Have you ever needed to know how to play a particular chord on your guitar but didn’t have a chord chart handy? Solving this common problem can be as simple as learning the formulas for building the different chord types. Follow this link for some basic tips for getting started:
Guitar Chord Formulas
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Instantly Play 12 Guitar Chords By Learning Just One Movable Shape
Learning movable chord shapes is a fairly simple concept. Yet, they can dramatically increase the number of chords and therefore the number of songs at your disposal.
Like many guitar students, my beginner days were spent memorizing about 10 open chords. You know, the ones found at the first 4 frets at the far end of the guitar neck.
When I gradually learned to move smoothly from chord to chord a whole world of songs were suddenly at my fingertips. For the first time I felt like a real guitar player.
It had taken quite a while to memorize the open chords and I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could learn and remember all the chords that reside at the other 18 or so frets on the guitar neck. It just didn’t make much sense. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why certain notes were fingered on certain strings. Each and every chord just had to be memorized… or so I thought.... click here for the rest of the article on Movable Barre Chord Shapes
Like many guitar students, my beginner days were spent memorizing about 10 open chords. You know, the ones found at the first 4 frets at the far end of the guitar neck.
When I gradually learned to move smoothly from chord to chord a whole world of songs were suddenly at my fingertips. For the first time I felt like a real guitar player.
It had taken quite a while to memorize the open chords and I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could learn and remember all the chords that reside at the other 18 or so frets on the guitar neck. It just didn’t make much sense. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for why certain notes were fingered on certain strings. Each and every chord just had to be memorized… or so I thought.... click here for the rest of the article on Movable Barre Chord Shapes
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
REVIEW: Jamorama Guitar Lessons Are Surprisingly Innovative At A Truly Low Cost
Ranked 8.5 out of 10
My top recommendations always lean towards guitar instruction programs that are all-video. They offer an easier method of communicating lots of subtle information. Having said that, I feel that although Jamorama is a downloadable written lesson program, it is by far the best in its class. The primary reason for this is because of the quality audio and video snippets added to enhance the learning experience.
The lessons are logical, thorough and perfect for the rank beginner all the way through advanced intermediate players. The course has some of the most innovative software programs and games for taking the mundane parts of learning the guitar and making them fun.
At only $39.95, Jamorama is perfect for someone that does not wish to spend $150- $200 for an all-video program. It is an excellent, low risk way to get started with learning to play guitar. For these reasons, I recommend, with out hesitation, the Jamorama guitar lesson program.
Click here for my complete written review of the Jamorama Guitar Lesson Program.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Review: Metal Method Video Guitar Lessons
Rated 10 out of 10
This course is designed for anyone interested in learning to play the electric guitar. It is especially appropriate for those interested in improvising lead solos. While the emphasis is on Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music, the fundamental techniques and theory are common and essential to Hard Rock, Classic Rock and Blues Rock as well.
I have reviewed so many guitar lesson programs that show some good potential but they always seem have one or two fatal flaws. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that the Metal Method Guitar Lesson DVDs where solid all the way through. It is one of the most thorough, polished and well thought out programs I have ever seen. It is obvious that Doug Marks has actually been listening to his students for over 23 years and using that feedback to continually refine each element of his lessons.
If you are serious about learning the electric guitar this DVD series is a must have. According to the Metal Method website they were picked by Guitar World Magazine for being essential guitar DVDs. I couldn’t agree more.
This course is designed for anyone interested in learning to play the electric guitar. It is especially appropriate for those interested in improvising lead solos. While the emphasis is on Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music, the fundamental techniques and theory are common and essential to Hard Rock, Classic Rock and Blues Rock as well.
I have reviewed so many guitar lesson programs that show some good potential but they always seem have one or two fatal flaws. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that the Metal Method Guitar Lesson DVDs where solid all the way through. It is one of the most thorough, polished and well thought out programs I have ever seen. It is obvious that Doug Marks has actually been listening to his students for over 23 years and using that feedback to continually refine each element of his lessons.
If you are serious about learning the electric guitar this DVD series is a must have. According to the Metal Method website they were picked by Guitar World Magazine for being essential guitar DVDs. I couldn’t agree more.
