To restring a guitar most people simply thread the string through the tuning peg and start to tighten. This is a good way to CUT the life of your strings in half, and is not recommended.

The trick is all in the threading. If you simply place your string through the tuning peg hold and tighten, you have just created the highest tension. This will eliminate any form of slack and doubled your chances of snapping the string when you go to break it in. Give this a go…

Instead of threading the guitar string through the tuning peg on the first thread, you should gently wrap the string around the tuning peg 3 or 4 times over. Now is the time to thread the string through the hole.

Here’s how the guitar string should look =>

See how the string is wrapped several times around the peg before threading it through the hole. This is how you make your strings last longer.

By doing this you allow more slack in your string, reduce tension and literally double the life of your strings. It provides your guitar with a heavier grip on the string which also prevents your strings going out of tune easily.

Give this simple trick a go next time you restring your guitar - I guarantee it will last longer for you!

These guitar playing tips are provided to you by Chris Elmore, owner of Guitar Tips - the fast guitar learning system.
Click here to discover how to learn guitar in 30 days

I’m sure you know what feedback is …that horrible high pitched sound that comes from speakers. It usually happens when you place your microphone too close to the speaker or play your guitar directly in front of the amplifier.

Not only does this damage your ears, but it puts your audience off when they come to hear you play. Now I’m not an expert on the dynamics of feedback. But I have performed on stage many times and have learned a few tricks to avoid feedback from occurring…

1) The first step is to turn down your treble on your amplifier. Too much treble invites feedback so don’t have too much treble in your amplifier settings.

2) Next, turn the volume on your guitar up only 3/4. Don’t turn your volume up full as this is invites huge feedback! Always leave a little room on your volume, so don’t turn it up all the way. Only 3/4 and I guarantee you will reduce feedback at least 80% with this trick.

3) Another tip is to turn down the gain or distortion on your amp. When you play softly, you can turn your gain or distortion full. But when you start playing with some serious volume, turn your gain only 50%. You will still get the same sound and distortion, but this is the trick to avoiding feedback from occurring when you play loudly.

4) Finally, if you’re using an effects pedal, only turn it up 3/4 the way. Like your guitar, always leave a bit of leeway as it offers more control over the sound and keeps your playing tight!

Remember this, if you keep control of your volumes, you reduce the level of feedback and have a much tighter sound as an over all band. If you turn everything up full, the music will sound a mess and out of control.

These tips are provided to you by Chris Elmore, owner of Guitar Tips - the fast guitar learning system.
Click here to discover how to learn guitar in 30 days

Getting “That” Blues Rock Guitar Sound Like Jimi Hendrix

Many people around the world love blues, and if you’re like me, you also love the amazing guitar solos of Jimi Hendrix. That’s why many people consider Jimi to be the most influential guitarist to ever grace the planet!

Blues and rock guitar playing tends to have a characteristic sound to it. Sure there is a style of playing that characterizes blues guitar, infact this guitar style is covered fully in the Jamorama course. The course provides blues Jam tracks and blues songs, and will teach you how to play the blues guitar.

But a question that often pops up is “Once I know how to play the style, how do I get that “sound” out of my amp?”. Let’s first look at the components for achieving that bluesy rock sound:

• Guitarist’s ability to play the blues style
• Choice of guitar - For example, electric or acoustic guitar? Solid body or semi-acoustic, single coil pickups or humbucking pickups?
• Choice of amplifier & the settings on the amplifier
• Settings on the guitar
• Miscellaneous details such as, guitar strings, effects pedals, etc.

So, from this list we can see that there is simply not one aspect that will directly change the sound, it’s the use of all of these things that point to the final outcome. A nice way of looking at it is to treat all of these aspects as ingredients to the sound recipe. By changing the ingredients or amount of, or order in which they are used you end up changing the final product.

Obviously one of the most important of the ingredients is the ability of the guitar player themselves. There is no point in having all of the ingredients to play blues guitar if the player can’t actually play blues style guitar, make sense?

Let’s start with the guitar itself, the best choice of guitar would be a solid body electric guitar such as a Fender Stratocaster, or a Gibson lespaul. Pretty much any solid body electric guitar will do.

Once you have selected a guitar let’s look at the settings that are to be used on the guitar itself. You will want to select the neck pick up (the pickup that is closest to the neck of the guitar).

This pickup gives a more rounded natural sound, often called the rhythm pickup. The on board controls of the guitar (the volume and tone knobs) are also very useful. To achieve a bluesy sound you should slightly roll off some of the tone knob, roll it back to about 7 or 8.

