Electric guitar

Power chords in dropped D tuning - The beginner rock guitarists short cut

When it comes to beginner electric guitar lessons, this has to be the quickest and easiest short cut I know of to fast track to playing power chords on the guitar. Especially if you’ve only just recently started to play the guitar and your fingertips feel like they really need a break.

To be perfectly honest though, when I first started learning how to play the electric guitar, no-one told me about this, and I think it’s only recently that a lot of guitarists have started to do it.

Here’s how you do it.

Detune the 6th string E down to D, so instead of the tuning being EADGBE it’s now DADGBE, and by the way, the 6th string is the thickest one.

It should be quite easy to tell when the 6th string is tuned to D, cos it’ll sound like the open 4th string except it’ll be an octave lower - same note but half the frequency.

With this alternate tuning you can play power chords using only one finger. The strings you play are the 4th 5th and 6th strings. Try not to let any of the other strings on the guitar make a sound.

You place your finger flat across the fretboard, preferably just behind or at least in the middle between the frets, and then you strum the 4th 5th and 6th strings.

Here’s a picture of the fretboard, and most of the power chords you can play with dropped D tuning.

I know it looks like you have to use three fingers, but you only need one finger.

The three open strings are a D power chord. Once you’ve got your finger flat across the fretboard you can basically just slide it back and forth to get to whichever power chord you want. Simple isn’t it?

If you need more info on tuning the guitar and other beginner guitar chords you can browse the main site play-electric-guitar.net and if you don’t mind signing up for some excellent free guitar lessons, you can pay a visit to the Jamorama site.

Here’s my MyLot page if you want to go there and friend me ClaudesBrother

Tips to help make it easy to learn to play electric guitar online.

Tip no 1 - find a friend who has already made some progress on the guitar.

This will help make it a lot easier to learn. When it comes to online guitar lessons, especially electric guitar lessons, I’ve noticed a tendency for most of them to be a bit too advanced for the beginner guitarist. This seems to be especially true for the free lessons.

Electric guitarists tend to be fanatics, and get carried away with showing all sorts of cool stuff to learn on the guitar. This is great for when you’ve advanced a little on the guitar, but it sure doesn’t help someone looking for easy to learn electric guitar lessons.

Tip no 2 - Make your guitar easier to play.

One of the main causes of beginner guitarists not having an easy time of it, is that their guitars aren’t set up properly for maximum playability. Whether you buy a brand new electric guitar or you’re learning to play on a second hand, hand me down, there are things that can be done to an electric guitar that will vastly improve its playability.

I don’t want to get into the whole technical aspect of guitar setup here, so I’ll just leave it at one simple solution. Get a guitar builder, or repairman to have a look at your guitar and set it up for you.

Now you’d think that a new eletric guitar would be set up automatically to be easy to play, but they’re not. The reason they’re only given the most basic of setups at the factory, is that it would take too much of their production time.

Tip no 3 - Buy a guitar lessons book.

Guitar instruction books are quite cheap. Sure, I know this is about learning to play electric guitar online, but here’s the plan: You buy a good guitar book with all the theory, pictures and information you need to learn how to play, and then if you want to learn more, or get more information on how to do a certain lesson, you do a search on that lesson and “video”.

That may seem like the long way around, but really, just getting all the materials together and then getting stuck in is a solid approach to learning how to play electric guitar.

There are programs like Jamorama that come with ebooks and video, and it’s an online how to play guitar course that has its own membership site and help forum.

Another option is to buy a physical book like the “For Dummies” guitar book.

There are some basic guitar lessons on my main site - Play-electric-guitar.net and those will be developing over time to become as comprehensive as possible.

Outside of these points, I think that’s a wrap for making it easy to learn to play eletric guitar online. Last but not least, just keep working at it. It may seem hard at first, but one day it all just falls into place.

Having worked in the music production and backing track industry for the last 12 years as a guitarist come music arranger, one thing has become quite obvious to me.

