Posts tagged Acoustic

When you learn guitar, think of you and the instrument as partners in a musical relationship, rather than treating the instrument merely as a tool. The more you can understand the construction and quirks of your particular guitar, the sooner you can work together to create lovely music. Having this attitude will be beneficial as you learn how to play the acoustic guitar, because you will learn how to treat the instrument well, and in turn, it will enable you to play more easily.

You can learn to name the guitar parts quickly; body, neck and head, and the frets that cross the neck with the strings running over them, attaching to the tuning pegs in the head. When holding the guitar, you let the back of it rest against your stomach, with the neck more-or-less parallel to the floor. The thickest string runs along the highest edge of the neck, with the thinnest along the bottom. Your fingers or guitar pick hang just over the sound hole, or the mid-point of the body if the guitar is electric.

It’s important when you learn guitar that you sit up fairly straight, and don’t strain your back muscles. And most importantly, hold your fingering hand at the far end of the strings, and pull your wrist down, with the thumb in the middle of the back of the neck. Now you can plant the tips of the fingers, not the flats, on the strings. It will hurt to use your fingertips, but once you build up some calluses, that will stop. And placing your fingers this way will help you learn guitar chords without the flats of your fingers touching neighboring strings and deadening their sound.

Placing your fingering hand in the right position won’t just make it easier on your fingers and muscles as you learn guitar, but will help the guitar itself. The neck of the instrument will tend to twist from the pressure of your fingers, but this will lessen if the fingers press straight down on the frets rather than dragging sideways on each guitar string. As you learn more about the construction and makeup of your instrument, you’ll discover these and other postures that will make it easier to play, and lessen the strain on both you and the guitar.

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If you’re hoping to teach yourself some easy acoustic guitar songs, that’s one thing. You’ll find a multitude of websites, books, videos and other tools to help with that. But what if you’re aiming a lot higher? What if you want to learn how to play acoustic guitar in a more complicated style such as flamenco? That’s another matter entirely. Just as the style itself is more complex, the teaching will be too. You can go some distance teaching yourself, but you’ll need great tools and a lot of practice.

Learning how to play a flamenco guitar will feel different from most other guitars. For example, you’ll notice you get a different type of sound from the instrument. These guitars are made from a kind of wood that doesn’t allow musical notes to sustain for long. This is because the style involves consecutive flurries of notes that would create an unbearable cacophony if they all held. Each guitar string is closer to the fret board than on a standard guitar, which can sometimes create a buzz in the sound. And the staccato taps on the guitar itself are as much a part of the music as the notes played.

What you may get if you try to learn how to play acoustic guitar in a flamenco style is a mix of styles that are all vaguely “Spanish.” So you’ll need to keep your eyes open so your chosen resources promise an undiluted product. One source of music books that might help you start out is the Mel Bay Publications website. Among its many other guitar-related instructional books, www.melbay.com offers “You Can Teach Yourself Flamenco Guitar.” Mel Bay books contain guitar lessons beginners can start with that will lay down a solid level of skill.

You can learn how to play acoustic guitar in a flamenco style, even without an instructor physically in the room. You just need to have a realistic understanding of the difficulty. Even with all the books, videos and CDs, you might still learn to play much better if you work one-on-one with a trained teacher. But if you’re not aiming for the most professional levels of expertise, you can likely use all those resources and still become quite good at this most complicated of guitar styles.

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Acoustic guitar learning is made out to be very easy, at least if you take your cues from most internet advertising. And in fact it may not be that difficult to learn, if you are hoping to become proficient in one of the less complex styles of playing. For example, gaining skill in playing chords to accompany people as they sing a song is not that hard. However, there are other styles, such as flamenco or classical, that take much more work. Acoustic lessons in one of these styles may therefore be harder to learn without a teacher.

Learning classical acoustic guitar involves mastering a very detailed way of picking and strumming the strings on the guitar, and most of the time it also requires that you learn to read sheet music using the standard staff notation, rather than using the type of musical notation known as acoustic guitar tabs. The music you play will get complicated quite quickly. So as you learn to read the music, learn the finger positions of your left hand on the frets, and learn the correct ways of picking the notes with the fingers of your right hand, you might find that you have so much to absorb that any progress is going to take time.

You do have several teaching tools at your disposal, however. You can start your classical acoustic guitar learning online, with teaching videos. Many instructional sites offer these, and some of them are free, so you can see detailed demonstrations of all the finger movements you're trying so hard to learn. Many people also recommend study books, some of the most prominent ones being the two-volume “Solo Guitar Playing” set by Frederick Noad. These books are very good for the technical details of learning guitar, covering everything from posture to sight-reading your music.

Many people feel that classical acoustic guitar learning isn't very effective without a trained real world instructor. The style is so complex that not everyone believes you can learn to play well just by reading books and watching a few videos. Whether this is an issue for you will depend on what you want to do with your playing. If you hope to play classical music professionally, then you are unlikely to get anywhere without formal training. Yet even teaching yourself, you can eventually become proficient enough to do very well just in personal guitar playing.

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When people think of teaching themselves to play acoustic guitars they usually have a generic picture in their minds. But there is a lot of variation among these instruments, even if they look outwardly similar. The differences are sometimes subtle, but the way they are constructed, and the purpose for which they are used, may affect how easy or difficult any acoustic guitar lessons might be. Whether you're thinking of flamenco, classical or another type of guitar, the styles of music they are designed to play might determine whether you can teach yourself or will need formal lessons.

Playing a classical style, for example, will involve a complex form of acoustic lessons, meaning you'll be unlikely to succeed at teaching yourself. You would need to learn to read music, and the style involves learning an intricate way of finger picking. There are even rules about how to hold the guitar. On the other hand, when you use an acoustic guitar to play folk music, it means you can learn how to play it more easily, learning the chords so you can accompany songs quite successfully.

The flamenco guitar is one of the most dramatic examples of acoustic guitars that are constructed and played differently from the standard classical instrument. This type of guitar is even made of different wood, which doesn't sustain notes as long as a classical. The reason is that the flamenco style is typified by swift bursts of notes. The strings are closer to the neck, to facilitate tapping. The whole percussive style of flamenco means that learning guitar in this style and on this type of instrument could be difficult to do on your own.

Acoustic guitars are obviously more complex and varied than most people realize. Some add more strings, like harp guitars in which any added guitar string is in a higher range than the standard ones, or extended-range guitars which add strings in the lower register. Others have differently shaped necks or bodies, or are tuned differently for particular music styles. If you're thinking of trying to teach yourself acoustic guitar, then you clearly need to narrow things down first, and decide which style you want to learn, and even which guitar you want to play it on.

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