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Guitar Playing

Once you become familiar bit about how music is structured and where it is located on the fret board, you must get those strings vibrating to create music. This means coordinating both hands. The fret board hand must be holding the strings down firmly to allow them to vibrate, and the picking hand must attack the strings neatly to prevent unnecessary notes from confusing the sound. This may take time and patience but practice is the only way to get there. Your finger tips will definitely hurt for a little while, as your calluses build up, and soon enough you won’t feel any discomfort. Be sure that you play at least a little each day to maintain their insensitivity.

The fret board hand will also need time to feel at ease with some of the chord shapes, some of which require spreading the fingers out quite a bit, and moving from one chord to another may impossible when you first start playing. However don’t feel discouraged, practice will make perfect.

To be able to get the best leverage, power and control over the fret board hand, make it a habit early on to keep the thumb as close to the middle of the back of the neck as possible. It should line up with your index finger. You will find if you keep the thumb and index finger lined up, the other three fingers will be able to work independently. As your hand moves, this thumb/index combo moves with it. Your elbow must be dropped, everything should be calm. It’s very easy for the shoulders to tense up.

Strings can be controlled in countless ways to extort the music: it could be sideways to ‘bend’ notes up in pitch, ‘hammered on’ to get from one note to another, ‘pulled off’ to get from one note to another, muted to muffle the ringing, slid up or down to get from one note to another, wobbled back and forth to make the note wobble in pitch, a technique called ‘vibrato, slid upon using a metal tube, known as ’slide guitar, or lightly touched at specific points to create ‘harmonics’ and so on. All of these create a player’s unique trademark ’sound‘ that makes us instantly recognize them.