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Learning to play a musical instrument of any kind is something lots of people want to do but never get around to, and one of the most popular choices is the guitar.  Thankfully, learning to play the guitar is actually not that difficult once you understand how a guitar works and can get to grips with the way guitar music is written.

Whether you fancy playing electric guitar or acoustic guitar, you will need to learn in exactly the same way to start with.

Obviously you need to start by getting a guitar to learn on.  Even if you are aiming to play the electric guitar, it maybe cheaper to start with an acoustic guitar as these can be picked up at excellent low prices and are good enough to learn the basics with.  Before you actually start to learn to play, you need to start by getting used to holding a guitar.  You want to get to the stage where it feels more natural to have a guitar in your hands.

The next step is to learn the notes of each string. There are 6 of them, all of which when playing with other people would need to be tuned, so learning how to tune your guitar is a good step too, as is overall familiarization of your instrument.  Put your guitar face up on your lap so that you can learn the order of the strings.  Furthest away from you at the bottom is E. This is high E, whereas the string nearest you is an octave apart and is low E.

Starting with high E moving back to you the string sequence is E (high) A D G B E (low).

Your left hand is used to create the chords we use to play the guitar, as you hold down one or more of the strings at a specific point along the neck; we call the neck the fret board.

A tab is the proper name for guitar music, and is a graphical form of music, where six lines have been drawn to show each of the strings. A number is printed on each line and this shows you at which you need to be holding the string – so 3 on the top line means you should be holding the high E at the 3rd fret.  Before you can really learn to play the guitar you need to learn how to read tabs with ease, and you should practice this until it becomes 2nd nature, as it really is important that you understand it.

When single numbers appear one after the other on a guitar tab, a single string should be played one after the other as directed.  However, where more than one number appears in a stack you are looking at a chord and you need to depress more than one string at the same time on different frets to create a perfect chord.

It may not be what you want to hear, but there is only one way to get really good at playing the guitar and that is to practice daily where possible, and be disciplined about it.  Learning to play any instrument isn’t instant, but if you practice regularly you will start to hear improvements for yourself and this is very uplifting.

On a bad day, walk away and find something else to do rather than just keep sitting there getting more and more fed up – but do come back later and try again.  Choose music that you actually enjoy playing as this is much better for your morale than endlessly fighting to learn to play something you hate listening to.

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Lots of people today are making use of the high availability of online sites that promise to help you learn to play the guitar. The internet has given us a whole new media when it comes to learning to play the guitar, whether you are an absolute beginner or a seasoned pro.

Not only that, but it has blossomed into a huge industry – there are a massive amount of sites that you can visit that promise to teach you a very high standard of guitar tutorials. The media of the streaming video has allowed people to learn from the comfort of their own front room, at any time of the day or night, whenever they like. In this article, we will explore some of the advantages of the online tutorial, and some of the things that they can offer you if you are considering learning to play the guitar.

1)    The convenience
As we stated earlier, by learning to play the guitar online you can learn wherever and whenever you want. More and more everyday activities are becoming more and more convenient (like shopping, for example). We are lucky to live in a time when convenience and easy availability of goods and services is part of our social make-up, and when it comes to learning to play the guitar, this is no different.

In the past, guitar students would have to travel to the instructor’s studio for a lesson. This involved often inconvenient travel times, and more often than not involved setting aside a whole afternoon or evening for a lesson. Nowadays, you can learn at your pace – a few minutes here and there if you so desire. You can even fit learning to play the guitar around other activities.

2) Choose your own instructor
The biggest advantage of this, of course, is that you can find someone who is specific to your needs. The majority of online tutorial sites give you the advantage of being able to choose from a wide variety of instructors. This means that instead of just finding someone who is close to your home, you can browse through a number of biographies and see sample lessons before you decide.

You do not have to stick to just one instructor – in fact, by taking lessons from two or three instructors you get a great sense of balance, and a lot of people can lean a lot faster this way. Take a look at a few different instructors so that you can find one that best suits your particular style – do you prefer a hands-on or more visual approach, for example?

3) Flexibility
You have the flexibility to choose what you learn, rather than in a one-to-one situation where you often find that you can only learn what the instructor wants to teach you. With an online program, you get to learn what you want to learn.

4)    Affordability
In order to learn to play the guitar, a lot of people don’t want to spend a whole lot of money. The whole business premise of the online tutorial is that they can provide more lessons for less money. The math is relatively simple: if 100 members of a particular site pay $10 each, then the site generates $1000. This revenue can then be used to film and produce even more lessons.

For a one-on-one instructor, you will realistically be expecting to pay something in the region of $40 per half hour lesson. Therefore, the value of the online tutorial becomes clear – you can get full membership to a lot of the sites for the same price (around $40), which will give you an almost endless amount of lessons.

It can seem a little frustrating at times when you come across something that you don’t understand. The only significant downfall when it comes to online learning, is that there is no-one there to ask a question to when you get stuck. This, however, is a pretty small disadvantage when you consider all the benefits of learning to play the guitar online.

Copyright 2009 Liam Gibson of ReviewsMetro.com

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