Learn To Play Guitar

eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_6690080_learn-reggae-bass.html#ixzz2PsV5zedq

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How To Change An Accoustic Guitar String

April 4, 2013 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Accoustic Guitar

TABLE OF CONTENT

Table Of Content

Electric Guitar

Lessons Learn To Play!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How to Get Good Guitar Tone

March 29, 2013 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

How to Get Good Guitar Tone
By Wade Shaddy

The best guitar tone comes from high-end guitars and tube amps.
Guitar tone consists of a guitarist’s technique, his choice of guitars, amplifiers and amplifier settings. For acoustic guitarists, good tone involves the guitar itself, and the way that the guitarist fingers the notes. Good tone comes from experience, but if the guitarist begins with proper equipment and instruction, getting good guitar tone becomes innate. Learning to play clean and clear is the best way to start.

Instructions
Acoustic Guitars

1 Purchase a Martin, Takamine, Taylor, Yamaha or any high-end acoustic guitar. Don’t spend less than $400. If there are models to choose from, specify and choose a model that produces mid-range tone. Don’t choose any guitar that has plastic, nylon or any bracing or walls that are not wood.

2 Put medium-gauge strings on the guitar. Use a medium-gauge pick.

3 When playing the guitar, make deliberate, confident moves. Don’t play shy, weak notes. If there is any buzzing or muted notes, examine your fingering and find out where your fingers are not making direct contact with the notes and correct the fingering. Practice your fingering technique until your notes and chords are crisp and clean.

Electric Guitars

4 Purchase a guitar with dual-coil pickups, a stop-bar tailpiece and a bone nut. Don’t get a guitar with a whammy bar. Pick a guitar body that is made from mahogany or alder wood.

5 Put medium-gauge strings on the guitar. Plug the guitar into a tube amp with 12-inch speakers—tube amps produce better tone than transistor amps. Don’t use any effect loops, or devices that preamp your guitar before entering the amplifier. These devices cause the guitar to have an electronic buzz or hum that detracts from good tone.

6 Set your amp’s gain control to 2. Set your reverb control to 4. Set your volume to 1 or 2. If your amp has a mid-range control, set it to 6. If your amp has a tone control, set it to 6. Plug in your guitar. Turn on the amp.

7 Set your pickup selector switch to the middle or neck position for solid mid-range tone. Don’t play with bridge pickup only. The bridge pickup is the one on the end of the guitar where the strings come out of the tailpiece. The bridge pickup is for lead playing and produces a treble sound that lacks tone.

8 Start out by playing slowly. Gradually build up speed. To get good tone, your notes have to be confident, even and solid. Avoid sounding choppy or amateurish.

Tips & Warnings
Single-coil pickups hum and have a tinny sound; dual coils produce deeper, richer sound. Stop-bar tailpieces and bridges are solid and produce better tone. Whammy bar-equipped guitar bridges and tailpieces are mounted on springs that compromise tone. Mahogany and alder produce deeper, richer tones than any other type of wood.

Check your cords, input jacks and control pots for static. If your have hum or static, change your cord. Lubricate control pots with anti-static cleaning spray available at your local guitar shop.

Lessons Learn To Play!

Easy learn Videos On How To Play Guitar For Kids

eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_6682774_good-guitar-tone.html#ixzz2OvzkZpCV

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How to Play Reggae Guitar

March 26, 2013 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Video transcript
Hi, my name is Stephen and I’m going to show you some basic reggae guitar style playing. And pretty much what you need to play it is a good electric guitar and an amplifier and your hands and a good reggae feel. And with reggae, really it’s a very simple style of playing guitar and a lot of it’s because the rhythms are typically about the same. Like say, if I’m playing a minor reggae rhythm, I’m going, and sometimes they play the notes, the bass notes like, and it’s basically just going back and forth, bass, treble, bass, treble.

