Guitar Fundamentals: Learn Quick with Mike Boyd

1. Introduction: Hi there. My name is Mike Boyd. You might know me from my YouTube channel where I learn skills as quickly as possible. But apart from making YouTube videos, I am also a guitarist. I've been playing guitar for 15 years and I remember the hardships I suffered when I was learning. I think I've come up with a course that avoids many of them and teaches you guitar, in my opinion, the easiest way. The problem, I think with many of the classes that teach you how to play guitar today is that they spend a little bit too much time on exercises and theory and many people lose interest, get bored and frustrated. I know what people want; they want to play songs now. That's exactly what this course teaches you to do. It jump-starts your guitar learning journey, teaches you five major chords straight out of the gate, which enables you to play thousands upon thousands of songs and creates a solid foundation for learning further theory and practical exercises. This course is designed for the super beginner with no knowledge of guitar, it will take you through, what is a guitar, what does all this mean, how to hold it, how to fret, how to tune your guitar, how to play your first chord and eventually your first couple of songs. The goal of this course is to get you playing as soon as possible. If you're a total beginner with no prior knowledge, or you just want to brush up on your resistance skills this course, as I deal for you, so grab your guitar and let's get started. 2. Basic Anatomy and Fundamentals: This lesson is going to be about super basic anatomy of the guitar. Because if you already know your way around the guitar, then feel free to skip this section here. But I'm just going to cover some words used to describe different parts of the guitar so that if I say them later on, you know what I'm talking about. We're just going to go from head to toe. This part here is called the headstock. That's where you're tuning pegs are, which are these things here. The next part of the guitar that I'll mention is the nut, that's part here. That's where the strings end effectively towards the headstock. You can think of the nut as the zero fret. If this is fret one, then this is fret zeros. The frets are these little pieces of wire that are embedded into the wood all the way down the fret board here. Fret one is obviously this frame here, fret two, fret three, fret four, fret five and, so on. Throughout these lessons, I'm going to be referring to this strings. Each of these strings has a number. That's just the easiest way to do this. The thickest string we're going to call the sixth string and the thinnest string, we're going to call the first string. You can figure out, what the rest of the strings are going to be, so going down from the sixth string, this will be the sixth string, this will be the fifth string, the fourth string, the third string, the second string and the first string. That's the way most people refer to the strings is 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. That's the best way in my opinion to learn what strings are what. The first thing that I struggled with when I picked up a guitar as we were young was actually how to hold it, where does it go? That's probably because I was really small when I got a guitar, but what I tend to do is just put it right there, and that's a really comfortable place for me to put that. I just drape my hand over the guitar there so that when I'm strumming , the pick is going over the soundhole. When I was younger, I remember playing a lot like this in a cramped position. If you do that, the string sound very mellow and muted. Likewise, if you're bringing your hand too far towards the bridge here, things can sound a bit dry and thin. Just straight over the soundhole is where you want to be strumming. I like to have a guitar sitting on my right lap, just try and be comfortable with how the guitar sits. If we keep moving down, we'll eventually get to the bridge. There's many other parts on the guitar that I could go through, but those are the parts that are most interesting to you as a beginner because I'll be referring to those as we go through the lessons and telling you where to put your hands in relation to all these parts. Once again, just to reiterate, this is the headstock. These are the tuning pegs. This part right here where the strings terminate at the neck end of the guitar, is called the nut, these pieces of wire, the frets. As we move down the frets, we eventually get to the soundhole and the strings terminate at this end on the bridge. The next thing I actually struggled with was how to hold the pick I used to hold it with two fingers like that and it always would fly out of my hand and there was a reason for that was because it was way too much pressure on the pick. I like to hold the pick between my thumb and index finger like that. The key here is to not put too much pressure on the pick, too much pressure, and you lose control the guitar becomes very loud. Hold pick between your index and thumb finger with a medium amount of pressure, give it a little bit of movement. Let it react to the strings, low that you get a much nicer sound that way. One of the things that people often struggle with when they're beginning guitar is actually where to put their finger within the fret. The fret is quite a big space and there's quite a lot of space there where you could put your finger. It makes sense to try and put it straight slap bang in the middle. But actually, it's a lot easier if you move your finger slightly closer to the fret wire towards the bridge. When you're a beginner, for example, if I'm fretting on fret two, sometimes if I fret too far up the fret, you might get a buzzy sound that if I move my finger down towards the fret wire, the note rings clean. When your fretting try and have your fingers as close to the fret wire as you can't, it makes things a lot easier. Let's talk about fingernails. If you have long fingernails on your left hand, you're going to need to cut them. If you have long fingernails, you can't play the notes properly. They're going to get in the way and interfere with your ability to fret a clean note, which means you're going to end up, instead of something like this, you're going to come up with buzzy notes because your fingernails will touch the fretboard and not allow you to press down far enough. On your left hand, if you're someone who has nice painted fingernails or something that I'm afraid you're going to have to trim them so that you can play these notes nice and clean. They don't have to be overly sharp, but sure enough so that they don't get any way at all. On your right-hand. However, it's actually useful to keep your fingernails a little bit longer than you normally would because as you advanced through guitar, you eventually will start picking and some people use the fingernails to pluck the strings. Keep your fingernails on your right hand as they are or grew them a little bit longer, and on your left hand, keep your fingernails nice and short. As you learn a little bit more about guitar, eventually you're going to come across a piece of information that tells you to use one of these as a capo, or sometimes people pronounce as capo. What this effectively does is move knob of the guitar farther down the neck and raise the pitch of the open strings. For example, if I put the capo on fret two and play a chord, it's as if I've tuned the guitar two frets higher in pitch. Now what this is used for is one because of the guitar can sound quite nice when it's very high. Singers have trouble moving the pitch of their voice as much as like a piano or a guitar. Capos are used to bring the guitar up to their pitch. The trick to use their capo is to find out which fret you want to put on. Let's see, we're going to put it on fret four, so 1, 2, 3, 4 put it there, and we put it nice and close to the fret wire just as if we were fretting it with our fingers. Give it and a squeeze and it should just rang nicely like that. In this lesson we went over some super basic stuff like the anatomy of the guitar, how to hold it properly, how to hold a pick, how to fret, and how to use a capo. In the next video, we're going to cover how to read chord diagrams its very quick, short video. Then we'll get into the real nitty-gritty of learning guitar and you'll start landing your first chords, which eventually will lead to your first song. 3. How to