After you have this set up, look at the amplifier. Blues guitarists have a slightly over-driven or distorted sound. To achieve this I want you to make sure that you are plugging the guitar into the “Hi-gain” input of your amplifier (if you only have one input then use that one.

What you need to do next is to turn up your amp gain to a point where the sound coming out is slightly distorted (on most amps this would be just after halfway). If your guitar amp doesn’t distort or overdrive then there are other alternatives, you could purchase and use a distortion effect pedal.

Ok, the amplifier’s EQ settings …what do you do with those? Basically you need to leave all the “EQ” knobs in the middle (i.e. don’t boost or drop any of them).

The bluesy sound really comes from having selected the neck pick up and by having the amp slightly distorting. Follow these tips, and I guarantee you that your next blues solo will now actually sound like a blues solo. Get into it!

These tips on how to get that rock blues sound are provided to you by Ben Edwards, Owner of Jamorama.

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Go here now => Learn to Play Guitar Like Jimi Hendrix

Guitar Lesson Five - Introduction to Chord Progressions

When you listen to one of your favorite songs you become aware to the fact that it is built up of notes and chords that are changing and causing the song to evolve in a way that is pleasing to the ear. The question that I want to look at today is: why do some chords sound good together and others sound absolutely terrible?

To answer this, we need to look at root notes as they are the base that chords are built upon. If we take the notes of a scale and number them from 1 to 8, you will find movements between notes 1, 4 and 5 consistently sound better and stronger than between any other number. Let’s take a look at a scale (for learning purposes we will use the C Major Scale):

It might be a good idea to get your guitar out at this point and just have a play around with the notes in the above scale so you can hear what I mean about strong movement between numbers 1, 4 and 5. Also, play around with some of the other numbers to see what some weaker movements sound like.

So, now that we have established the above fact, let’s use it in some chord progressions.

A turnaround progression is a sequence of chords that can be continually repeated due to strong sounding chord movement between the ending and starting chords. In the following turnaround progression we use the F chord (F being 4 in the C major scale) to get back to the starting chord C (C being 1 in the C major scale):

Try playing the above chord progression using a strum of your own. If you don’t know the chords, they are shown at the bottom of this page - you will hear that the progression sounds good and repeats itself through a strong chord movement.

Here are some more turnaround progressions for you to practice:

1)

2)

3)

Chords

Guitar Tip: It’s important to enjoy the process of learning how to play guitar. Try not to push yourself to learn to play too quickly. This sounds basic, but often beginners learning guitar often focus on negative aspects about their guitar playing skill level. Remember, all professional guitarists started off just like you at one time! Learning guitar takes time, patience and practice.

Guitar Lesson Four - How Tablature Relates to The Guitar Fret Board

Guitar tablature is probably the easiest and most used method for guitar notation. On the internet, you can find guitar notation for almost any song that you want to learn. Tablature is easier to learn than traditional music notation because it relates directly to the fret board of the guitar, indicating where your fingers should be placed. Although it is an easier method to learn it still has its weak points, the main one being that you can’t easily indicate rhythm on tablature. This means that when you learn a song you have to learn the strum from the song itself.

The following diagram shows you how tablature relates to the guitar fret board:

We use numbers to indicate the string and the fret position that you are supposed to play. Each fret is numbered, starting at the nut of the guitar at O and moving upwards towards the bridge of the guitar. The following diagrams demonstrate this principle.

The 3 on the above tablature score (Tab. diagram 1) indicates to you that you place a finger on the third fret of the sixth string. It is the note G.

Diagram here.The 1 on the tablature score (Tab. diagram 2) on the last page indicates to you that you place a finger on the first fret of the third string. It is the note C.

The O on the above tablature score (Tab. diagram 3) indicates to you that the third string is to be played open. This means that you don’t need to place a finger on it. It is the note G.

Chords and Tablature

Chords are indicated by a set of numbers that tell you which frets need to be played and which don’t. The following diagram demonstrates how an open A major chord is constructed with tablature.

The first and fifth strings are played open whilst the second, third and forth strings are played at the second fret. The sixth string is not played in the A Major Chord and this is indicated by an X.

