Guitar 101 Lesson – a much needed one!

I recently joined a free Guitar 101 session organized by a wellness circle in our office.  They really treat this seriously and I’m glad I attended.  Why?  For one thing, I really like to learn how to play the guitar.  Also, I bought my guitar way back in 2002 but until now, I still don’t know how to use it hahaha!

I learned a whole lot at this 2-hour lesson.  There is soooooo much information!!  Care to join me?  I don’t know if you’ll learn anything from me but worth a shot right?  So here goes:

There are different Types of Guitar:

• Classical Guitar – uses nylon strings, has a mellow tone and is good for beginners due to its soft strings.
• Folk/Acoustic Guitar – uses steel strings, has a bright sound and used for folk, country, rock, pop music.
• Electric Guitar – has “pickups” to enable guitar to be amplified.

Well mine is a classical guitar.  It was the best one I could find in the factory in Cebu where I bought it.

Guitar Parts:

There are 7 important letters to remember when learning guitar:  C, D, E, F, G, A & B.  They’re musical keys which corresponds to notes in a music sheet.  The one in the image below is from a piano piece:

Things to remember regarding Notes/Music Alphabets:

• One Octave: C (Do), D (Re), E (Mi), F (Fa), G (So), A (La), B (Ti), D (Do)
• Notes Progression:  C – C#/Db – D – D#/Eb – E – F – F#/Gb – G – G#/Ab – A – A#/Bb – B – C
• there is no sharp/flats in between B-C and E-F

• each fret is a half-step.
• each open string in the guitar is an alphabet (Easter Bunny Gets Drunk at Easter)

There is a system of notation for guitar.  It is called Tablature or the Tab.

You don’t just play a guitar.  You need to maintain it too.  Not just cleaning but you need to tune it.  Tuning is the most important thing to learn & do when you have a guitar.  Your guitar must be in tune in order to play beautiful sounds.  This is also crucial for bands who play musical instruments together.

There are several tuning methods:

• Reference Pitch from Piano
• Reference Pitch from Pitch Pipe
• Tuning Fork
• Computer, iPod, iPhone, MP3 Player
• Electric Tuner

So remember I mentioned notation & tabs?  Well to play the guitar, you also need to know the Guitar Chord Chart.  It is a list of chord diagrams that is a virtual presentation of a guitar chord.

• horizontal lines are frets, vertical lines are guitar strings
• a number beside the chord chart indicates the 1st horizontal line is on the nth fret
• 0 (don’t play), x (open string)
• 1st horizontal line is the nut

Too much information right?  We do need to remember all of them though.  Lastly, we ended the session by learning a very basic song for guitar playing: Happy Birthday.