You can also use your fingers too. I’ve seen reggae guys do that where they, and sometimes they’ll get a little more clever and use a alternating bass line, but a lot of times, I’ve seen them, a lot of them are just simply playing in the bottom part of the chord and letting the bass player doing the bass part of the work. Reggae guitar, really it’s, this example uses a minor, it would be like, maybe just go to D major, D, and so essentially what they’re doing there, is they’re just playing a shuffle rhythm like that. And they’re typically muting the bass.

They’re not going going, everybody’s a, kind of add a slight muting technique to them. We had, songs I’ve played where we did like Bob Marley songs or played reggae style rhythms in a song, I would typically, sometimes I wouldn’t even play the bass. I would let my bass player do that part of it and I’d just there and go. I’d just play the bottom part of the chords and play the bottom parts, so.

I mean, there’s other aspects to reggae. That’s the basic reggae style is simply using that feel that I just showed you and a minor is a very common progression used in reggae. I mean, there’s other aspects to it too. I mean if you want to get further into it, it’s a great style and people love to dance to it, it’s you know, I’m a big fan of it myself so. Again, my name is Stephen and I was just showing you reggae style on guitar.

How to Play Reggae Guitar — powered by ehow

In reggae guitar, many of the rhythms are similar, and many songs are just a batter of switching back and forth from bass to treble. Learn about muting the bass notes on a guitar with help from a professional guitarist in this free video on reggae guitar lessons. Charactistics of Reggae

Table of Content

Lessons Learn To Play!

eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/video_6152260_play-reggae-guitar.html#ixzz2OfRyCHlx

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How to Play Guitar Like Jimi Hendrix

March 26, 2013 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

How to Play Guitar Like Jimi Hendrix
By an eHow Contributor

Jimi Hendrix may have done as much for the advancement of the sound of electric guitar as anyone who has ever lived. His style, entrancing melodies and driving riffs keep Jimi a household name decades after his guitar reign. Guitarists have been trying to play like Hendrix for years, and while his style can never be duplicated, you can use some of these tips to channel your inner Hendrix.

Instructions

1 Restring your guitar.
Hendrix was left-handed, but instead of using a left-handed guitar, Hendrix restrung a right-handed guitar and flipped it over to play left-handed. The result of this was the low E string being the longest string and the high E string being the shortest, which changed his sound. If you’re a right-handed player, you can get the same effect by restringing a left-handed guitar.

2 Equip yourself like Jimi.
Hendrix’s gear is the stuff Rock and Roll is made of. He used a Fender Stratocaster, flipped over and restrung. A 100-watt Marshall amplifier will also get you close to the Hendrix sound. If you want a right-handed replica of Jimi’s guitar, check out the Voodoo Stratocaster.

3 Pick your effects.
You need a great wah pedal first and foremost, as this was one of Jimi’s go to effects. A Clyde McCoy Vox wah pedal will give you a great Hendrix sound. You also need a good fuzz pedal and some overdrive. Digitech makes a Jimi Hendrix pedal that emulates some of Jimi’s effects.

4 Use some of Jimi’s playing style.
This is where Jimi Hendrix made a name for himself, and as such it is the most difficult part to replicate. Jimi often relied on arpeggios and inverse chords. He also utilized his thumb on his strumming hand to pick out melodies while playing rhythm with his other fingers. He did many volume swells using his volume knob. Most of all, though, Hendrix was a showman. He played the guitar behind his head and between his legs, jumping around and laying on his back, so practice these techniques; they’re really not as hard as they may seem.

5 Find some Jimi Hendrix tabs and practice, practice, practice.
Jimi Hendrix music is easy enough to find, so start playing along with tabs. A good place to start is “Purple Haze” and then move on to more complex songs like “All Along the Watchtower.”

Learn to Play Hendrix-Style Music on the Guitar — powered by ehow

Learn how to play a Hendrix style of music on the guitar in this free video series that talks about the guitar and the different musical stylings it lends itself to.

Tips & Warnings

“Guitar World” magazine created a DVD-magazine that will take you step-by-step through how to play the songs on the “Axis: Bold as Love” album from Hendrix.