Tune Your Guitar: This lesson is going to be how to tune your guitar so that it doesn't sound like that. Many beginners play with out of tune guitars and there I can understand why because tuning can sometimes seem daunting and complicated but it is not complicated. It takes one minute to do and it makes everything sound so much better. The first thing you're going to do is get a tuner. I don't recommend when you're starting out to try tuning your guitar by ear because it takes a little while for your ear to become trained enough to figure out how to tune it without actual using any aids at all. The one I would recommend is called guitartuna. You can download it on the App Store for iPad, for iOS and for Android, completely free. This works really well. Playing with an out of tune guitar is frustrating and you don't know if you're doing it correctly because it sounds so badly and it can put you off the guitar altogether. Make sure your guitar is tuned before you start playing, it only takes a minute. It's really easy to do and it makes playing so much more enjoyable. On the guitar, there are six strings on a standard guitar and they're each tuned to their own pitch. Starting with the thickest string, which is called the sixth string, this is tuned to E. The fifth string is tuned to A, the fourth string to D, the third string to G, the second string to B, and the first string is also tuned to E. That sounds really complicated but there is a mnemonic to help you memorize what note each string is supposed to be tuned to and that mnemonic is Even Average Dogs Get Bones Everyday. That's Even Average Dogs Get Bones Everyday. Don't worry too much about the names of the notes on each string. The tuner app should take care of this for you provided your guitar is not too out of tune. You can see that the thinnest string, the first string, is actually the same note as the thickest string, the sixth string and it's actually two octaves above which you can see here visualized in this endless line of guitar notes. We're going to tune the guitar from the sixth string down to the first string. That's from the thickest string all the way down to the thinnest string. The first note is E. I'm going to pluck the sixth string here and look at the guitar tuner and we can see that that guitar string is too low, that's too loose, also known as flat. I'm going to tighten this up here and we can see the note moving higher and higher and eventually we will get to E and the app watch will tell me when I'm in tune, the next note is A. That's too high, so I'm just going to let that down back. There we go. That's me tuned all six strings on the guitar using the tuner on the iPad, which also works on iOS and Android phones and now sounds fantastic. Now when I play a chord it sounds much, much better. I can tell when I'm in tune and that's the best way to start learning. Today we learned how to tune our guitar. We use a simple free app on the iPad or a phone or something like that to tune the guitar and we learned a simple mnemonic that helps us to remember what each of the notes that the string should be tuned to. Easy as that. 4. Chord Diagrams and How to Read Them: In this lesson, I'm going to quickly cover the topic of chord diagrams to teach you how to read them so that you can learn any song you like using chord diagrams. So a chord diagram is basically a representation of the fret-board and it's held the way I've drawn them as if the guitar is held up like that. So the line on the leftmost side of the chord diagram is the thickest string, which is also known as the sixth string. The line on the farthest right hand side represents the thinnest string. So there are six vertical lines on the chord diagram. Each of them representing a string on the guitar. So the solid thick line at the top of the diagram represents the note of the guitar, and the horizontal lines going down after that represent each of the frets. So this space here is fret one, this space here is fret two, this space here, fret three and so on. The notes that are fret on a chord diagram are indicated by these little dark circles which are placed on the right fret and the right string. Within the circles is a number and that number denotes which finger is recommended that you use. The fingers are numbered one to four, with one being your index finger and for being your pinky. Again, those are just recommendations. I sometimes don't exactly follow chord diagrams because I find it easier to fret chords in slightly different ways, but these are the recommended ways to do it. The only thing left to understand on a chord diagram are these little symbols above the knot which tell you which strings to avoid playing. So across means that you shouldn't play that string. So here on a C chord, the cross above the sixth string means don't play the sixth string, just play the fifth string down. If there is a circle above one the strings, it means that you shouldn't fret that string but should allow it to ring open. So do play that string, but don't include any frets. So on the third string in a C chord, there's an open G string. You just play that string open, you don't fret any notes. Chord diagrams might look a little bit intimidating at first, and they look kind of like a code. But after a while you just be able to glance at them and instantly know where to put your fingers. It does take a little bit of time, but trust me, this is the easiest way to read and learn chords. Make sure you download some of the PDFs that are included in this lesson to have a look at some of the chord diagrams. 5. Chord E - You First Chord: We are going to learn our first chord. What is a chord you ask. Simply put, a chord is two or more notes played at the same time. If that's the single node, that's a chord and you can strum all six strings in this case, that gives you a chord. There are lots and lots of different chords and we're going to learn what's called the open chords, the ones that are situated up here and have strings that are ringing without any notes being Fred and these chords are going to allow you to play hundreds if not thousands of songs. We're going to learn just five chords, which will open up a whole range of different music to you and you'll be able to learn hundreds of songs. The first chord that we're going to learn is called E or some people call it E major. This chord is called E. This is a really, really important chord, this note comes up in lots and lots of music, and it also forms part of the bar chords which you'll learn later on. You might recognize that It's the first chord in Back in Black by ACDC, I love E. This chord is pretty easy to learn, most people don't have too much trouble with it. There's a couple of things I will show you that will help you learn and stop any buzzing our notes that aren't being Fred properly so let's get stuck right into this. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our second finger and middle finger, and we're going to place that on the fifth string, on the second fret right there. With your ring finger or your third finger, we're going to place that underneath on the second fret, on the fourth string here. Now, all that's left now is to take your index finger or your first finger and put it on the first fret on the third string there. What we do with E as we strum all six strings, so there's no string there is left out here, all six strings give it as strong as shoots sound like this. But yours isn't going to sound like that, yours is going to sound like this. It's going to sound awful, don't get frustrated. There's a couple of little tips that I can help you with that will make this a lot easier. First of all, make sure you're using the tips of your fingers. Don't use the pads on the flat here, the chord doesn't played like that, is played like that, don't do that, do that. Now, this can be a little bit painful to begin with. The tips of your fingers can be a little bit tender. If you're experiencing pain, don't worry about that, that's normal. Take a break, maybe come back a couple of days later and give it another go. You will eventually start to get some rough skin on your fingers and which will make playing chords a whole lot easier. I understand that as painful and is part of the learning process I'm afraid, it does go away though. If you're having trouble playing with your fingertips, one of the things I can suggest is to just move your thumb slightly down the fretboard. If it's hanging over