To discover some of the unique innovations that make Metal Method so unique click here:
http://www.compareguitarlessons.com/Review-Metal-Method.html
http://www.compareguitarlessons.com/Review-Metal-Method.html
To directly visit the Metal Method site for additional information or to buy click here:
Metal Method Video Guitar Lesson Website:Monday, March 31, 2008
Free Online Guitar Tuner Plus How To Tune Your Guitar
I have just added an Online Guitar Tuner for your convenience (compliments of Mike Giesen at WimpyPlayer.com). Follow this link:
http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com/Online-Guitar-Tuner.com
You will also find a new series of articles about " How To Tune A Guitar". This is an often neglected part of learning to play guitar, even for experienced players, yet tuning is as important as learning chords, theory, picking, fretting and reading tabs.
The articles cover the following topics:
http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com/Online-Guitar-Tuner.com
You will also find a new series of articles about " How To Tune A Guitar". This is an often neglected part of learning to play guitar, even for experienced players, yet tuning is as important as learning chords, theory, picking, fretting and reading tabs.
The articles cover the following topics:
- How To Set Up Your Guitar For Tuning
- How To Tune Using Reference Tuning Methods, (How to tune using a piano and more...)
- How To Tune Using Relative Tuning Methods
- How To Tune a Guitar To Itself
- Tuning with Harmonics
- How Tune Using An Electronic Tuner
- The Types of Electronic Tuners and When To Use Them
- Guitar Tuning Tips
- Plus A Free Online Guitar Tuner Tool
Just follow this link to my new guitar tuning section: http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com/How-To-Tune-A-Guitar.html
Please let me know what you think!
Happy Playing,
John Mackinnon
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Chord Finder Tool: Find Fingerings for Hundreds of Guitar Chords - FREE
I have just installed an animated Guitar Chord Finder Tool FREE for anyone to use. Select a chord and watch as an animated dots are superimposed over a photo of a realistic guitar neck. It supports hundreds of chords and derivations. Its amazingly fast and lots of fun. Try it out.
Go To http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com/Guitar-Chords.html
Be sure to let me know what you think.
Go To http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com/Guitar-Chords.html
Be sure to let me know what you think.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Guitar Maintenance: Is Your Guitar Slowly Dying Of Thirst?
Do you sometimes finger a fret on your guitar and hear a buzzing sound or even no sound? If you answered yes then your guitar may be seriously, even irreversibly dehydrated and possibly headed for the graveyard.
This is the story of how I became a true guitar hero by saving the life of my severely dehydrated guitar.
My Sad Story
Last Winter I remember grabbing my guitar for a typical daily goof around ...ah... I mean, serious practice session and found that my B string made an annoying buzzing sound from frets 4 - 9. I wondered why it was suddenly doing this when just a few days before it was fine. I decided to ignore the problem and hope that it would disappear on its own.
In just a few more days the B string stopped buzzing but frets 4-9 now wouldn't play anything. To make matters worse the G string had now started to buzz.
Initially I thought that some of my frets were coming loose and needed to be repaired. Then an awful thought hit me. Had my guitar become warped because of the extremely low humidity produced by the typical winter weather? Was my precious guitar now ruined?
I also wondered that if my guitar really was dehydrated, was it possible to re-hydrate it and would this reverse the damage? Fortunately, in my case, the answer was yes. My guitar had not yet reached the point of no return. It was indeed possible to restore the sound that I had grown to love. The following describes are the steps I took:
Measuring The Humidity Of My Home
With a little research I learned that most acoustic guitars need an environment that has a relative humidity level of 45% to 55%. An inexpensive, non-digital, device called a hygrometer was purchased at my local hardware store for under $10 dollars (USD).
It was then mounted in the room where I usually kept my guitar. For reasonable accuracy, I selected a wall that did not have an exposure to the outside cold. I also avoided wall locations that were too near the common humid air blasts of the bathroom and kitchen.
