Electric guitar

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.

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.

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.