the top like that, slide it down a little bit and it forces your hand to go into this position here as if you were holding a tennis ball or something like that. It's where you want be, you don't want to be like that. That's not how we play chords, we play chords like that. Once again, second finger on the fifth string, second fret, third finger on the fourth string, second fret, first finger on the third string, first fret. Let's talk about some common issues that people have when playing the chord E. Number one is with the index finger. What happens is it touches the first and second string and dampens them, doesn't let them ring out so you get something like this, and it sounds weird. Again, that's a problem with not using the tip of your fingers, so you want to bring your hands down and drummed again into that shape there. Really play with just the tip of your finger so that you don't affect any of the strings below. This also tends to happen with the third finger and it tends to touch the third string which makes it sound like this. That's not what we want. Again, just rotate your hand drummed, use the fingertip, and that's when we get there. Another problem people seem to have is the beginning of the palm of the hand touches the strings here. If they're doing that like a very cramped car shape, is actually quite difficult for me to do but sounds like that. Again, this can be solved with making this shape with your hand, bringing the thumb down the neck a little bit and really getting some space between the palm of your hand and the fretboard there. We don't want to be like this, we want to be like this. This fourth finger here, that's a little pinky, that's just get that out of the way. That's the main thing here, don't have it land on the strength of that sound strange, just relax that and let that go out of the way and that is the card of E. This is going to be hard. Your muscles are not used to holding that position, It's a very awkward hand position at the start and it can be painful on your fingertips and the muscles around the back of your hand and your thumb. This pain fades really, really quickly, so don't worry about it too much. Take a couple of days after the initial shock of this and come back to it. There is a little bit of pain, it does fade away. Eventually, you won't be able to feel any pain when you play E. When you are first having problems with a chord, you might not be able to know exactly where the problem is coming from, it might sound crap, but you might not know where that issues coming from. What I suggest you to do is you go down each string from string six down to string one, pick each one and see if it rings true, so here we go here. Six is okay, five is okay, four is okay, three we have a problem and we can diagnose where that problem is. We can have a look at our hand and see what that issue is right now. What's happening is I'm just not press it hard enough with finger one. I'm just going to apply a tiny little bit more pressure and the string starts to ring. Another tip for you is if you're having trouble with freting the notes and they're not ringing true and they're kind of buzzing little bit. One of the problems that some people have is they're no freting close enough to the actual fret wire itself. So they're pushing the chord up here, which makes it much harder. It's much easier to ring a node if your fingers are closer to this fret wire here. This is bad, this is good. Just slide your hand up slightly towards that fret wire, not on it, just before it and it makes things a whole lot easier. Once you can ring the coordinates and true like that, here's a little exercise for you. What I want you to do is place your hands into the E shape. Use your chord diagram if you're struggling, the diagrams are available to download so download those, print them off, have a look. You'll forget chords from time to time, that's okay, just refer back to the diagram. What I want you to do is place your hand in the E position, strum a couple of times and then take your hand completely off the fretboard and try and find that E position as quickly as you can. Now at first it's going to take maybe even 30 seconds to get your fingers back into this string shape. That's okay, that's what we want. We want your brain to figure out the shape so that when you need to do it, it just goes straight there. Now I've obviously been playing guitar for a year, so I can do it without really looking, I just know where to go but the start, It's going to be a painful process one finger at a time, eventually finding the right string, correcting any problems that you have until the chord rings true. That's the card of E, try the exercises, try not to get frustrated and best luck and in the next lesson, we'll cover the A chord. 6. Chord D: The chord that we're going to learn in this lesson is called the D chord, and it is also one of the most fundamental chords in guitar. Again, is an open chord and links very well with the E chord and A chord that we've learned previously. Just to give you an idea of what D sounds like, the BOs use D as the root position for Norwegian Wood. I love that song. Now D is probably the easiest chord out of the three that we've learned. It probably will cause you the least number of issues which I'm sure you're glad to hear. Let's begin learning this. Finger one, we're going to place on the third string, on the second fret. Now we're going to jump straight to finger three, and we're going to place that on the second string, on the third fret which is here. Now we're going to sneak in finger two underneath this whole thing and place it on the first string, second fret. That's the shape you're looking for right there. Now if you look at the chord diagram for D, you'll notice that the fifth and sixth string have across above them. That means that we don't play those nodes, we don't play those strings. We just play the fourth, third, second, and first string. Once again, there's no way in hell that you're going to just play the chord like that straight at the gate. You're going to have some problems. Let's go through some common ones. Most common ones are going to be just strings buzzing not being pressed correctly. A quick fix for that is once again, making sure your fingers are really as close as possible to the fret wire as you can get without being on top of it. This is not a good position to play D, this is much better, slide then right up against that fret wire. The pressure you have to apply is hugely reduced, saving the muscles in your hands and your fingertips. Another problem that people have with D is with this first string, the thinnest string here. One of the common issues is this finger, your third finger touches the first string, causing this noise here. When strum in the field chord that sounds really bad. That's not what we want. Again, with these chords, the solution, make sure you're playing with the tips of your fingers. Perhaps bring thumb from around the top of the neck here, just ram the back and it will force your fingers to come into the fret board at more right angles, which keeps them from touching other strings. Let's just do that again, let's slide the thumb down the neck, and it creates this position. What we really want to avoid is playing the guitar with flat fingers like that, we want to play with our fingertips. Sometimes that means we're taking the hand down, bringing thumb, rub the back of the neck further down the back of the neck to get that nice claw position, as if we're holding like a squash ball or a tennis ball. Not like this, that's a common beginner position, more like this. Once again, as with all our chords, if you're having some trouble, pick each string individually and see if it rings true, and if there's a problem there, have a look at your fingers and try and diagnose what that issue is. Peck from the fourth, should be okay. Third, not many people have trouble with the third string on the D. Second string, sounds good, and on the first string, we have that problem here. If I look, I can see that it's this third finger touching the first string, and I can just apply a quick fix by bringing my hand into that claw shape. It's a really useful tool to pick each string individually and diagnose what the problems are yourself. Quick little exercise now that we've learned the chord E, the chord A, and the chord D. We can try linking these together. Find your D chord, get it ringing, true, take your hands off the