After mounting the hygrometer and letting it acclimate for 24 hours, I discovered that my guitar had been constantly exposed, un-cased, to a relative humidity of only 24%. Now that I had confirmed that my guitar was indeed dried out, it was time to find a way to return the lost moisture.
How I Re-Humidified My Guitar
I remembered seeing a humidifier that was designed specifically for a guitar. It had a ½" diameter, foot long, green rubber tube with about 100 small holes poked along its length. Inside the tube was a yellow sponge material. Both ends of the tube contained black plastic plugs with one end attached to a string. The other end of the string was attached to a black plastic disc approximately the size of the guitar sound hole.
The idea was to cover the sound hole with the disc then dangle the water soaked tube inside the body of the guitar. As the moisture inside the tube evaporates it would re-hydrate the wood causing it to return to its previously un-warped shape. The plastic disc was designed to prevent the evaporating moisture from escaping the inside of the body of the guitar.
So That's The Theory Anyway But How Did It Work in Reality?
In about 24 hours, a simple visual inspection of my guitar revealed that the partial re-hydrating of my guitar caused the wood to begin to move back to its pre-warped state. The bridge, the device holds the ends of the guitar strings near the sound hole, had rotated in such a way that it raised the guitar strings slightly higher off the frets and therefore began to eliminate the buzzing or dead sounds at certain frets.
After 2 days I noticed that the sound of the B and G strings had continued to improve. After a total of 4 days of checking and remoistening the humidifier's sponge, it had improved even more but, the buzz still had not completely gone away. At this point I wondered if the tube-in-the-body method was too slow and didn't allow the entire guitar to properly re-hydrate.
Bringing Out The Big Guns: Satisfying The Need For More Moisture
I decided to use a standard table top room humidifier to increase the relative humidity in the entire living room. I bought a Sunbeam Ultrasonic Model 705 at a local Pharmacy. Its capacity was about 5 quarts of distilled water which turned out to be just about the amount of cool, distilled water vapor that it could dissipate in 24 hours.
It took about 4 days to increase the room's relative humidity from 24% to 43%. During this time I propped my guitar on a stand outside of its case in the same room. I had also removed the humidifier that was inside the guitar. At the end of these 4 days the buzzing and dead fret sounds had completely gone away. What a relief, my guitar hadn't been dead after all - just very sick.
The bottom line for Guitar Humidity Control
1. Don't expose your guitar to extremely dry environments for extended periods. This includes the trunk of your car during extreme cold or extreme hot weather. While a hard shell case or a gig bag can offer some protection they cannot prevent damage in extreme conditions.
2. If your guitar is primarily stored and used in one room of your home then humidify the entire room in the driest seasons. Monitor the room's humidity using an inexpensive hygrometer available at most hardware stores. Target 45% to 55% relative humidity.
3. If you cannot control the relative humidity of your home then make sure to keep your guitar in its case a much as possible. Use an in-guitar or in-guitar-case type of humidifier.
Think prevention. Don't wait until your guitar is in trouble before you start to worry about humidity control. It is possible to dry out a guitar to the point where it cannot be fixed. Remember, it's never fun to attend a guitar funeral.
About The Author: John Mackinnon started taking guitar lessons over 40 years ago and still enjoys the learning process. His website http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com is dedicated to providing guitar player reviews of DVD based and online guitar lesson programs. He also offers guitar related articles, guitar resource links, a free newsletter.
This is the story of how I became a true guitar hero by saving the life of my severely dehydrated guitar.
My Sad Story
Last Winter I remember grabbing my guitar for a typical daily goof around ...ah... I mean, serious practice session and found that my B string made an annoying buzzing sound from frets 4 - 9. I wondered why it was suddenly doing this when just a few days before it was fine. I decided to ignore the problem and hope that it would disappear on its own.
In just a few more days the B string stopped buzzing but frets 4-9 now wouldn't play anything. To make matters worse the G string had now started to buzz.
Initially I thought that some of my frets were coming loose and needed to be repaired. Then an awful thought hit me. Had my guitar become warped because of the extremely low humidity produced by the typical winter weather? Was my precious guitar now ruined?