Lessons Learn To Play!

eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/video_2389235_learn-play-hendrixstyle-music-guitar.html#ixzz2OfMW0bgj

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Learn Harmonica In 5 Minutes

December 1, 2012 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Facts About Harmonicas
By Timothy Sexton,

The harmonica is one of those musical instruments like a tambourine, triangle, or cow bell that is often overlooked, but many popular songs would sound quite different without. Simple and elegant in its design, the harmonica is often given as a gift to kids because it is easy to play. While it may be easy to play, it is difficult to master.

Definition
A harmonica is defined as a free reed instrument in which sound is created by the flow of air vibrating a reed placed within the frame. The air flow is the result of a person breathing in or blowing out while the harmonica is placed against her lips.
Parts

The harmonica only has three essential parts. The long shape of the harmonica is technically called the comb. The reed plate is located inside the comb and contains a group of reeds that can be made from brass, steel or even plastic on cheaper brands. The cover plates cover the reed plate, and are usually made of metal or wood.

Types
There are three main types of harmonicas. The diatonic harmonica is the most common, consisting of 10 holes and playing 12 different keys. The chromatic harmonica has a button that, when depressed, allows the addition of certain half notes. This type is often used for jazz compositions. The tremolo harmonica is essentially a diatonic model that has double holes with reeds attuned to each to create the tremolo effect that gives this type its name.
History

Amazingly enough, the harmonica only dates back to the 19th century. A teenager named Christian Friedrich Buschmann filed the first patent for a harmonica instrument in 1821, but the harmonica is actually a case of several people coming up with the idea independently of each other. Buschmann’s model was quickly imitated and adapted and the portability and affordability of the instrument quickly made it popular.
Popularity

Although initially constructed as an instrument to be used for classic music, the harmonica did not really take off until African-Americans began to incorporate it into the blues. The instrument became as vital an element in the playing of this style of music as the guitar and so it is quite natural that rock music adopted the harmonica as they did incorporated so much else from blues music into this new genre.
Popular Use of Harmonica

The harmonica has been an essential and memorable instrument in many very popular songs. Among the song that would sound quite different without a harmonica that have become legendary are “Fingertips” by Stevie Wonder, the theme song to the movie “Midnight Cowboy,” “Love Me Do” by the Beatles, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel and almost any blues song.

Lessons Learn To Play!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Basic Harmonica Lesson: “Bending”

November 30, 2012 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

How to Hold a Harmonica
By an eHow Contributor

Hold a Harmonica
Playing the harmonica can be lots of fun. But before you start taking lessons or playing the blues, you need to understand that how you hold your harmonica affects its tones. Holding a harmonica properly gets the best sounds from it.

Instructions

1. Hold your harmonica so that the low notes sit on your left. Harmonicas have printed numbers from 1 to 10 over the holes, with 1 being the lowest note and 10 the highest.
2. Get comfortable playing single notes before you try anything fancy with your harp or your hands. Move the harmonica, not your head, to play the different notes.
3. Slide your harmonica between your left index finger and thumb, against the web of your hand. Allow the rest of the fingers of your left hand to cup the harmonica. Wrap your right hand over the left to create the largest airtight cup possible. This technique, cupping, is the single most important lesson in harmonica holding.
4. Open your hands for more volume; close them for a more muted sound that seems like sound trapped inside your hands.
5. Flutter the outer hand that cups the harmonica when you reach notes that should be held longer. The fluttering leads to a vibrating or wavering effect that alters the volume.
6. Hold your harmonica consistently. Consistency with holding allows you to quickly find the notes you need to learn to play.

Lessons Learn To Play!

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Guitar Fretting Hand Position: The Do’s and the Don’ts

May 1, 2012 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Feb 20, 2012

You will find a lot of resources on correct guitar hand positions when you scour the Internet. Unfortunately, there is lot of misinformation. Here is a list of guitar hand position dos and don’ts that will help your technique, improve your guitar playing and protect your physical wellbeing!