fret board and try and find it as quickly as you can. This will probably take you 10, 20, 30 seconds. But that's a really good exercise, even bring your hand all the way off the neck and completely reset. I'm trying to find that again. Once you get good at that, we can start linking the E, the A, and the D chords together. Now this will take some time. Print off your chord diagrams which you can download. Have a look at them to remain yourself if you get stuck and link these cards together. The exercise here really is to try to get linking these chords together as quickly as possible, and it's going to happen very slowly. But you're going to need to train your brain and your fingers to the patterns and possessions of the chords. The only way to do that is by repetition. Over time you will be able to link chords together super, super quick, just a matter of weeks and you'll be. Once you get these three chords linked up together, you are ready to learn songs, and there's plenty of songs we can learn with just these chords. That is the D chord. Now you've learned three chords which is plenty to get you started in playing songs. Try linking nodes together, and when you've done that, when you're pretty good at linking up these three chords. Let's jump to the next lesson. There's lots of things you can do with D. 7. Chord A: In this lesson, we're going to cover how to play the A chord. Another one of the most important cords you can learn. This one is also not too tricky. A chord, again, like E, is one of the most fundamental chords you can learn, it will allow you to play hundreds, thousands of songs and many rock roll songs. It's not too tricky to play it, there is a little difficulty because it's all based in one fret. You have three fingers all squeezed into one fret, but after a little bit a time, you'll figured out that they can overlap slightly and those problems fade away. Let's get started on the A chord. First of all, we're going to start with our second finger, and we're going to place that on the fourth string, second fret. Next, we're going to take the first finger and we're going to place that on the third string, also in the second fret. Finally, we're going to take our third finger and place it on the second string, also in the second fret. Let's talk about the issues here. Number one, the issue that almost everyone has at the start when they're playing the chord A is getting all three fingers in the fret. The technique that I try to use is rather than have your hand very flat like that, you can actually rotate your hand a little bit and have your fingers overlap, and that's how you squeeze them all in one fret. This becomes more and more important as we start moving down the fret board and the frets actually gets smaller. The technique here is rotate your hand a little bit from here to here and you'll find that your fingers can overlap somewhat and fit in the fret. Naturally finger one is going to be further back and the fret, so you're going to have to apply a little bit more pressure because you're farther away from the fret wire. But fingers two and three can be right up towards that fret wire making it as easy as possible. The last thing we want to cover is if you look at the card diagram, there's a little cross above the sixth string on A, which means that we don't play that string. We play from the fifth string onwards. Some people can struggle with that a little bit because it's quite hard. You have to be a little bit more precise with your pick, if you want to avoid the sixth string and strum from the fifth string downwards. If you're having trouble with this third string here, just slowly increase the pressure in your first finger until the third string rings out. You don't want to apply too much pressure because you'll start experiencing pain and also that's just a kind of inefficient way to play guitar, but just enough to make that string ring. With all chords, I recommend you do this. If you're having trouble peck downwards from each string and diagnose what the issue is. As we go down from five, all the way down to string one, we can hear that we have two problems there. We have a problem on the third string, which I talked about is probably a pressure problem, and we have a problem on string one which is an open string and that's because I can see that this finger here is actually touching string one. If we remember back to our E chord while I was talking about, was this claw position here, where instead of your hands being very flat on the fret board they are coming in at more of an angle. You do that by this shape here. Rather than this shape here, strings get caught in this position here, you want to make your hand as if you're holding a tennis ball and that prevents these problems. This would be an issue. You can hear the first string isn't ringing, but as I make that claw shape about more, the first string begins to ring. That's because I've got the start finger out of the way of first string, allowing it to ring through.. Exercise is for practicing the A chord is the same as the E chord. Find your chord, it'll take you a couple of seconds. Make sure your strumming the correct strings. Remember this one is five downwards, so 5,4,3,2,1. We don't strum six. Strum the chord. Take your hand away from the fret board, reset, and then try and find it as quickly as you can. Now this will take a long time. But with time, you will get very quick in finding the A chord. Soon you ill be able to do it even without even looking. The next thing you can do is once you start getting quicker, finding the A chord from scratch, what you can do is you can start linking the E chord and the A chord together so you can find your E chord, then you can jump from E chord straight into the A chord. Now this is going to be tricky if fingers are going to be falling all over themselves and your brain it's going to be wondering what is going on. But with time, it just falls into place. Your fingers remember the positions they're supposed to go into and they just fall straight and it takes a long time. Jump from your E chord straight in to A chord. That's a really great exercise that prepares you later on for very quick, chord changes which is what we need to do when we're playing songs. That is the A chord. 8. Bars, Strumming and Rhythm: We have learned a bunch of cords, but let's learn to put them all together. To do this, we're going to have to do a tiny teeny little bit of music theory. But don't worry, it's not too boring and it's really quick and it will really help you out. This lesson is all about strumming and rhythm, and this is what's going to allow you to play a song. Music isn't just a continuous random stream of sounds. It's actually divided into smaller segments of music which are called bars. Most music has four beats per bar. Most modern music like pop, rock, blues have four beats in bars. There is music that has three, five, seven beats in the bar. But we're going to focus solely in these lessons on music that has four beats in the bar. That is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3 , 4. Bars is how musicians communicate with each other. If you're out like a blues gig or something like that, you might hear the drummer say, "Four more bars," to the guitarist and he knows to play the chord progression or to play the solo for a set amount of time. That's four more measures, four more bars of music, it's an efficient way of communicating time amongst musicians. The bar begins on a one count and ends at the end of a four count. If we do 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, the one in that counting sequence is the beginning of a bar and the bar ends after the fourth count. The reason this is important is that guitarists strum along with music in relation to the bars. They follow the beats and the bar. They'll change cords in relation to the bar and they'll change segments of the song, begin and end solos, all within relation to the bars or the number of bars that they have completed. If you want to better strum the guitar, it's really important that you understand the concept of a bar. This app here, which is called Soundbrenner, is a metronome, and it allows me to hear the beats of each bar. Each of those high pitches, [inaudible] is the beginning of the bar. That allows me to play and change cords accordingly. Have a listen to this, you'll hear me change cord at the start of a new bar. You probably already have a really good understanding