Smashing The Basics

Let's get you started gently! We really need to quickly cover a few basics before tackling our first chord shape on the guitar. First up, let's learn how to hold the guitar and the pick properly. We'd highly recommend sitting on a stool if you have one available so that your right leg (assuming you're holding a right-handed guitar) is slightly raised. On this raised leg, you rest the guitar where the natural curve is. Here's Dan beautifully demonstrating this vibe...

As for holding the pick, well, there are a few ways to do this. On balance, we believe that the best way to do it is to place the pick between curved first finger and thumb, ensuring the pointy edge is horizontal with your hand. Here's an image of how that should look.

The E Minor Chord

During the lesson, we will learn your first chord shape! To be sure you know how to view the shape on the web, you need to get familiar with the chord box diagrams. Here's how they work.

In this lesson, we will be adding a brand new chord shape and learning how to move between the two. First up though, let's just learn those string names!

Need an easy way to remember these string names? Here's a fun one for you!

Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears

C Major 7 Chord

With that out of the way, let's tackle our brand new chord... C major 7. At this point, don't spare a thought for "why" this is called a C major 7, just know that we will get to that later and that this is a nice, relatively easy, chord shape to start with. The chord shape looks like this:

Spend a bit of time getting that chord shape 'under your fingers' (that's guitarist talk for getting familiar with the shape!). Pay careful attention to the fingers you use to fret the notes. The finger you use won't change the note you hear, but it's important for our next part of the lesson.

Changing Chords

We will now try going between the two chords (E minor and C major 7) while keeping all of your fingers as close as you can to the strings at all times. This is very challenging at first, but keep at it, and keep taking regular breaks!

We're getting into some real playing here, so it's a great time to start building your practice habit! Try to spend 10 minutes today practicing your chord changes to get ready for tomorrow.

In this lesson we start to work on your timing. This is such an important part of music but is often overlooked! In the video Dan will take you through practicing with a drum machine. It's great to practice with a drum machine to give a more realistic feel, but you can also practice with a metronome to keep time. When it comes to timing you're trying to sync up your own inner feel of the pulse or beat with the external drum machine. Once they're synced up you'll be perfectly in time!

Think of a bar as a group for your beats. It's most common to have 4 beats in a bar, but you can have any number. A bar always starts on the '1'.

Simply start by putting your drum beat on and counting "one ,two, three, four" with the beat. Once you have that, bring in the chord changes. We will use the E minor and C major 7th chords, using them every 2 bars. This looks something like this:

Notice how the number "1" is highlighted in yellow in the diagram. That means that you need to strum the guitar on that first beat. Try your absolute best to get to that chord. Do not worry about making it sound perfect, just get to it! This is now the focus of your practice! When it's starting to feel comfortable go ahead and try with drum beats at different tempos.

In this lesson Dan is introducing you to rhythm and your first strumming pattern! This is where we can start to introduce a groove into what we're playing.

To play a groove you need to know the mechanics of strumming on the guitar. First up, we need to start counting the beats and matching up with the right hand movement. We will start by saying "one and two and three and four and". Every time you say a number you will do a downstroke, and everytime you say "and" you will do an upstroke. For example:

at this point we are not actually hitting the strings, just moving the arm in the right direction with the count.

If we look at this up and down strumming in relation to the 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + count we get this:

With that understood, we can just simplify the strumming pattern to be the arrows and beats, as shown below. This is our base "air strum". As long as the arrows are grey, it means don't hit the strings, just move the arm.

The Pattern

Let's now add in the red arrows. In the video we gradually build up to this pattern, so be sure to follow along with that build up.

Yesterday's lesson was a big jump in technique - it will almost certainly take a while to get feeling comfortable, so today we're introducing you to some important theory. Time to give your brain a workout! In music we play notes. There are 12 notes in music, and this is the same for guitar, piano, trumpet, singing or any other (western) instrument you can think of!

The 12 notes are made up of 7 natural notes A B C D E F G and 5 accidentals (notes between the natural notes, for example C# goes between C and D). Don't worry too much about this, for now, just learn that we have the following 12 notes in music:

We write accidentals out in one of two ways: sharps '#' or flats 'b'. Sharp means 'one higher' and flat means 'one lower'. So, a C# sounds exactly the same as a Db. It's also really important to remember that there is no note between E & F and B & C. Again, don't worry about the reasons for this, just make a note of it! Here are the same notes written out in flats.

Applying The Theory

Of of the many great things about guitar is that it's a very visual instrument - simply move fret and you move note! Here are the notes on the E and A string for now:

Each string starts on the notes we learned in lesson 2 and follows the sequence through, always in the same order. We've used sharps in the above diagram, and for completeness here it is again with flats:

There we have it! We can now, quite slowly, work out all of the notes on the neck. It's a steady process, but doing it each day will help get it quicker and quicker. Eventually, you can start memorising the notes on the neck, and we'll get to that! For now, do this process at some point each day and it'll become second nature soon enough.