I also wondered that if my guitar really was dehydrated, was it possible to re-hydrate it and would this reverse the damage? Fortunately, in my case, the answer was yes. My guitar had not yet reached the point of no return. It was indeed possible to restore the sound that I had grown to love. The following describes are the steps I took:
Measuring The Humidity Of My Home
With a little research I learned that most acoustic guitars need an environment that has a relative humidity level of 45% to 55%. An inexpensive, non-digital, device called a hygrometer was purchased at my local hardware store for under $10 dollars (USD).
It was then mounted in the room where I usually kept my guitar. For reasonable accuracy, I selected a wall that did not have an exposure to the outside cold. I also avoided wall locations that were too near the common humid air blasts of the bathroom and kitchen.
After mounting the hygrometer and letting it acclimate for 24 hours, I discovered that my guitar had been constantly exposed, un-cased, to a relative humidity of only 24%. Now that I had confirmed that my guitar was indeed dried out, it was time to find a way to return the lost moisture.
How I Re-Humidified My Guitar
I remembered seeing a humidifier that was designed specifically for a guitar. It had a ½" diameter, foot long, green rubber tube with about 100 small holes poked along its length. Inside the tube was a yellow sponge material. Both ends of the tube contained black plastic plugs with one end attached to a string. The other end of the string was attached to a black plastic disc approximately the size of the guitar sound hole.
The idea was to cover the sound hole with the disc then dangle the water soaked tube inside the body of the guitar. As the moisture inside the tube evaporates it would re-hydrate the wood causing it to return to its previously un-warped shape. The plastic disc was designed to prevent the evaporating moisture from escaping the inside of the body of the guitar.
So That's The Theory Anyway But How Did It Work in Reality?
In about 24 hours, a simple visual inspection of my guitar revealed that the partial re-hydrating of my guitar caused the wood to begin to move back to its pre-warped state. The bridge, the device holds the ends of the guitar strings near the sound hole, had rotated in such a way that it raised the guitar strings slightly higher off the frets and therefore began to eliminate the buzzing or dead sounds at certain frets.
After 2 days I noticed that the sound of the B and G strings had continued to improve. After a total of 4 days of checking and remoistening the humidifier's sponge, it had improved even more but, the buzz still had not completely gone away. At this point I wondered if the tube-in-the-body method was too slow and didn't allow the entire guitar to properly re-hydrate.
Bringing Out The Big Guns: Satisfying The Need For More Moisture
I decided to use a standard table top room humidifier to increase the relative humidity in the entire living room. I bought a Sunbeam Ultrasonic Model 705 at a local Pharmacy. Its capacity was about 5 quarts of distilled water which turned out to be just about the amount of cool, distilled water vapor that it could dissipate in 24 hours.
It took about 4 days to increase the room's relative humidity from 24% to 43%. During this time I propped my guitar on a stand outside of its case in the same room. I had also removed the humidifier that was inside the guitar. At the end of these 4 days the buzzing and dead fret sounds had completely gone away. What a relief, my guitar hadn't been dead after all - just very sick.
The bottom line for Guitar Humidity Control
1. Don't expose your guitar to extremely dry environments for extended periods. This includes the trunk of your car during extreme cold or extreme hot weather. While a hard shell case or a gig bag can offer some protection they cannot prevent damage in extreme conditions.
2. If your guitar is primarily stored and used in one room of your home then humidify the entire room in the driest seasons. Monitor the room's humidity using an inexpensive hygrometer available at most hardware stores. Target 45% to 55% relative humidity.
3. If you cannot control the relative humidity of your home then make sure to keep your guitar in its case a much as possible. Use an in-guitar or in-guitar-case type of humidifier.
Think prevention. Don't wait until your guitar is in trouble before you start to worry about humidity control. It is possible to dry out a guitar to the point where it cannot be fixed. Remember, it's never fun to attend a guitar funeral.
About The Author: John Mackinnon started taking guitar lessons over 40 years ago and still enjoys the learning process. His website http://www.CompareGuitarLessons.com is dedicated to providing guitar player reviews of DVD based and online guitar lesson programs. He also offers guitar related articles, guitar resource links, a free newsletter.
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