of what this sounds like and what this feels like. You probably just didn't know the name for it, if you are unfamiliar with music. It's really, really obvious in something like dance music where it's very clear the beat 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. The reason this is important for us is because we are going to strum our strum pattern for the cords in relation to the beats in the bar. Each of the four beats in the bar can be represented by these little lines here. One line for each of the four beats. That's a little bit simplistic, so what I'll like to do is to divide each beat into two just to give us more options for strumming. Each beat is now divided into two, so that's four beats, which is divided into two, giving us eight lines. When counting this, it's useful to count it as one and two and three and four and. With the word and representing the second half of each beat. For example, a really good strumming pattern to start with would be to strum down just once on each beat of the bar. That would be just four down strums in the bar, each of them occurring on each beat of the bar. One and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. Counting in this way might seem confusing and difficult to begin with, but what this does is allows you to keep time, which when you eventually start playing with other musicians or along with other records, will allow you to keep along the same pace as all the other music, which is critical if you want to change cord at the correct time. The best way I find for a four beat bar is by counting one and two and three and four and. It might sound stupid counting it out loud like this. But eventually if you play this enough, this will be ingrained into your brain and you won't actually need to verbally count it out loud, you'll just feel it in your head. Bass players really obviously show their feeling of the beat, moving like that. You see musicians do it. You see them move to the beat. That's them basically counting one and two and three and four and. Let's illustrate counting with a slightly more complex strumming pattern. Once again, we're going to strum down on each beat in the bar. But on the hand, that is directly between the beats, we are going to strum upwards. We're going to strum down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up; one and two and three and four and. That should sound like this, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. That would be an up-down pattern with the down-strokes happening on the star of the beat and the upstrokes happening halfway between each beat, on what I call the and. Let's try that again. But this time with all down-strokes. A down-stroke on each beat and down-stroke on the and between each beat. That would sound like this, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. This is how metal players play. Metal players really like down-strokes like that. Just to recap what we've covered here, I've represented each beat in the bar as a line, but we've split each beat into two just to add a little bit more complexity to it. I find that the best way to represent that is with the word and between each beat. That sounds like one and two and three and four and. You can design a strumming pattern with up and down-strokes assigned to each of those intervals in the beat. The most simplistic being a down strum on each beat, that sounds like this, one and two and three and four and. Before we move on to learn on our first song, what I really suggest you do is practice the four down strum technique, that is the one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. If you want to extend the exercise a little bit, then you can practice the down, up, down, up. That's strumming down on each beat and up on each and. That's one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and. You can download a picture of the strumming pattern and print it off and put down front of your guitar and practice counting, one and two and three and four and. In the next lesson, we're going to learn a song called Wild Thing using that strumming pattern. It sounds like this. Sounds like that. I'll teach you in the next lesson. 9. Song 1 - Wild Thing: In this lesson, we're going to learn our very first song, and that song is Wild Thing by The Troggs. This is very easy. You will enjoy this. It only uses the three chords that we've learned so far, that as E, A, and D, and you shouldn't have too many problems with this song. If you're not familiar with strumming and bars and beats, then go check out some of the earlier lessons in this class. Before you get started, it's worth downloading the chord diagrams that I've provided, as well as the sheet music that I've also provided for the song. In addition to that, I've also provided two audio tracks which you can download, which is a slowed down version of the song. One of those versions also has a metronome embedded in it. You can play along with a very, strong beat and listen to your timing and play along perfectly in time. For this song, we're going to need three chords. If you've forgotten the chords, then print off the chord diagram and familiarize yourself with those again. Those chords that we're going to need are A, D, and E. There is actually one more chord in the song sheet.The O, chord which has sharp far open chord. Really as simple as doing this,[ MUSIC ] strong in the strings open, we'll go over that when we get to that point in the song. You're going to need to be comfortable changing between these chords. For some people that might prove a little bit tricky and there might be some big time intervals before you can get your fingers into the correct places. Here's some tips to help speed that along. The first chord change when going to need to do, is to go from [ MUSIC ] A to D. Now if you look closely at my hand, you'll see that changing from A to D, only requires move in two fingers rather than three. There's three fingers involved in each of those chords, but only two of them actually move. The first finger or the index finger actually just stays where it is. Some guitarists call an anchor. That means it doesn't move between those chords. You can see, once you get that in your head, you don't actually have to left your hand off the fret-board entirely. You can just make the card and keep the index finger planted there the whole time. Just as an extra bonus, the third chord in this song is E and if we go from A to D and E and you watch my fingers again, so that's [MUSIC] A to D to E. You'll notice that my first finger, actually stays on the third string the whole time. It just slides back slightly until the first fret to make that E. That is still an anchor finger and it's useful because you don't have to find the string over and over again for at least one of your fingers, you only need to move two fingers really, and just slide it back from D and to the E. In the real song, the [inaudible] pattern is a little bit complicated. You might be able to get at though by less than to the record. Describing that in terms of ups and downs at this stage would be a little bit difficult. We're going to simplify this all the way down and we're just going to strum, damn, once on each beat of the bar. Strumming down on each beat of the bar, sounds something like this one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. Just down, once, on each beat of the bar. So, without playing chords, you could practice as, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. Let's figure out how to put this all together. So, this actually sounds like the song. We're going to start with our A chord. [ MUSIC ] What we're going to do is we're going to play this for two beats of the bar, so, that is half off the bar. After that, we're going to change to D for the remaining two beats of the bar. It should sound something like this, [MUSIC] one and two and three and four. That is the first bar of the song. Let's try that again. Remember we're playing A for beats one and two and D, for beats three and four and the bar, so, that some something like [MUSIC] one and two and three and four. Then we come to the second bar and on the first beat of the second bar, that's the first number one that you'll hear in a second bar. We change to the chord E, and we play that for two beats. Putting that all together, that sounds something like this, [MUSIC] one and two and three and four and one and two. For the last two beats of the second bar, all we do is switch back to the subpoena altogether. That's a [inaudible] something like this, [MUSIC]one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. The majority of that song, is those two bars repeated over and over. Once again, that sounds something like this, [MUSIC] one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. Let's repeat those two bars back-to-back,one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four. You should try playing that loop along with the slowed down version of the track that I've provided and follow along the music so you know where you are in the song. Eventually, you will come to what is called the bridge. Some people call it the chorus or whatever, but in this song of quite hard to decide what is actually the chorus and what's the verse. I've called this, the bridge. That's a musical term for a bet in-between. It sums like this. [ MUSIC ] Is the bit where the singer says, I want to know for sure.