Relax!

Keep your fretting hand forearm and wrist in a straight line. Don’t bend your wrist! Having a bend in your fretting hand wrist puts strain on the tendons in you wrist, which can cause tendinitis when you practice a lot. You want to make sure you’re not putting any unnecessary strain on the muscles and tendons in your forearm. Tensing up while playing guitar will make you sound tiny, nasally, and cramped up. In addition: your fretting hand and arm will get tired faster. Loosen up! Holding a guitar is not a struggle.

Stretch!

All top players stretch when they are engaging in physically demanding practice activities, so why wouldn’t you? When you’re not used to playing bar chords and you feel like your arm is about to fall off, stretch! When you’re doing intense, repetitive technical exercises to improve speed, dexterity and strength: stretch! Not a bad idea to stretch a bit before you practice intensely. You should surely stretch during those practices.
Again: when you feel your hand and fore arm getting really tired, stretch before you start feeling discomfort, then continue practicing or practice something else to give your hand some further rest. How do you stretch? Keep your (fretting hand) arm straight (don’t bend at the elbow) in front of you, your hand open, the inside of your hand facing forward: like you’re signaling “STOP!” Then with your picking hand: gently pull your fingertips of your fretting hand towards you. Keep that pull for about 30-40 seconds.

Other really good stretch: keep the arm of your fretting hand straight without bending at the elbow. Rotate your forearm so the inside of your fretting hand is facing up. Close your fingers into a fist, without pressing hard: just simply close your fingers. Then reach over with your picking hand, grab your fretting hand fist and gently and carefully pull your fist towards you, without bending at the elbow. These 2 stretches work both sides of your arm. Do them often when you’re practicing physically demanding exercises.

Always Play With a Strap

Do you want to use your hands to play guitar with them, or do you want to use them to hold the guitar? That questions pretty much sums it up: when you play without a strap, part of your hand energy and attention is directed towards having to hold your guitar. With a strap, your guitar holds itself and you can use your hands to actually play guitar. Not only that: you also don’t have to worry about your beautiful guitar dropping on the ground.

Rest Your Thumb On The Back of The Guitar Neck.

As opposed to: pressing (really hard) against the back of the guitar neck. Try it out: play chords without your fretting hand thumb touching the back of the guitar neck! It’s usually pretty surprising for most people to found out that you don’t need your thumb to play guitar. This being the case: go figure how much energy you waste then if you press hard on the back of the neck with your thumb. You don’t even need your thumb to get the job done. Just rest your thumb against the neck. You’re only wasting your power and energy when you push against the back of the guitar neck.

Keep Your Fretting Hand Rounded!

Your fretting hand should always look as though you are holding a bubble or a baseball. The only exception to this might be if you’re playing a bar chord. Your fingers should be curved (exactly as your hand naturally is in a relaxed state) with your fingertips perpendicular on top of the guitar strings. There should be no “angles” or strain on any joints in your hand and fingers.

Keep your thumb straight

Very often guitar players bend their thumb of their fretting hand behind the guitar neck. Don’t do it: keep your thumb straight. This is the fix for guitar students who complain that their forearm starts hurting after a while of fingering chords. More often than not, the solution is in straightening out the thumb. Your guitar is basically your “tool” that you pick up to create music with. You would never pick anything up with your thumb bent, because your hand is not designed to function that way. So trying to play guitar with your thumb bent goes against the grain of how your hand is designed to function. The bent thumb results in added tension in the forearm muscles, which leads to the forearm pain guitarists feel after a while.

Conclusion:

The position of your fretting hand is important for various reasons: better sound, better technique, less strain, better performance, more control, more endurance, physical & medical precaution preserving your hand, arm and wrist, and having more fun playing more at ease. And that is exactly what I would like you to do now. Enough reading: go have some fun, jamming guitar while improving your hand position.

Lessons Learn To Play!

