How To Play Electric Guitar: A Primer

Guitar can be a confusing instrument to the total beginner. Notes, chords, scales, progressions; all these different terms can overwhelm the guitar novice. It’s okay to feel lost when you first start guitar, but as time goes on and you spend more hands-on time with your guitar, you will soon realize that all these terms will fall into place and you will pick them up bit by bit, learning about each concept as you gain knowledge, understanding, and practice with guitar playing. There are a few things that one needs to understand to get started on the guitar, and they aren’t super complicated concepts or procedures. Without further hesitation, let’s jump head first into the process of how I learned how to play guitar.

The acoustic guitar is quite straight forward: a bridge, a nut, a few tuners and some strings; not much to it. The electric guitar, however, is a different beast. Starting from the top down, there are the tuning pegs. The tuning pegs adjust the pitch of the strings to keep the guitar in tune. After the tuning pegs there is the nut, where the strings sit. This particular part of the guitar helps hold tension on the strings. On the other end of the strings there is the bridge, which also helps keep tension on the strings, which in turn keeps the strings in tune.

After the bridge, the rest of the knobs are completely unique to the electric guitar. There is the volume knob, which adjusts the volume and the tone knob that adjusts how bright or bass-heavy the tone of the guitar will be. There is also the input jack, where the player puts the guitar cord to connect to the amplifier.

On any guitar, standard tuning is E-A-D-G-B-e. You can use a website such as http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org/ to learn how to tune your electric guitar. Once the tones of you guitar match those of the website, your guitar is in tune. It’s really that simple!

Tablature, or tabs as they’re better known as, are the fastest and easiest way to learn how to play songs on guitar. Tabs can each you everything from chords to full guitar solos, and everything in between. To learn more about how to read tabs, you can head over to http://www.ultimate-guitar.com and navigate over to their lessons category. This is will be the medium through which you will learn how to play electric guitar.

Setting aside time to practice, simply put, is how to get better at playing guitar, or anything in general. Carve out however much time you have to play guitar everyday. You could start out with as little as thirty minutes, and as time goes on and you progress, you can start investing more time until you reach your desired practice time. During your practice time, you may want to start out my focusing on basic elements, such as chords, chord progressions, and scales, and then spend some time on the challenging song you’re trying to master.

In the end, you’ll get back what you put in. Take the time to progress daily, and you will be playing at a level you never thought possible before you know it.