Welcome To Guitar Notes For Beginners HQ…

Guitar notes for beginners imageThanks for visiting!  As a beginner guitarist I’m sure you have a ton of questions about getting started playing guitar.  You want to learn where the notes go on the guitar, how to read music, how play different chords and scales, and of course, songs, songs, songs!

If you feel like a total beginner or have tried to learn before and didn’t stay with it, have no fear.  I’ll show you the notes on the guitar, and plenty more, in the easiest ways possible.  The biggest trick is learning a few great brain hacks and having a good practice strategy.  I’ll give you those too.

I’ll be writing for both acoustic and electric guitarists.  At the beginning it’s all the same.  Feel free to leave a comment on any of the posts if you have a question and I’ll answer them asap.

One last thing before you dive in… Continue reading

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How To Read Extended Chord Symbols For Guitar

In Beginning Chord Theory For Guitarists I showed you how to construct basic three note chords, get them on the fretboard, and understand their relationship to one another.

In this post we’ll talk about extended chords, meaning those 7′s, 9′s, 11′s, and 13′s you’ve probably run across.  These chords add a lot more depth and complexity to your chord progressions than regular 3 note (triad) chords. Continue reading

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The Epic Guide To Intervals For Beginning Guitar

When I was studying music as a kid, just the word “intervals” would make me groan.  “Ah, crap… I get it.  It’s the distance between two notes.  Whooooo cares!?”

But the longer I played, the more I realized that my sight reading skills and ability to understand the construction of a song all thoroughly depended on what I’d learned about intervals.  The longer you play, and especially on guitar, the more you’ll think in terms of intervals than note names.

By the way, if you’re not yet familiar with how to read all the notes on your fretboard, that will help to give you an even better understanding of the stuff we’re talking about here.  Check out my easy fretboard reading trick here.

So, what are intervals? Continue reading

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How To Learn A Whole Song On Guitar

Maybe you’ve been playing for awhile.  You’ve got some chords and scales under your fingers.  You’ve been playing your exercises diligently.  But then you realize that you’ve yet to learn a whole song!  Something you know and love and can play for your friends!

Let’s dig into the process of learning a whole song.  Some of these steps may be changed or altered depending on what kind of song you’re learning.  There’s a big difference between Andres Segovia and Green Day.  But the basics should work across the board.

A couple of caveats… Continue reading

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Beginning Chord Theory For Guitarists

As a guitarist you’ll spend 85% of your time playing chords.  And you probably have a few chords under your fingers already.  G, C, D anyone?

What you and I will accomplish with this article is helping you understand 3 things about chords.
Step 1 will be learning how they’re constructed.
Step 2, how they’re placed on the fretboard.
Step 3, some basic chord relationships.

To follow this article, you’ll need to know how to find notes on your guitar fretboard.  If you haven’t yet, be sure to read these two articles first:
Guitar Notes For Beginners – This teaches you all the open position notes.
Easy Guitar Fretboard Reading Tricks – How to read all the rest of the notes on the fretboard.

And be sure to read all the way to the end for a cool bonus item…

And away we go….

Continue reading

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How To Use The Guitar Chord Finder

I’ve added a very handy tool to the site, a guitar chord finder.  You’ll find it in the bottom of the right sidebar.

Eventually you’ll want to understand how to find chord voicings by knowing what notes are in the chord and how to find them on the fretboard.

But as a beginner, it’s really handy to have a chord finder to get a quick fingering for that weird chord you’ve run across. Here’s how to use it. Continue reading

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