Guitar Scales Mastery!
Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/guitar-fretting-hand-position-the-dos-and-the-donts-5675750.html

Filed Under: Uncategorized

What Is Guitar Improvisation – Don’t Get Left In The Dust!

May 1, 2012 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Jan 21, 2011

By Andrew
One of the biggest questions asked, is what is guitar improvisation? The answer can really be summed up in one short phrase. It is just like improvisation on any other instrument.

It can mean many things to many people however. One of the simplest explanations would be that it can take the form of playing around with, or extending scales, but it is also very much at the heart of many musical cultures, such as the Spanish flamenco style, or the alapanas, ragas, and tanams that are used in classical Indian music.

Throughout the years, improvisation has also had a particularly wide usage in jazz, all the way from the technical musicianship of many stars of “bebop” to the more controversial “free” musicians, who at their most extreme play everything completely void of reference to melody, harmony, or rhythm.

A major surprise will come to those people that view Western classical music, as some sort of severely rigid musical system, to find out that improvisation has played a significant role in its development and history. In fact, some of the great musician-composers like Handel and Bach, were recognized for their improvisations on the organ. The violinist Paganini is actually thought to be one of the greatest improvisers of all time!

What is guitar improvisation in practice? It would be very idealistic, as well as simplistic to imagine that each and every guitarist that steps forward to take a solo, views what is about to be played as some sort of blank canvas, and that the resulting sound will be a manifestation of divine inspiration.

The fact is, that in the hands of capable musicians, improvisations can be little more than linking together a vast series of musical phrases, which may or may not be completely identical from one performance to another, and surprisingly could only amount to a minor variation of the same theme.

Often, soloing in the realms of many popular music styles will fall into this category. It is even truthful to say that this can and will be the case even in genres where improvisation holds a more tradition role such as jazz, albeit it will most likely be held to a more technically proficient degree.

In truth, this isn’t particularly surprising. As musicians who happen to be working in a broadly accessible sphere of music make up their minds not to play set pieces, the possibilities that are open to them may all of the sudden seem relatively limited in scope.

Interestingly enough, the word “limit” is especially apt when speaking about improvisation, simply because at a practical level it usually requires working within a predefined framework of music.

This concept may of course seem somewhat theoretical or even irrelevant to many guitarists, because many of them take pride in the fact that they can reproduce or replicate the sound of their studio recordings in a live performance situation. This should not be taken to mean however, that improvisation is irrelevant in mainstream music.

How then are new songs composed one may ask them self? More often than not, it is simply a result of sitting down with your instrument and playing around until that “spark” happens. It is usually the same process that takes place when working out a solo or band arrangement.

So, what is guitar improvisation…really?

As the Harvard Dictionary of Music puts it, improvisation is “The creation of music in the course of a performance.” Pretty straightforward if you ask me. However, this seems to me like a fairly narrow definition of the word. It doesn’t seem to do it justice to the manner in which it has come to be used in nearly every form of modern music.

Take for instance the typical approach to a jazz solo. Traditionally, the melody is predefined, and the soloist will then stray from the melody, but strangely enough, will generally play around the notes that are used in the melody.

Also, in many blues-based musical patterns, soloing often times appears to be a case of playing around with the notes of a minor pentatonic scale, which have usually been based around a previously developed motif.

I guess with all of this information, the true question begins to emerge. What actually constitutes true improvisation?

In some cases, such as an outstanding jazz soloist, could we simply be confusing inspiration with an extremely well developed musical vocabulary?
Or could they actually be part of the same equation?

When so many people are asking, what is guitar improvisation? Maybe we are all over complicating the approach. Sometimes it may be better to “just play” and not try too hard to analyze the music.

Lessons Learn To Play!

Guitar Scales Mastery!
Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/music-articles/what-is-guitar-improvisation-dont-get-left-in-the-dust-4080437.html

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How To Create A Blues Guitar Riff From Scratch

May 1, 2012 By niguitar Leave a Comment

Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation
from the companies whose products we review.