Playing lead guitar to a backing track definitely makes a big difference to how well you play guitar solos. I often have to stop myself from just soloing endlessly over the backing, when I know I should be concentrating on finishing the backing track. Customers waiting and all you know.

But anyway, here’s the thing. Sometimes I’ve wasted too much time, and the song is due yesterday already, so I skimp on copying the exact guitar solo that’s in the song, and make up my own. This is quite easy to do when I’ve spent some time on just jamming to the track.

If you want to play guitar solos that are meaningful and fit into the song, it’s a good idea to have practiced with the same kind of rhythm and chord structure. Backing tracks, or “Jam tracks” as they’re sometimes called - Jam tracks being more specifically created for playing guitar over, are an excellent way to improve your soloing style.

Sitting in your bedroom and running over scales and learning guitar licks is all fine and well. You do improve on your soloing skills a lot when doing that, but when it comes to making up your own guitar solos, and getting it to sit well with the song, getting some decent Jam along tracks to practice to is a major help.

I find it very encouraging that lead guitar lessons like the Jamorama lead guitar course, which by the way, I do recommend, come with Jam along tracks.

If you can - Start a band.

The reason I say this, is because way back, when I first started to play lead guitar, I learned most of my guitar scales and lead runs sitting on my own in the bedroom, with no interaction with any other musicians. I thought I was doing alright but…

Later when I joined a band and started playing lead guitar to a whole lot of different songs, it took a lot of work to actually really get into the songs. I spent a two month stint down the coast as the lead guitarist for the band, and when I came back home I realized that my playing had improved radically.

For the first time ever, when I played a solo, it worked as if I’d taken it straight off the record.

Playing with a band for a good while, or failing that, some decent guitar backing tracks, just kicks your solo guitar style up a few notches.

Later then.

When I first learned to play lead guitar, I basically taught myself. I had no lead guitar lessons to work from. My knowledge of music theory was very limited, and all I had as a starting point was a simple finger exercise in the key of C.

I don’t want to bore you here with my life story, so let’s just get on with the lead guitar lessons.

The first step to playing lead guitar - The major scale.

I know some people will say that to learn to play lead guitar, you should start out with the pentatonic scale. I never bothered to learn the pentatonic scale, mostly because I didn’t have any information on it.

I had just joined a band as the lead guitarist, and I wasn’t one - so that little major scale finger exercise was just going to have to do. There’s a page on my site titled Lead guitar lesson one that shows it, and gives you some tips on how to work out the entire scale all the way along the fretboard.

A good reason for working it all out yourself, is that it becomes firmly embedded in your mind. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for you, I needed to expand on the whole lead guitar lessons theme, for which I had to draw the entire C major scale with every position or pattern clearly marked out.

Best thing is to work it out yourself then check it with my Full Fretboard C Major Scale page.

Once you’ve really familiarized yourself with the different patterns, you’ll begin to recognize how various chord shapes fit into specific scale patterns. A good example of this is if you take the first pattern, you’ll see how an A minor open, a C open, an F open etc, all fit nicely in there.

I’ve tried to explain this using as little music theory as possible. I think for myself, playing lead guitar is very much a visual exercise. You don’t want to be thinking too much during a solo. If your fingers get used to the different patterns, and your ears guide you well - you can start playing really passionate lead guitar solos.

How I play blues guitar solo’s or rock n roll.

Here’s something that confused the Dickens out of me when I first started playing lead guitar. Many standard blues progressions, as also used in rock and roll songs, are just plain musically incorrect.

In a standard major key, you can’t have a seventh chord as your root chord, and then compound the problem by adding a seventh to both the 4th and 5th chords as well.

If you’re playing a blues number in the key of A, you can forget about trying to solo over it in the key of A major - It just doesn’t work.

Here’s a tip. Try playing to it in the key of G for the A7 and the D7, then switch to the key of A for the E7. It’s not perfect, but I’ve gotten away with it for years, and it makes an interesting solo. Now all that may sound complicated, but it’s really just a matter of moving the pattern up 2 frets for that extra chord.

