget flashy performances and shock value – you can do great things with just an acoustic guitar and well-crafted lyrics. Yet for some reason, many of us out there still think up excuses for not picking up the guitar. We say we’re too busy, it’s too hard, we don’t have any other musical training, and it hurts our fingers. In actuality, it’s really quite simple. If you want to learn the guitar, do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re ten years old or sixty years old – anyone can learn to play, and anyone can make time to practice.

As Grohl said, you don’t have to be perfect. Just start simply. Take it one step at a time. And for a little extra guidance, here are 10 guitar tips for the absolute beginner:

1 – Make sure you choose the right guitar for your size. Guitars come in different sizes from classic to jumbo. It is very important that you find a guitar size that you are comfortable playing.
2 – Learn how to change your guitar strings. The dirt and oil on your fingers and hands builds up on your strings over time and will ruin their sound. It is therefore extremely important that you learn how to change your strings. How often you change them will depend on how often you play.
3 – Build up those calluses. Many beginners complain of pain in their fingertips when first starting out. This is normal and will go away after you have been playing for a little while and start to form calluses. The more often you practice the faster you will build up calluses.
4 – Learn how to tune your guitar. Make sure your guitar is in tune before you start every practice session. Tuning your guitar is really quite easy. You can either purchase one of those small battery powered guitar tuners, or you can easily find a tuner online.
5 – Find a good guitar teacher. While it is possible to learn at your own pace at home using free guitar lessons online, books and guitar home study courses, nothing can really replace a guitar teacher. A guitar teacher will help keep you from forming bad guitar playing habits and praise you when you are making progress.
6 – Stretch and warm up your hands and fingers before each playing session. This is important. Proper warm up and stretching exercises are essential in helping you avoid injury and improving your guitar playing.
7 – Learn about the parts of your guitar. Spend as much time as possible familiarizing yourself with all the various parts of your guitar and how it is constructed.
8 – Don’t overdo it. If you are experiencing any pain or discomfort during your playing or practice session, stop and take a break.
9 – Try and learn something new. If you continually do the same thing, day after day, then your guitar playing will become stagnant and you will not progress.
10 – Go to live performances. This will give you a chance to get up close and personal with the musicians, enabling you to see first-hand how a professional plays.

See what we mean? Start out simple, and pretty soon you’ll be working your way up to the more complicated chords and songs. Do you have your own tips to share? Leave us a comment!

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Practice Tips: Exercises and Guitars for Small Hands

Friday, February 10th, 2012

Former Beatles bandmember Paul McCartney is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “most successful musician and composer in popular music history,” and now he finally has the Hollywood mark of success – a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

McCartney has had 32 number-one hits in the US, 24 in the UK, and was even named the Greatest Composer of the Millenium by BBC Online News readers. Let’s see today’s top artists rack up a list of accomplishments like that!

With the growing popularity of dance music on the charts these days, rock seems to have been pushed a bit to the side. The Grammy Awards will even be featuring a dance-focused segment this year, for the first time ever. But there’s nothing like the feeling of picking up a shiny new guitar and strumming your first chord. Rock music isn’t dead – we promise.

Yesterday we discussed some common beginner instruments for children, and guitar is definitely a popular choice. But one issue that young beginners and many adults run into is learning to play the guitar with small hands. If you’ve experienced the frustration of not quite reaching a certain finger placement, it doesn’t mean you need to give up your future star on the Walk of Fame. These tips for playing guitar with small hands should help:

Choose a Guitar with a Comfortable Neck
Every guitar is different. Some have broad necks, others have narrow necks. If you have small hands, a guitar with a narrow neck will make playing more natural and more enjoyable. Some guitars even come in 3/4- or short-scale models, making the instrument more compact and accessible to those with smaller hands.

Get Your Thumb in Position
Many players let the thumb of their fretting hand go lazy when playing chords or individual lines. Try positioning your thumb directly center under the fretboard and use it as a guide as you play.

Stretch Those Fingers
Even guitar players with large hands can benefit from “stretching out” and working on exercises to increase one’s span across the fretboard. Work on stretching your fingers by incorporating into your practice routine exercises that demand distance leaps. Start on the low E-string and play an F (first fret) with your index finger, then play a G# (fourth fret) with your ring or pinky finger – whatever works best – and follow this pattern across all six strings.

Don’t Fret over Barre Chords
Without question, the most difficult chords to play for folks with small hands are barre chords, where the index finger is required to fret sometimes all six guitar strings, acting as an anchor for the placement of other fingers to fill out the chord. If your hands are too small to span the entire fretboard, try using your thumb to hold down the low bass string to form a barre chord. To play an F-major chord this way, you’ll bring your hand around the neck, almost wrapping it. Then, get the fingers in position: Fret the high E- and B-strings (first fret) with your index finger; place your middle finger on the second fret of the G-string; your pinky on the third fret of the D-string; your ring finger on the third fret of the A-string; lastly, put your thumb on the first fret of the low E-string and strum.

Your guitar teacher is a great resource as well, and can help you determine the best exercises for you. (Need help finding a teacher nearby? Click here!) Like these posts? Sign up to receive daily updates right to your inbox! Click here to subscribe.

Photo by Roblawol.

Tags: Guitar Lessons, Practice Tips & How To's...
Posted in Guitar, Music Lessons for Children | 2 Comments »

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Posts Tagged ‘Practice Tips & How To’s…’

Learn to Play 20 Songs Using 5 Easy Guitar Chords

5 Common Mistakes of Beginner Guitarists

10 Tips to Amp Up Your Electric Guitar Tone

10 Easy Tips For Beginning Guitar

Practice Tips: Exercises and Guitars for Small Hands

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