Often tablature is written beneath traditional music score or stave. The two together looks like this:

Side Note: “GuitEarIt!” is a powerful ear training game developed to help you learn music notes fast. The program works simply by starting you off with the notes A, B, C, and D. As you listen to various strums, you must choose the note that was just strummed by using a multiple choice answer board. You’ll be amazed at how quickly GuitEarIt trains your ear with very little effort on your part. It’s extremely effective and fun to play. And of course, the GuitEarIt software program is included as a free bonus with Jamorama.
Click here to learn more about GuitEarIt

Guitar Lesson Three - How to Read Guitar Tablature

Tab or tablature is the most common method of writing out music for the guitar. It is different from classical music notation in that; TAB uses ordinary numbers and keyboard characters as opposed to standard musical notation which uses symbols. Because of this format, anyone with a computer can write or read TAB making it the most user friendly way to read and communicate guitar music. Also TAB relates directly to the fret board of your guitar meaning that you may easily see where you put your fingers.

In the full version of Jamorama, both standard musical notation and tablature are used. But for this six day course we will only use TAB. The reason for this is that tablature is very easy to read and you should have no problems learning TAB in a few short minutes of reading.

TAB has some weak points, the worst of which is that rhythm can’t be easily indicated. This shouldn’t pose a problem though, as I will indicate the rhythm for each exercise using the strum indicators that were introduced in lesson one.

OK. To start I want you to look at your guitar and you will clearly see that it has six strings going from thickest to thinniest. On a TAB diagram, the thinnest string, (or 1st string as its most commonly called) is at the top - The thickest (or 6th string) is at the bottom. This is clearly demonstrated in the 1st example below.

The following diagram shows you how tablature relates to the guitar fret board:

Some of you may notice that this guitar seems upside down in relation to how you play. This is simply the way that guitar music is generally written. Now if you transfer this same model to a written format you will get TAB, which can be seen below.

So the lines above indicate the strings on a guitar. The top line of the TAB being the thinnest string of the guitar, and the bottom line on the TAB chart indicating the thickest string of the guitar. Now if you look at your guitar you will see metal bars that raise up from the neck of the guitar called frets. TAB uses numbers to show you which one of these frets to press down and play.

For example, look at the tab diagram to the right and you can see that the 1st string (thinnest string) is being played. The number refers to the fret that you should press down. In this case the number zero is displayed. This means that you shouldn’t press down anything.

So if you were to play the above piece of TAB on your guitar, you would pick the thinnest string once with your plucking hand and do nothing with your fret hand.

Now let’s see if we can start pushing down some strings. Look at the next example below and try and play the note that the TAB chart displays.

Guitar Tab Video: If you are having trouble learning guitar tab with this concept, you can download a video or audio example of the above exercise to see and hear it for yourself. The download links are below (right click on the link and select "save as"):

Let’s try another one. Play the following piece of TAB:

This TAB diagram above indicates the 2nd string (second thinnest) and you should be pressing down on the first fret.

Guitar Tab Video: Once again, there is guitar tab video available for this example. The download links are below (right click on the link and select "save as"):

Things become a little more complicated when you are required to play chords, however the basic principals I have already outlined still apply. The only difference is that you will be required to play more strings and hold down more strings with your fingers. In this next example I will show you how to play the chord ‘A’.

A Major Chord

The first and fifth strings are played open while the second, third and forth strings are played at the second fret. The sixth string is not played in the A Major Chord and this is indicated by an X.

If you have read the TAB correctly your fingers should look like this:

A Major Chord Video: To learn guitar tab faster, you can download a video or audio example of the above exercise to see and hear it for yourself. The download links are below (right click on the link and select "save as"):

So now you know how to use basic tablature as it applies to notes and full chords. In this introductory set of lessons you will use TAB to learn different chords and by lesson six you will be able to play the full song, ‘Rivers of Babylon’.

Notes on the First String

Knowledge of the notes that are on each string is necessary for understanding guitar theory. The first string is also known as the high E string. The main notes in the first position on the first string are E (open), F (1st fret) and G (3rd fret). The first position refers to the first 4 frets of the guitar.

We will use these notes in the following exercise to introduce to you the concept of note picking.

Exercise:
Note picking is a skill that is used in all types of music. For now, we will use it to familiarize ourselves with the note names on each string in the first position. Pluck these first string notes with a downward picking motion. Notice that your fingers should match the fret number when playing in the first position:

Try listening to audio for this example.

Audio

Picking the notes on the first string mp3. (456KB)

We will leave it there today in terms of guitar theory. Next time I want to get you strumming a whole lot more.

Guitar Lesson Two - Tuning Your Guitar to Itself

This is probably the most important piece of knowledge that you can learn when it comes to tuning your guitar. The process of tuning your guitar to itself is one by which you tune each string to another string on the guitar.