The other alternative, which is what most people use, is called the blues scale. I’ve never learned the blues scale, although I play it all the time. It’s hidden inside the major scale and it’s also called the pentatonic scale. When I do play blues, I play a lot of other notes as well, but that’s because I’m following the chords and not just playing in a certain key.

Here’s the pentatonic lead guitar pattern for the key of A, at the fifth fret - where you’d play an A Bar chord. It looks very similar to the G major scale pattern at the 5th fret.

Here I added the extra notes in green for G ….. hmmm

Playing rock lead guitar over power chords.

When it comes to rock music, my approach is pretty much the same as my blues approach. But I generally don’t bother with changing keys for that extra chord. It’s a lot easier to figure out when you’re mostly dealing with root notes and fifths.

Two semitones back from what looks like the root chord of the song, and the patterns above work like a bomb. Don’t forget to keep your ears open though for any unexpected surprises.

Okay, confession time - I’m not one of those guys who can instantly solo over any song without first becoming familiar with it, and getting a good feel for what works best. You don’t have to be either.

I don’t think there are many of those people around anyway.

Just a short note to end off this guitar lessons blog post. You should look into learning the harmonic minor scale as well, cos someone’s going to play something with a Spanish progression, and you’ll need it.

Cheers for now - Keep rockin

Why learn to play electric guitar - Reasons, a lesson on its own.

While busy putting some lessons down for Play-electric-guitar.net, it became quite obvious to me that to help someone else “get” how to play electric guitar, I have to really examine every little thing that happens when I play guitar.

One of the first things that I realized, was that there’s a definite connection between strength and speed.

When I pick faster, the grip on my plectrum weakens slightly. Less strength and more speed. This brought to mind an article I read not so long ago about how too much of a grip on the neck of the guitar will slow down your ability to change chords fast, or execute fast lead runs.

A friend of mine has a terrible problem with this. If I give him my electric guitar to play, he exerts so much pressure on the fretboard that he pulls the strings out of tune. Needless to say, he’s not the fastest player by a long shot.

Not to put the fella down or anything - He admits it himself - But here we have a perfect example of an imbalance between power and speed. Too much power and no speed.

It’s my opinion that this comes from learning to play on cheap acoustic guitars with terrible action and heavy strings. If he’d learned to play on a decent electric guitar from early on, he wouldn’t have developed this problem.

He still plays a badly set up cheap acoustic steel string guitar with a high action and heavy strings, so I don’t think the problem will get solved anytime soon.

People need to understand that this is a bad habit that, once it’s embedded in your subconscious, is not so easy to break.

Parents buying their children guitars to learn to play on need to also understand that. The argument of “We’ll see how they do with it before we buy something better” may just be a reason in itself why they won’t get anything better.

Guitars can be nasty things to try and play, especially some steel string acoustic guitars, and some of them may be downright impossible to play.

Fortunately, an electric guitar is a lot easier to set up nicely, and with a little help from your local guitar repairman or luthier, at very little cost, can be made to play as well as some very expensive guitars.

Fast picking - How tight can you hold the plectrum?

It seems to me that your body is incapable of exerting the same amount of strength when speed is required. When you need to play faster, your muscles need to relax a bit to get the job done.

Case in point - Not so long ago I had to play the acoustic rhythm guitar to Pinball wizard. It’s kind of fast strumming. The plectrum kept falling out of my hand cos I couldn’t hold it tight enough. Mind you, it was kind of cold that day.

On the web page I recently finished - How to use a plectrum, I talk about how my fingers extend outwards slightly when picking fast, so as to get the job done. I think strumming all six strings at that speed might be a bit much.

Anyway, to wrap this post up for now, I’d have to say that, as a lesson in itself, if you learn to play electric guitar and you do it on a decent electric guitar, you give yourself a distinct advantage when it comes to practicing how to play fast.

