I love to receive requests for online lessons, one such request was from a beginner that was unable to take private lessons from me, but wanted to get off on the right foot.
Beginning students that are unable to take lessons from a professional teacher should proceed very carefully. You don’t want to get into a bad habit in regards to posture, hand positions, direction, bad tone, etc.
Here is a first scale and exercise to practice.
You have four left hand fingers that play the guitar, they can be re-arranged 24 different ways. Here is an example.
Scales – A scale is a group of related notes in a fixed order. Every song or tune/melody comes from a scale. The key of G is the most common guitar key, and a great place to start.
A sequence is a series of notes that create a pattern. Often they’re played repititiously as an exercise. Sequences are a great way to memorize a new scale or to utilize your scales in soloing. Here is one of the most common Pentatonic sequences. Make sure to practice it in the other four positions as well and add hammer-ons and pull-offs.
Click to download the sequence ascending and descending in the first two positions. PentatonicSequences-1
Learning how to fingerpick correctly is imperative in your playing more technical pieces. I recommend Classical Guitar methods by Carcassi, Sor, Segovia, Christopher Parkening, as well as others. Take things slow, listening to your tone and using the correct fingers. Here’s a very basic exercise by Ferdinando Carulli called Andantino.
Warming up is an integral part of playing an instrument and a necessary first step. Here are some simple, and common chromatic (using all 12 notes) exercises.
Did you know that the most challenging aspect of playing the guitar is that it’s upside down and backwards? More beginning students are perplexed with which way is up than anything else. Due to this fact, the guitar is much harder to play than it looks.
Unraveling the directional mystery requires a shift in thinking. Moving to your right makes the pitch go up; therefore you’re going up (horizontally). Interestingly enough, beginners always refer to this is going ‘down the neck’, enter the confusion. And, since the string with the highest pitch is nearest the floor, moving toward the floor is also up (vertically). The direction your hands are moving don’t have anything to do with the way the pitch is moving. When you combine horizontal movement with vertical movement the end result is diagonal.
Understanding how to move around on the guitar is the first step to being able to play well. If you’re playing the guitar without knowing how the notes are arranged, the results you achieve will be accidental and non-reproducible. Here’s a graphic to help illustrate the directional problem.
