How to Tune Your Guitar

Here's a step by step guide on how to tune your guitar - use the online tuner to check your results! If your guitar is new you're going to find that it will take a week or more of constant tuning before it will settle down. This is because the strings stretch when new.

Online Guitar Tuner Here

How to Use A Capo

Using a capo will be very important for learning to play acoustic guitar and will save you from having to learn barre chords should you not wish to yet. Here's a selection of designs and how to use them. Once you get into the Song Books you're going to quickly realize the power and usefulness of Capo's for beginners.

Strumming Technique

Strumming is something we have to be careful about, it's very important to identify any bad habits you have early on in order to correct them. In this acoustic guitar lesson we'll go through all the main points and aspects of producing a warm tone from your guitar and how to examine your own strumming for problems.

Guitar Chord Secrets

After learning chords with the online guitar DVD we're going to put that information into a new and exciting concept. This will really change how you group your chords and how you see songs!

Improving Your Acoustic Guitar Chords - F and B minor Shapes

Once you are comfortable with your 'easy' shapes for F and Bm it's well worth learning some better, more secure sounding shapes for both those chords. They are harder to form but I think well worth the effort as you end up with a much fuller sound for both those important shapes.

How To Strum Guitar - Shuffle Strum

This is a really useful and fun strum to play. By combining it with other chord families it will add some great colour and swing to your playing. You're going to be surprised at how many songs, even modern day pop and rock songs employ a shuffle strum feel into their meter. Definitely a 'must have'.

Acoustic Guitar Chords - Dominant 7 Chords

Along with Major and Minor chords, this family of chords make up the 3 most important chord families to know. You'll find them everywhere in songs and this acoustic guitar lesson will equip you with the ones you'll most encounter. Try to get used to the 'tonal character' of these chords to be able to identify their sound.

How to Play Acoustic Guitar - Accent Strum

This strum is great for learning how to isolate your bass notes from your chords and add some real definition to your strumming. It's very musical and rewarding once you get the hang of it and you'll have heard this effect in many songs already

The Keys of C, G and D

These are our '3 crucial keys', the ones we need to know! The lesson explains how keys are structured and teaches you to play through them from start to finish with ease.

Passing Chords

Once you learn about passing chords you'll find yourself suddenly hearing them a lot in songs. To get started there are just 2 we need to know - these are the most commonly used and you'll hear them everywhere.

Pentatonic Scale

This scale is the easiest way to get into melodic playing and expressing yourself through melody on guitar. In later acoustic guitar lessons we'll be exploring exactly how to use scales and create our own guitar solos.

Major 7 Chords

This is a beautiful family of chords which will add some real class to your chord vocabulary. It's through knowing these kinds of extra chord families that your playing is lifted beyond beginner guitar status and it allows you to place so much more colour, depth and interest into your progressions

Bass Notes

Here we'll examine how each chord has a Tonic or Root note and identifying which one it is for every chord we know. This will be essential knowledge for your new strums, arpeggio picking and fingerstyle. As I was saying earlier, it's this kind of musical education and guitar theory which will empower you to play with much greater authority.

3/4 Strum

Not every song is in a 4/4 time signature and so for this reason we need to have a 3/4 strum! Its very useful for a surprising amount of popular songs and actually quite easy to do... always a good thing! As with all our strums, once learned we'll put it through it's paces with some example progressions.

Minor 7 Chords

Their sound quality is like a delicate version of a normal minor chord. We'll learn the most used shapes and put them into progressions as before, minor sevens are delicate.

Suspended Chords

This family of chords are valuable to know and can add a lot of interest to your playing. Once you know them you'll be able to slot them into your progressions quite easily and using some 'musical taste' they'll work very well for you.

C scale and G scale

After our pentatonic scale these 2 are next in line. They work hand in hand with your 'Keys' lesson from earlier and together you'll have the first steps into being able to write and improvise your own songs and melodic lines. This gives us a complete picture of songs, melodies and keys. You'll see how everything fits together as one.

How to Alternate Pick on Guitar

This technique is an absolute must for developing your speed and fluency in playing guitar! It takes practice but is well worth it and I know of no good guitar player who is unable to alternate pick. Start simply (and slowly) with the examples given, after some careful attention it will start to get more and more automatic.

How to form Barre Chords

Barre Chords are difficult at first and bane of many beginners lives! But they are well worth whatever effort you put into mastering them. They will increase your song playing power enormously! Here we'll discuss the 4 basic shapes you'll need, how to form them and where they come from as well as doing some good practice progressions.

Arpeggio Picking Chords

Arpeggio picking provides us with a great break away from strumming and is very useful for playing songs at slower tempo's. You can even combine your strumming with arpeggio picking for a hybrid effect.

Barre Chord Progressions

Hopefully you've had some time to get a handle on Barre Chords so this lesson is about mixing them in with our normal open chords. The trick is to start with just one Barre chord in the progression and build in single strums with a drum track.

Fingerstyle Part 1

How did you get along with your Arpeggio Picking? Now lets continue that theme and go into Fingerstyle. Here's a beginners pattern to get you going across all chords, if you check out the Fingerstyle module on the site you'll find a complete series on online guitar lessons for how to play fingerstyle guitar. I've made it especially with beginners starting from scratch in mind.

The Key of A Major

Ok so we have already 3 keys, now let's break further out from 'beginner guitar' to discover and learn this new key of A together with all chords, it's scale position and practice progressions.

How to Solo On Guitar

Using your knowledge of keys and scales allows you to develop your playing into improvising and making melodies. You see a scale on it's own means nothing, it's just a scale. You see each note as an individual building block, it's up to you to use those building blocks to express yourself musically. I'll get you going with this in depth video lesson. Download the TAB

Backing Track Demo

In this tutorial I've given an example of what it's like when you make up a solo and how it all gets put together from the last lesson. Download the track to practice the techniques on your own. The video is an example of the kinds of things which can be done. Download the Track

Adding Ornaments to Chords Pt.1

Once you can play your chords and strum confidently the next step is to add 'ornaments' to your chords and take your playing to the next level. These ornaments will make your chords sound much more interesting and more lessons are to come on this subject!

Advanced Chords 1

Let's do the same with our basic chords now and try adding some 'colour' by mixing them with some more advanced but very beautiful chords. It will increase the depth and expression of your playing enormously and show you how much there is to gain from learning chord families and incorporating them into what you already know.

Classical Piece No. 1

This is the first of a series of Classical Guitar pieces.

The point of this series is to show you how easy it can be to play other styles of guitar and that you CAN DO IT even if you're a beginner. It's going to improve all the other aspects of your guitar playing.

Audio PDF Course Books

There are 3 Audio PDF course books to accompany the video lessons. They contain extended diagrams, photo's, explanations, many progressions, strums and TAB.

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