It seems obvious to me that most beginner electric guitarists want to play guitars that look and sound like their favorite guitarist’s axe. For me personally, when I was about 14 or 15 years old, I was a big fan of Jimi Hendrix.

Naturally, I wanted a Fender Stratocaster. Then there was the Jimmy Page - Led Zeppelin addiction, so I wanted a Les Paul guitar.

For rock guitar, the Gibson Les Paul, or alternatively the Gibson SG are the most appropriate choices. Their solid mahogany bodies and necks, combined with powerful humbucking pickups are perfect for driving any valve guitar amplifier into warm ballsy crunching overdrive.

As far as guitar sounds go, the Gibson Les Paul and Fender Stratocaster are two opposite ends of the spectrum. The two most distinct sounding electric guitars that where the forerunners of every other electric guitar ever built.

In todays electric guitar manufacturing diversity, guitars either sound like one or the other, and sometimes halfway between the two with no distinct tonal character of their own. Not that that’s a bad thing.

An interesting thing about Les Paul, is that back in the early days when he was experimenting with the idea of electric guitars, and building various prototypes, he used the Epiphone factory as a workplace on the weekends.

He later took his electric guitar ideas to Gibson, who in an ironic twist, ended up buying the Epiphone guitar company.

Nowadays it’s possible to buy a Gibson Les Paul guitar, or a much cheaper Epiphone Les Paul guitar. The Gibson SG also has its Epiphone equivalent, the most accurate copy being the Epiphone G400.

Not so long ago I owned a beautiful Epiphone Les Paul which I got as part of a swap for one of my amplifiers and some cash at a music store. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a guitar salesman look sad when I walked out the shop with what was clearly his favorite guitar.

I think he wanted it for himself.

At that time Epiphone was advertising their Les Paul models as having either a mahogany or alder body, and they weren’t telling which wood you’d get of the two. Lately, I see they’re listing a number of their Les Paul guitars as having mahogany necks and bodies.

Here’s the list, and a reason for the list is that I regard mahogany as a phenomenal tone wood. So much so that I recently had a guitar custom built for me, made almost entirely out of mahogany

1. Les Paul 1956 Goldtop - This one has P90 pickups, so not exactly humbucking
2. Les Paul Black Beauty 3
3. Les Paul Custom
4. Les Paul Custom Plus - mahogany body with flame maple top
5. Les Paul Standard
6. Les Paul Plain Top - mahogany body with maple top
7. Les Paul Plain Top Plus - mahogany body with flame maple top
8. Les Paul Studio
9. Les Paul Studio Chameleon - These change color depending on which angle you look from
10. Then there’s the Les Paul Ultra and the Les Paul Ultra II, which have chambered mahogany bodies with quilted maple tops and maple necks.

Okay well…… You’ll notice that I’ve only included guitars with glue in, also known as “Set necks”. Apart from neck through body construction, a set neck provides the best neck to body join, which also adds to that classic Les Paul tone and sustain.

Some of these guitars definitely wouldn’t be considered as beginner electric guitars, like the Ultra and Ultra 2, but I’m really impressed that Epiphone have decided to make most of there Les Paul guitars exclusively out of the same materials that their Gibson counterparts are made of.

Something that you should know about the maple tops on Les Paul guitars is that tonally, maple has a resonance one octave higher than mahogany. This adds to the guitars ability to put out good harmonics. If you don’t know what that means - It just adds more treble, without taking away from the full rich tone of the mahogany.

What does an Epiphone Les Paul sound like?

Some time back I was asked to make a backing track of Sensitive kind, the Santana version.

Here is the intro guitar solo, done on my Epiphone Les Paul - Sensitive kind intro

At one of my gigs I was hounded repeatedly by a fellow guitarist begging me to swap my Epi for his Carvin Custom guitar. He said he was in love with the sound I was getting.

In an ironic twist, I later ended up selling the guitar to a friend of mine who has a music shop, and the customer who bought it from him was the same guy who ordered the backing track from me.

