Make your own song

Playing and strumming guitar chords is hard for a beginner. As I suggest in the songwriting courses for buying guitars, it is recommended to buy the standard (full size) guitars. The reasons is for you to easily cope up the size of the guitar frets easily at the beginning of your practice. When you cope up the size, the more you can easily progress in the future practice and performance even though you are still young (and your hands is small).

The tricky part in playing guitars are the chords. Chords are very important for a songwriter/performer since all songwriting methods and performance are basically based on this technique. The harder part in the earliest stage are the hands and timing. Based on my experiences in playing with this instrument, below are my suggestions on how to cope up difficulty in playing chords for the 1st time (Assuming you have the acoustic guitar already)
Tip #1: Get a guitar chord book with figures and understand how to interpret it.
Tip #2: Practice one common chords at a time: Common chords are the ones that are easy and useful. Example are A,Bb,B,C,D,E,F,G,Am,Bm,C#m, Dm, Em, F#m,Gm.
Tip #3: Position your hands according to the chord book.
Tip #4: Make the whole chords sound without a break or muffled sound. This is done by strumming downwards 2 stroke with your right hands.
Tip #5: Remove your hands then position again your hands (same chord) then strum 2 strokes downward.
Tip #6: Do this until your hands are comfortable with the chord positions.
Tip #7: Change to another chords if you feel confident that you can now shift and position your hands in the fret without much effort.
Tip #8: After positioning all basic chords as mentioned above do basic strumming practice by doing a sample songs.

Recommended practice songs:

a. What’s up by 4 non blondes.- tips: try to practice really slow by following the most basic pattern as what you have listen.

Video: What’s up -video

b. Every Rose has it’s thorn by Poison- tips

Video: Every Rose has it’s Thorn- Video

Reference: Guitar chord patterns

How to interpret the chord patterns:

1. X means it will not be included in the strumming.
2. 0- means open string, no fingers should be placed on that string but it will still be played.
3. To your rightmost is the high E-note.
4. To your leftmost is the low E-note (bass)
5. A number of the left means the fret number of which you will be forming the chord if none it will be the first fret.
6. The dotted black is where you place your fingers on the guitar.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 2:03 am and is filed under Guitar playing tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.