How to learn to play electric guitar
Are you one of those people that loves to listen to the electric guitar in rock, blues and metal bands and dreams of standing on stage in front of thousands of people playing an amazing guitar solo. Many people would love to start playing the electric guitar but feel intimidated or overwhelmed. The electric guitar is truly a unique instrument and can sing in the hands of the right person, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you can make nothing but horrible noise. This article will give you some tips when learning to play the electric guitar.
The first thing to realize is that the electric guitar is a completely different instrument to any other, even the acoustic guitar. Because it is amplified you’ll have to deal with things like noise, feedback and distortion. For the beginner these can be a nuisance but for the experienced player these are great tools and tones they can employ in their music.
Before you get started make sure that your electric guitar is set up correctly. Many people mistake the fact that the guitar isn’t set up correctly as them being bad players. Even good players can’t make a good sound on an incorrectly set up guitar sound good. So ask a guitar playing friend or your local guitar tech (you can ask at your local guitar shop) to set up your guitar correctly. The strings should be at the right height and the neck should have the correct curve so that all the strings have the correct intonation.
The next step when learning to play the guitar is to play clean, this means with no distortion or other effects. You just want to hear the amplified guitar so that you can hear what your fingers are doing. Effects can cover up sloppy playing and you will will pick up bad habits. It’s better to leave effects until later when you have some basic guitar playing skills and can use them tastefully.
In order to stay motivated it’s best if you can learn some kind of simple riff from one of you favorite songs. Something like ‘Come as you are’ by Nirvana or ‘Smoke on the water’ by Deep Purple. The sooner you are actually making music the more you will enjoy yourself and the more likely you are to keep playing and keep practicing.
Before you start learning any theory I would advise you learn all the locations of the notes on the fretboard. This might seem like a huge task but is fairly easy once you know how to do it. Find an image of the fretboard on the internet and mark out the following notes, D, E, F, G, A, B and C. Choose one of these notes and spend a week learning all of it’s locations. Mix up the order you find them in to make sure you learn their location independently. Spend a couple of minutes throughout the day looking at all the notes and you should know all the notes quickly. You’ll automatically know all the sharps and flats as they are just in between the whole notes.
There is of course much more to learn in order to become a virtuoso electric guitar player and if you want guidance and quick progress then consider checking out Guitar Superstars for comprehensive video guitar lessons.
Neil Becker likes to write about psychology, health and fitness, relationships and music amongst other things.