[ MUSIC ] So, the strumming pattern on this part is actually, a little bit complicated. If you look at the CD, he strums on their three and so the, and between the three and the four beat of the bar. So, that sounds like as one and two and three and four and one. Let's just do that super slowly so we can get that here, one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one. That can be a little bit difficult to get when you're actually just working it out by trying to strong exactly correctly. I actually think in this scenario is actually easier to just listen to the record and do this.[ MUSIC ]. Just try and play along with your ear. Sometimes in guitar, it's best to do things intuitively. Sometimes it's best to follow theory very strictly. Try and find a happy medium, where you feel comfortable. If the theories bonging you down, then try to do it just with intuition. If you really excel at theory and it really helps you keep in time then uses the theory, do whatever you think is best at this situation here. But we're alternating between the O chord, which is these five open strings. This isn't a real chord. You really are just strumming the guitar open without threatened any strings. It's these four strings here that we're playing, you can see the card diagram in the sheet music for wild thing. But don't worry too much about this chord. It's not a real chord. You're just strumming some of the strings opened. The A chord, the O chord, and then the A chord. Super slowed down it sounds like this, one and two and three and four and one. Very slow goes from E, one and two and three O, A, O, A. Once again, with counting [MUSIC ]one and two and three and four and one. With those two segments learned, you should be able to play along with the entirety of Wild Thing by The Troggs. You can even play along with the record. The record might be a little bit quick for you. I've supplied a slowed down version where I play guitar and there's a metronome with that as well. You can listen along and try and play in time with what I'm playing for you. Alternatively, you could actually go on YouTube and slow down the speed and play along with that. If you're struggling with the speed off the record. [ MUSIC ] 10. Chords G and C: Now we're going to learn an additional two chords, which are slightly more difficult and they're still open chords, so they're not too bad. But what these chords will do will enable you to play an enormous number of different songs. The chords we're going to learn are G and C and they're going to enormously open up the number of songs that you can play. The first chord we're going to learn is called the G chord, and there's only really one reason why this chord is difficult, and that's because it requires a little bit of a stretch across the fret board. The chords that we've learned so far have been kind of contained within three strings that are adjacent to each other. The G chord, you go all the way from the sixth string and you also have to fret on on the first string. We're going to start with our second finger, and we're going to place it on the sixth string, on the third fret. With our first finger, I'm going to slip underneath onto the fifth string and on the second fret, we're going to fret that node there. With our third finger, we're going to stretch all the way to the first string on the third fret and fret that there, and that's the shape that the G chord looks like. You might also have that problem with your first finger, where your first finger touches the fourth string and you get this sound. Again, that can be remedied with the same thing by making that claw shape, bringing the thumb down on the neck. Now, this chord can be a little bit painful because of the stretch but with time, that pain subsides, your hand becomes a little bit more flexible and you're able to do a G chord with no problem at all. But I do understand that it can cause some pain at the start. Bear with it though, because G is a great chord to know and it opens up your song book hugely. With the G chord if you look at the chord diagram, you'll notice that every string is actually strummed in the G chord. There's little circles above the open strings, which means that we strung them even though they're not fret, so you can just give a nice big strum cross all six strings on the guitar. The number one issue by far is with this second finger here touching the fifth string because your hand is to flat on the fret board like that. Now, I can understand why that happens, the stretch in your hand here from going from the sixth string all the way to the first string, makes you want to put your hand like that. But again, with playing chords on guitar, that position is always the claw shape, you really want to emphasize that on the G chord. You really want to be pressing your fingers almost perpendicular to the fret board like that. You don't want to have them resting across fret of the guitar. Once again, if you're having problems with the G chord, what you can do to help yourself diagnose your issues is pluck all the way down the strings six, five, four, three, two,one, and see if there's any issues. Most likely your issues will be on the fifth or the fourth string here, let's have a look and see if I've got any problems. I can see the fifth string isn't ringing and that can be remedied by making that claw shape. Once again. Once you've got that sorted out, we want to link it to the other chords that we've learned in the same way. Again, try and find the G chord as quickly as you can by taking your hand on and off the fret board, it will take a couple of seconds for your hand to remember and stretch to that position there. But try and as quickly as you can go from not freting any nodes to playing a perfect G chord in the little time as possible. Once you get better at that, you can link it with a E chord, a A chord, and a D chord. Now this will take time again but if you practice enough, then the G chord will just become a shape that your hands just jumps to very, very quickly with no effort at all. That is the G chord. In this lesson, we're going to learn the chord C, another open chord which means it has open strings ringing and this chord sounds like this. This one can be a little bit tricky for a number of reasons, but really these problems can be worked through with just a little bit of practice. The problem that most people have with this chord is again the stretch. It stretches this time, not across the entire fret board this way, but across three frets which means that it looks like that. Now for some people that stretch, especially if you have smaller hands can be a little bit too much but with time, your fingers get better at kind of stretching apart like that, and the C chord should be no problem. Let's learn this chord. We're going to start with our third finger, and we're going to place it on the fifth string on the third fret like that. That's we're going to look at our second finger and we're going to put that one string below on the fourth string, but this time on the second fret, just behind our third finger here. Lastly, what we're going to do is we're going to take our first finger, put it on the second string on the first fret, so the chord looks like that. When strummed correctly, it should sound like this. With a C chord, if you look at the chord diagram, there's a little cross above the sixth string, meaning that we only play strings five downwards, that's five, four, three, two, one, we don't play string six. Number one problem that a lot