Electric - Rock guitars for beginners.

It seems to me that the Big Boys in the electric guitar manufacturing world have woken up. The Les Paul I got from Epiphone was quality through and through, and I think companies like Fender and Gibson realized a while back that unless you give a beginner guitarist a decent guitar to learn on, there won’t be that many of them around to buy any guitars later on.

All too often I hear from people that have tried to learn to play guitar, about how difficult it is to press the chords or progress beyond a certain point.

In most cases they’ve tried to learn guitar on something that could barely be described as a cheap knockoff, made by companies who’s only concern was to sell as many unusable guitars as possible in as short a time as possible to as many unsuspecting novices as they could.

My very first guitar was one of these. It was unusable, but for 19 bucks and a pretty finish, both myself, at the age of 12, and my mother where suckered in.

When it comes to rock guitars for beginners, I have two main recommendations.

Here they are.

First choice beginners electric guitar for good rock tone.

Epiphone Vintage G-400 Electric Guitar Worn Cherry

Now I suppose you’re wondering why, after all that talk about the Epiphone Les Paul guitars, I recommend an Epiphone SG as a first choice for a beginner rock guitar?

First of all, it’s cheaper - although not the cheapest Epiphone, this particular model is about 50 dollars cheaper than the regular G400. Epiphone SG’s are called G 400’s.

It’s still got that great mahogany tone and set neck with humbucking pickups, but here’s the clincher for me…..

If you look at where the neck joins the body, there’s just an incredible amount of access to all the higher frets, unlike on a Les Paul where you’ve got this big bulky neck joint to contend with up there.

As a beginner guitarist that might not concern you too much, but a little later on you’ll really appreciate it.

On to number two.

2nd choice for a beginners rock guitar.

Epiphone Les Paul Studio Electric Guitar Ebony


Well, I know that description says Ebony, but the picture sure isn’t black. At least you can see here the nature of the guitar. Mahogany through and through.

I’ve chosen these models specifically because they’re cheaper Epiphones without all the fancy quilted maples - which I love by the way, and extra trimmings, and because they’re guitars in the Epiphone range that have what it takes to last well into the future as trusted workhorses.

So yes, Epiphone does have cheaper electric guitars that are well made, they’re just not something both a professional and a beginner would be interested in.

A guitar is worth so much more than the price you pay for it. When you’ve got something you’re proud to own that’s also a joy to play, it’s priceless.

I hope this post has been useful to you - Keep rocking.

Warning: Blatant advertisment for the most awesome guitar lessons on dvd.

Before you buy a beginner electric guitar, or throw your old one away.

I get a little troubled when I read a user review of a beginner electric guitar, and the reviewer badmouths the guitar, when I know for a fact that the guitar in question is a sleeping beauty.

There are quite a few entry level guitars that are actually of comparable quality to the expensive brands they copy. Some of them are actually made by the same company, as a cheaper alternative to their top of the range guitars.

Fender, for instance, has the Squier range, and Gibson has the epiphone range.

Here are a few things that just about any guitar should have done to it before being judged.

1.) The frets should be leveled and crowned before any comment on the playability of the instrument. This process brings all the frets to a uniform height above the fretboard, which eliminates most of the unwanted fret buzz and enables the strings to be set a lot lower. This process is best carried out by a professional luthier (Guitar builder)

2.) The intonation should be set. This is simply setting the bridge saddles on the guitar so that the strings play in tune all the way up the neck. This is quite simple to do, one just has to check that the note at the 12th fret is exactly an octave higher than the open string. I usually check this by playing the harmonic at the 12th fret and compare it to the fretted note.

If the fretted note is higher than the harmonic, I adjust the bridge saddle back, making the string length a bit longer, and vice versa.

Some beginner guitarists buy their first electric guitar and complain that it won’t stay in tune. Admittedly, some beginner electric guitars have cheaper tuning machines, but I’m still of the opinion that with due care and attention, even these can be made to stay in tune.

