These techniques aren’t always necessary to be played, but it sure can add some flavor to your guitar playing. Add some spicy can be something extra in your play. Consider it as an icing on your cake, despite the taste it looks good also.

And they are:

• Guitar Tapping – The most common advance guitar technique used by many guitarists in the world. Done by tapping string on the frets without plucking it to make its unique sound.
• Natural Harmonics – Don’t you know that you can make your guitar sounds like gentle chimes rings clearly? This techniques produce more ambient to your sound done by gently touching (not pressing!) your finger upon strings on certain frets.
• Pinch Harmonics – This certain harmonics technique produces a high pitch squeal that gone through air and eardrums. Think about Heavy Metal then you’ll know what I mean.
• Palm Muting – Place your palm at the end of the strings near the bridge to do this technique. This will produce the distorted chug-crunch sounds commonly found in rock and metal style. Goes well also on clean electric and acoustic.
• Double Stops – This technique goes when you want to play two notes at once.

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The thing is by learning these essential techniques you will be able to play many various and different guitar playing style. And of course this too will let you do more complex guitar passage riffs. The more techniques you got the more style you can play the better you’ll be as guitar player.

Essential Guitar Playing Techniques

I know that probably some of you have already heard about these basic techniques or even you have master it well, but it still won’t harm to over look it again. You know it well that there’s always room for improvement.

With these techniques you can explore more with your creative side of playing. Even if you’re playing for just a few chords, these techniques will add something extra in your playing.

Let’s learn about these essential guitar playing techniques; they are:

1. Alternate Picking – This is probably the most essential guitar playing techniques. That’s why it goes first. This technique will build speed, solidifies your timing, and coordinates the actions of your picking and fretting hands.
2. The Legato Techniques, consist of:
   - Hammer Ons – Go from lower to higher notes done by pressing on another frets with different finger.
   - Pull Offs – The Reverse of Hammer Ons which you go from higher notes to lower notes. Done by releasing your fingers to lower notes.
3. Slides – Just like the name itself, slides means you slide your finger on strings going from one frets to another that will add “smoothness” to your playing sound.
4. Bending – Means that you actually bend the string up or down that will increase or decrease the note. This vital technique will make your guitar solo run sounds like crying.
5. Vibrato – Great techniques that makes your note sounds longer. It can also add vibration to the sound. Made by press and shaking your fingers gently on the string. You’ll be amazed once you heard the sound you’re making using this technique.

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But it all changed when I try to learn a song over some musical score and I couldn’t do it. Not because I wasn’t good enough, but simply I didn’t know how to read it. It just froze me on my track to see something like this:

It’s a “tuplet” as I learned later, and it makes me realize that if I didn’t want to learn how to handle such basic musical notation you can imagine what kinda player I would be. I have to study this to reach my full potential. I have to do it and solve this basic issue, learning some music theory.

And you should do it too. If you can’t play a guitar solo run because it’s too friggin’ hard that’s one thing. But if you can’t play it because you don’t know how to read and understand to play it, that’s another thing. You need to solve that. You won’t let this technical boundaries stops you to reach your full potential don’t you? And I’m gonna help you with that.

In this page you will find important things you need to know about music theory related to guitar playing. If you want to learn about just intonation or any other obscure concept then I’m afraid that you will be disappointed. But if you want to learn how to play anything you see in tab or music sheet, then you’re in the right place.

And these basic topics that you should address to solve:

• Tempo – describe how fast or slow a song should be played. Simple stuff.
• Basic Note Values – every notes has a values, it describe how long a note should be played or hold.
• Tuplets – a group of notes with same values played in a time.
• Time Signatures – describe how many of which notes get put in each measure.

I know this may sound difficult for any beginner like you, but don’t get caught up with difficult terms you are having. These are just aspects of guitar music theory just yet. There are tons more, and it’s all worth learning. As always the more you know the better you’ll be. I say you should work on this and going all from here.

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You need a guitar! Well that’s obvious isn’t it?

But before you do that in case if you haven’t got one, or you considering to get another one, and since this is a beginner guitar lesson, let’s us start with anything you need to know about guitar. I’m sure most of you have already know what a guitar looks like, how it played, and what the sounds like. But for those who haven’t… Well, I really don’t know what to say to you. I mean common people, it’s guitar! How strange can it be? It’s not some short of super weird traditional musical instrument from out of nowhere. It’s a guitar!

Ok now, you know what a guitar is, but I’m sure not all of you know what type of guitar you have. In fact even some guitar players still don’t know the types of guitars! I’m not kidding! They’ve played it but still some don’t know what type of guitar they’re playing. So I think it would be good if as beginner we should know any of these materials:

• Guitar Types
  It’s just something you need to know about the types of guitars, like what its like, what kinda strings they’re have, what are they used for, etcetera, etcetera.
• Guitar Tonewoods
  As you know most guitars are made of woods. We’re going a lil’ physic here, in case you don’t know that a guitar sound is made of strings struck resonate by its wooden body. That’s why you’ll see a hole in its body, to resonance the sound and make it louder. And that’s why any woods materials a guitar made of should be impact on the sound quality that will produce. And you’ll be step ahead of any guitar players if you know about this stuff.
• Buying a Guitar
  Well that’s easy. But not as easy as it looks. You’ll deal with hundreds choices that will blur your mind. But this cover will help you where to buy a good guitar from.

Right, now that you have your guitar, it’s time to do something about it. It’s time you learn how to play it. And the first lesson a guitar player should have is to work on those weak and lame fingers. Remember, you’ll play guitars with your fingers. And there’s nothing better to train those fingers than chords. It’s a great way to practice.

So I would like you to try these particular chords first:

• Guitar Power Chords
  Okay these aren’t technically chords actually, but it showed up in any songs that requires guitar playing. I mean they’re everywhere. And you can’t call yourself a guitar player if you don’t know any of these chords.
• Basic Guitar Chords
  Now here comes the real parts, after learning those now it’s time for you to move on to the real deal. And these basic are the staple of any beginner guitar lesson everywhere.

Let’s move on then, after you’ve done practicing any of those chords, it should makes you familiar to hold your guitar. Next is to practice the movement of your fingers. Go ahead to guitar playing techniques page where you will learn what the different techniques are and how to tie them all together. Just take it easy. Your speed and technical proficiency will come in practice. Just keep on going.

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