of people have is just nodes not ringing properly at all. This can be fixed pretty easily by sliding your hand or stretching your hand so that your fingers are right up as close as they can be on the fret wire, not on top of the fret wire, but just before it. A C chord played in this position is very difficult. However, if we slide the whole chord up, keeping our fingers in the correct frets, but all the way up against the fret wire, it's much easier to play this chord. You'd require much less pressure in your hand, you're much more likely to get the chord to ring properly. Absolutely, the most common problem with C and something that I remember struggling with was with the first finger touching the first string. We get this chord, that can be a real problem. Remember, we use our fingertips when we're fretting notes here, so really focus on getting the second string fret, with your index finger or your first finger with just the fingertip. We don't want the part of the finger or the finger tip like that. Once again, remember we only string from five down. We want to go through each string see if it rings true and diagnose and solve the problem if it doesn't. Let's just do that now, we can hear here that the third string isn't ringing for me. Once again, that can be solved making my hand into that claw shape again. Never go there, the first string isn't ringing for me, that's because I'm using the part of my finger here, I should be using the tip here. Try that again. This one's a little tricky and requires a little bit more time to get that stretch and to get that position correctly. But if we follow our same exercise regime which is to find the chord, try and play it perfectly, take your hand completely off the fret board and try and do that over and over again. You'll really speed up the process of your hand jumping into that C chord position. With the aid of your card diagram that you can download, try and link the C chord and with quick changes to all your other chords. We're going to length that into E, to A, to D, to G, and to C. Ideally, you would get to a point where you can go through these chords and kind of like a cycle loop, just strumming ones without making any mistakes. That will take a lot of practice so stick with it. Here we go, this is what we want. That was a little bit ridiculous in the end there, but you get the idea. You want to get faster and faster and faster until you got a point where you can comfortably change between the chords. If you're at that point, you can mix up the order that you were doing it and just make it a little bit more difficult for yourself, and really practice, train your fingers and your brain to find these chord positions quickly and without any problems. So that is the C chord. [inaudible]. 11. Song 2 - Sweet Home Alabama: In this lesson, we are going to learn to play our second song. That song is Sweet Home Alabama. It's a classic. It's fantastic from the play along. I've been playing along with that record for 15 years now, and it still never gets old. With the course that you just learned, you can play along too. We're gonna play a simplified version of Sweet Home Alabama, and we're not going do there. That's a little bit more complex, but with time you'll be able to play that also. But for now we're going to concentrate on the main chords behind those little x, which is D, C, and G. and you'll be able to play along with the record at full speed and no time at all. Before we get started, I recommend that you are familiar with the chords G, C, and D. There's lessons on those cards above. If you haven't already done them, I would download the chord diagrams that contains these chords just for reference if you get stuck when you're learning. It will also download the sheet music that I've provided so you can follow along with the song, even though this song is just the same three cards over and over again. It's still useful to get used to read sheet music just to familiarize yourself with where you are in the truck. We'll talk about the strumming pattern and we're going to use in their song. We're going simplify things all the way down and use the most simplistic strum and pattern that we can. Overtime you can augment nostrums and power and make it more complicated, make it sound more like the record. But for now we're going to start with just the most simple one. I'll give you an extra level complex one if you're really making strides here. We're going to start with our classic down on every beat of the bar strumming part. If I play a G chord and just play that strumming pattern for you whilst counting, that sounds something like this. One, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four. Super easy strumming pattern and that'll get you really good against staying in time and change of chord on the BL that was enough time to change chords, so you can nail that chord change on the beat. If you want a little bit more complex strumming pattern, you just want to mix it up a bit and maybe you'll make us more progress. Here's one for you to try. We're still going strum down on each beat of the bar, but on the second and we're going to strum up. That's some something like this. I'm just going strum a mute chord here. There's no strings being frat at all that's going to sound something like this,one, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four. We're going to strum upwards in addition to our downward every beat strums, we're going strum upwards on the and after the two and after the four. I want to play a card this type. One, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four. If you can get that strumming pattern down, you're really on your way to getting a really useful strumming pattern that someone like the Egos or The Beatles are use a lot. Let me play that at faster speeds so you can hear what that sounds like. I'm going to change some chords as well. Once again, there's two strumming patterns that you can use here, an easier version, and one with a little bit more complexity. Those strumming patterns down on each beat, that's, one, and two, and three, and four. The other more complex strumming pattern is the same as that just with an upstroke and the hand that just after the second beat and just after the fourth beat, and that sounds like this. Don't worry, if you're having trouble with that more complex strumming pattern at the stage, that allows much less time to change chords. That can be a little bit tricky. Go back to the first one if you're struggling. This song as super simple because it just repeats over and over again. It starts on the D, moves to a C and ends on a G, and that pattern just repeats the whole time. Let's just have a look at how that actually is structured. We start on a D chord and we count for two beats, one, and two, and on the third beat of that bar we change to C. We play that for two beats also, and that sounds something like this, one, and two, and three and four. On the first beat of the second bar, we changed to G, and we hold G for the whole bar. Put out all altogether, it sounds something like this, one, and two, and three and four, and one, and two, and three, and four. That power and extends for the entirety of the song. Once again, let's just reiterate that. We play D for two beats of the bar that's, one, and two, and, and then we switched to C for beats three and four. Three and four and on the second bar we switch to G for the entirety of the bar, one, and two, and three and four. I'm just going to play that a little bit faster so you can hear how it sounds like, one, and two, and three, and four, and one, and two, and three, and four. With those cars there, D, C, and G, if you get up to speed, you can actually play along with basically the whole record of Sweet Home Alabama. If you can't quite you up to speed right now, what you can do is you can download the audio track that I provided, which is almost at half speed I think, and you can play along with a much slower version. There is also one that features a metronome so you can really get your time and check. Alternatively, you can also listen to the original track on YouTube at half speed. That'll allow you to play along, doesn't sound so good though. Problems you're going to have with the song. The reason this is a little bit more difficult than other songs is because of the stretching of the chords. C for beginners as little bit of a stretch as as G, D is a little bit easier. However, these chords requires