Here are some tips to help your beginner electric guitar stay in tune.

• When putting new strings on the guitar, try to have no more than 3 windings around the tuning post. This helps the string settle more tightly around the tuners - plus it’s a lot less hassle than turning forever trying to get all the string on.
• New guitar strings need to be stretched in. It’s just something about the metal actually stretching before it reaches the end of its elasticity. You can do this by holding the string down at the 12th fret, and gently tugging inbetween the 12th fret and the bridge - You have to be gentle, but not too gentle. I have broken a string or two like this, but that was from one set of strings a long time ago, and I think they where duds.
• Always tune up to the note, even if the string needs to be loosened to get to the right pitch. It’s better to go down below the desired pitch and tune it back up from there. This means the string tightens around the tuning post again as opposed to just being loosened.
• Make sure the frets are leveled and the intonation is set correctly. If the strings are too high off the neck fretboard, the extra distance when a note is fretted can cause the string to play sharp.

When looking at beginner electric guitars, or any electric guitars I’m interested in, here’s my main criteria before I buy.

1. Wood - Of utmost importance. The guitars tone comes mainly from the type of wood used. Everything else on the guitar will either compliment the tone or inhibit it. Don’t be fooled by the acoustic guitar enthusiasts who say that “Good wood equals good tone” doesn’t apply to an electric guitar. It most certainly does. Here are my favorite tone woods - Mahogany, Alder, Maple, and possibly Ash. There are some other tone woods that could be considered good quality, like Basswood, Agathis and Poplar, but they’re not woods I’ve really tried.
2. Pickups - The guitar pickups on cheap electric guitars have improved quite a lot in recent years, after all, the parts needed to make a good pickup aren’t expensive. I like to see pickups on a guitar that are made by a well known company, like for instance, Dimarzio pickups or Seymour Duncan pickup. Sometimes they may just be designed by them, which is also cool. If I’m looking at a Top guitar companies products, then I tend to be less worried about the pickups being brand names. Worst case scenario, I can always buy good quality but cheap replacement pickups from Kent Armstrong.

Decide beforehand what kind of music you want to play, then buy the right guitar for the job.

Too often I read reviews by beginner guitarists, who’ve bought a Stratocaster style guitar, and then complain that it sounds lousy, cos they’re into death metal or something, and the guitars not suited to that kind of music.

If you want to play heavy rock, you should buy a guitar with humbucking pickups.

If you want to play blues, then buy a semi-hollow or hollow body guitar.

If you want to play blues rock or country music, consider buying a stratocaster type guitar.

Here’s the kind of guitar I think offers an all round solution. A stratocaster type guitar with a humbucker pickup in the bridge position. This gives you the nice fat sound of a humbucker for playing rock, and that nice single coil twang in the other positions for playing bluesy stuff.

For the budget conscious, I think one of the best Fat Strats is the Squier.
I took the liberty of borrowing a friends Squier Stratocaster, so I could record some sound samples.
The guitar I borrowed wasn’t the Fat Strat, but the one with three single coil pickups. I was quite pleasantly surprised by the sound of this guitar.
I had always thought - And I still do - that single coil pickups in the bridge are not good for rock.
This guitar proved me wrong.
Here are the sound files.

Squier bridge pickup distorted mp3
Squier bridge pickup Distorted Solo mp3
Squier Clean sounds mp3
Squier neck pickup overdrive mp3

Squier by Fender Affinity Series Fat Strat Electric Guitar Metallic Red

Hmm…… Looks like a Fender Stratocaster, sounds like a Fender Stratocaster, it must be a Fender Stratocaster.

Nope - It’s a Squier, and an Affinity series at that. The cheapest in the range, and it’s made from the same wood as some of the best sounding Stratocasters - Alder wood.

While I found the feel of the guitar neck to be a bit thinner and flatter than most Fenders, it was actually quite a fast action, and I took it down even closer to the fretboard. I hope Martin doesn’t mind.