Feb 10, 2011

By Phil Johnston
Looking to brew up some blues guitar hoodoo but don’t know the mystical formula? Though the blues is a deceptively simple guitar style, you can get started creating your own classic blues guitar riffs with a few simple tools. Check it out..

I’m going to give you some of the basic tools here, as well as a little guidance on what you should look to learn next.

Tool #1: Your main squeeze, the big daddy, the mystical master of the blues, is the pentatonic minor scale. Not only do we use it in blues guitar, but also funk, jazz, rock, metal, and everywhere else.

Here’s the formula for a minor pentatonic scale: 1 b3 4 5 b7
Just five simple little notes and a world of possibilities.

In a couple of different keys, the scale would be:
C minor pent: C Eb F G Bb
A minor pent: A C D E G
E minor pent: E G A B D

This is an easy scale to move around the neck for any key you need. Tab? Sure…
The tab on the left is E minor pentatonic in the open position. The second is A minor pentatonic in the 5th position. That pattern is movable to any of the frets.

————————————0–3 ————————————-5–8—
—————————–0–3——- ——————————5–8———-
———————-0–2————– ———————–5–7—————–
—————0–2——————— —————-5–7————————
——–0–2—————————- ———5–7——————————-
-0–3———————————– –5–8————————————–

Where to go from here:
- Add the blue note, the b5. In the E pattern above that would be a Bb.
In the A pattern it’s an Eb.
- The minor pentatonic can be played in many different position patterns. Learn at least 3.
- Learn the major pentatonic pattern. You’ll find there’s a relationship between the major and minor pentatonic

Tool #2: The swing (or shuffled) 8th note. To really play the blues you need to swing like a drunk at the edge of a cliff. Normally when you play 8th notes, each note is exactly the same length. We call those “straight 8ths”.

A swing 8th pattern is actually based on an 8th note triplet – 3 note inside one beat. Count it like “tri-ple-et, tri-ple-et” What we do though is tie the first two notes in the triplet together. So you’re basically playing just the first and third notes of the triplet. That makes the first 8th note long and the second 8th note short. – Boom… Swing 8ths.

Where to go from here:
- Learn to mix regular triplets with your swing 8ths. Work with both chords and single notes.
- Listen to lots of blues and jazz to absorb the feel of playing these.

Now, you can start constructing riffs by using those pentatonic scales and swing 8ths. But here’s a couple bonus ideas to bust them open a bit.

Tool #3: The sliding 3rd. In the blues we’re allowed to mix our major and minor ideas together. “Blasphemy!”, says Beethoven. Well, Beethoven’s dead and BB King is still touring.

A great way to get into this idea is the sliding third. In your minor pentatonic scale you have the minor 3rd (b3). We can also add the major 3rd (natural 3), and use both. In the E scale above that would be a G#. In the A scale it’s a C#. The two notes can be used right next to each other (hence the term ‘sliding 3rd’) or separate. Your choice.

Tool #4: The 6th riff aka the Boogie Riff. From Johnny B. Goode to countless Chicago style blues guitar classics, this is a must have riff. Play an open E power chord (E and B) with your first finger on the B on your 5th string. Pick that twice. Then, leaving your 1st finger where it is, put your 3rd finger on the C# on the 5th string. Pick that twice. Go back and forth between those two and you have your basic sixth riff. It’s moveable and there are countless variations on the idea.

More bonus tips:
- The notes that really define the sound of a pentatonic blues scale are the b3, b7, and the b5 (the ‘blue note’). Use the first two liberally in your riffs, and the last sparingly for flavor.

- Most blues songs are built around a 12 bar blues format with some small variations. Learn it well, but don’t be afraid of veering away from it for some other forms as well.

- Lastly, do a ton of listening. The more you listen, the more you absorb the common traits of the blues. This will help you to know when you’re playing something traditional or happily breaking every rule in the book.

Lessons Learn To Play!