you to completely remove your fingers and start again each time you make a chord. There's a lot of stuff going on here and a lot of stretch, and that's why it takes a little bit of time. You're going to have to give your hand some time to be able to do that stretch, and the jump from C to G is quite a tough one for beginners. You're going from your hand and rotate it around like this and you have to rotate the hand all the way around, get that G right there. That again, can be quite a stretch all the way across all six strings. But don't worry, no matter how small your hands are, they will be able to handle this with time. It's just a case of getting those muscle stretch and will take a couple of weeks for that to happen. It will also be a little bit painful, but don't worry soon it will come to you as a second nature. Stick with it. That's Sweet Home Alabama. Best of luck with that one. A little bit more tricky, a little bit faster, you'll have it done in no time at all. 12. Tips, Tricks and Summary: I hope you've enjoyed this guitar course. Don't worry of progress is a little bit slower than your first thought, a guitar happens very slowly and then all of a sudden that blossoms and you are able to play any song you want in almost no time at all. In this lesson, I'm going to go over some issues you might be having and I also cover some resources that might be useful to you as you progress with guitar. Let's talk about pain. You are going to have some pain, especially at the tips of your fingers. The strings are going to be a little bit abrasive on your fingertips when you first start out. There's a couple of things you can do to avoid that, first of all understand that it's not totally avoidable, you are going to have some pain, something you can do, one of them is a capo. You can place a capo on the first fret and then just shift your hand long, pretend that the capo is now the nut play your chords as if that was the nut, play them normally, those sounded a little bit higher there's a semitone higher but what this does is it brings the string a little bit closer to the fret board which means you have to press it down less distance, means that you will apply less pressure and that will relieve some of the pressure and some of the pain that you are experiencing at the tips of your fingers so a capo can help out, when you are starting. If you are really struggling with pain and you are bleeding all over the place and just actually getting blisters and breaking the skin might be worth trying a nylon string guitar to begin with. However, if you can bear it, it's worth sticking with a steel string. That's probably the instrument that you came to learn because that's the one you are familiar with, that's what most pop and rock music uses but a nylon string if you are really struggling is a little bit easier to press and the strings are made of nylon so they are much less abrasive on your fingertips. The next place you are probably going to be experiencing pain is actually in your hand itself, you are going to get some cramp here. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do about it that it takes a little while for the tendons and muscles in your hand to become strong enough and also stretch to make those difficult chord shapes like C and G, give it time. Don't strain your hand too much if it's, really bad take a couple of days off and you will find that when you go back you will have a little bit more and movement and a little bit less pain. There's not really much you can do about the strain at the beginning, it goes away, sorry about that. The next thing that's going to really put you off aside from having a crappy out of tune guitar which you can avoid by just tuning your guitar is buzzy strings so it really irritates beginners because it does not sound like the record that they want to play along to. So the best way to fix that is to diagnose the issue by picking each string one by one and finding out where the problem is so let's take G, for example, the chord G, most beginners struggle with fifth string there because their second finger lies against it, and you can self-diagnose and fix that problem and know that they cannot familiar clow shape will solve that issue. Individually pecking each string will help you diagnose problems and solve that horrible buzzing sound. Let's talk about resources. I've provided a more complete chord diagram list and has chords that we have not covered, now you might see them pop up in song books or on online resources that you are reading. They are all open cards and you should not have much difficulty in learning them, the process is very similar you should know how to read chord diagrams at this point, if you don't go and check out the lesson on how to read chord diagrams. But you could learn chords the minor chords, like A minor or E minor with relative ease, and further open up your arsenal of chords that you can use to play along with your favorite songs so check out the chord diagram resource that we have provided for you. If you are hungry for songs, you could go to our music shop and buy sheet music, and that normally comes with a guarantee that it's going to be correct and my experience with that is good however, it's expensive. A good place is a place called ultimate guitar, they actually make an app that works really well but the desktop version is very good also, this is private sourced transcription of music but normally people's interpretations of chords especially for simple songs, they are normally pretty spot on and it's worth checking out. The strumming patterns that I've taught you, you will be able to read ultimate guitar diagrams with that so you are already good to go. So checkout ultimate guitar, check out the app and the desktop version I am not affiliate with them at all, I am not sponsored anything, this is just a personal recommendation as what I use when I'm stuck transcribing that song. Another issue beginners have is playing along with records for songs that they have learned, say Wonder wall. You might be able to play those chords really well and entertained but the record is just a little bit fast for you. Well, there's a couple of options here, the most rudimentary option is to just go on YouTube and slow down using the playback speed, doesn't sound that great, but it's free. A better solution, a more professional solution is software called Transcribe!, that's with an exclamation mark and a more professional solution above and beyond that is a program called Ableton Live, that's what I use there's a light version for a $100 I'm not affiliated with any of those companies but I've used the software and for the price, it's pretty good. You can slow down songs without affecting the pitch which means you can play along with them at slower pace. Absolutely, the best way to practice is every day. You don't want to be playing guitar for four or five hours every day. I found that when I was learning in that half hour or an hour session was really effective and I find that splitting my practice into two segments works really well. One segment for just enjoying the guitar playing the songs that I like and then half of this session dedicated to practicing and working out problems I have so for example, the chord F bugged me for a long time and I would avoid playing that so I would play some songs that don't have F in it for the next half of the practice session, I would work on playing that awkward shape of F and getting it done. So that's a good way of practicing, practicing for short amount of time every day and split your practice session into just enjoyment of playing guitar and also working on something that you've been struggling with for a little while. However, I would add one little point there, if your fingers are beginning to bleed or if your hands get in really, really sore then stop playing guitar for a couple of days, let your fingers heal up, colors will always will come eventually, don't draw blood. That's all the tips I have for this Beginner Guitar Course, I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've found it useful, If you enjoy this course than you can review this course on Scotia, you can leave a comment if you want more, If you want to progress to level two then let me know by leaving a comment down below and I will begin making part two of this course a slightly more advanced version. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed learning the guitar as much as I did.