To Learn and Master the guitar will require some knowledge of the basics before you actually begin playing notes and chords. This is important because you’re progress will be a lot slower without covering the basics to playing the guitar.

Therefore the purpose of this article will be to run through some of the guitar playing basics.First of all you need to decide whether you want to learn and master the electric or acoustic guitar. The electric guitar tends to be more expensive. This is due to the expense of buying an amplifier and the construction of the guitar tends to be more expensive. However, the electric guitar requires less strength in the finger tips to play.

You can also get a good variety of sound with the sound effects and you can sustain the notes for much longer. The acoustic guitar is cheaper is generally used for learning to play the guitar.

One of the drawbacks of using a a steel string acoustic guitar is the sensitivity of the fingers. However you soon build up a layer of hard skin to protect the finders. The basics to learning the guitar involves correct body and hand positions and posture to protect your lower back and shoulders from over straining. It is advisable to use a support strap and to be seated when first starting.

This will enable you to balance the guitar nicely on the leg with your right arm supported by the superior rim of the guitar enabling your fingers to be correctly position over the strings. Your left hand should be able to hold the neck in a relaxed position with you thumb behind the fret board. For protecting the finger tips and for accurate string picking you can use a spectrum. The spectrum is a plastic teardrop shaped piece of plastic which is held between your right hand thumb and index finger.

You should have your fingers as close to the tip as possible for better control over the strings. For tuning your guitar I use a electronic tuner. I started using pitch pipes which is a cheaper option but you have to train your ear to the different pitches. It is so much easier using an electronic tuner.

The tuning unit I use has a built in microphone and all that was required was to reduce or increase the tension of the strings to get the needle on the electronic display dead centre. A well tuned guitar makes all the difference to your sound quality and is one of the basic skills needed to learn and master guitar.

About the Author
James Joyce has written a number of books and has a several websites on the subject of learning the guitar. If you would you like to know more about learning the guitar check out http://www.stxx2.jamorama.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=LG for more information about the above topic!

If you are one of the many people looking to learn guitar notes, what are you going to do with these notes when you learn them? There is an idea alive and well in alot of people’s heads that if you want to learn how to play the guitar, all you need is to find out where to put your fingers to play the notes, and there is nothing more you need to do.

In fact, learning the guitar notes is a very small but important part of guitar playing. So let us take a look at the other pieces of the puzzle.Guitar playing is based more on learning chords than on playing single notes. If you listen to solo guitar playing, it usually consists of a combination of single melody notes, bass notes and chords. Anyway, having established that there is much more to guitar playing than learning guitar notes, let us take a look at these notes we are so anxious to learn. 

Standard tuning for a six string guitar is, starting at the lowest note, E A D G B E. If we take an acoustic guitar without a cutaway body as having the minimum number of reachable notes, that gives us twelve frets worth of notes to play. But the guitar can only give us a total of thirty-seven different notes, so that means we have lots of different positions on the guitar neck to play the same note.

Now let us go back to basics for a bit. You probably know that musical notes are named after the first seven notes of the English alphabet. At least, they are if you play the guitar in English. So starting with the sixth string that plays the note E, on the first six frets you have F G A B C D, then you start again at E on the seventh fret, right? Wrong! The steps between notes are not uniform.

Starting with the open string E, the first fret is F, but the second fret is not G but F sharp there are sharps after A C D F and G. There are no sharps between B and C or between E and F. So if we look at the sixth guitar string again, instead of starting the next octave with E on the seventh fret, we start with E on the twelfth fret.

So let us look at the notes on all the strings of the guitar up to the twelfth fret:

E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E
B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B
G G# A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G
D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D
A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A
E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E

So the notes at the twelfth fret of each string on the guitar are the same as the notes sounded by the open strings. You can use this diagram to pick out tunes if you already know how to read music. If you do not know how to read music yet, you can start finding out how to learn the guitar notes by finding recurring patterns up and down the fretboard.

About the Author - Ricky Sharples
Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.