Guitar Uni

Before you start strumming away on your new guitar, you’ll probably want to tune it. This can be challenging at first, especially for those with little or no musical training, but like most things that have to do with music, the more you do it the better you get at it.

The first step is to tune the low E-string with a reference pitch. This can come from another guitar, a keyboard, pitch-pipe, etc.

For now, you can just use the low E from my guitar:

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First play the reference pitch and then play the string. Try to identify whether the string is too high or too low, and then tune it lower or higher respectively. Turn the peg clockwise to tune the string lower, and counter-clockwise to tune it higher.

It helps to leave the string ringing while tuning it. This way you know how far to turn the peg.

Tip: If you’re having a hard time telling if it’s higher or lower (which is perfectly normal) try humming the pitches as you play them..

Now that you have one of the strings tuned, you’ll use that as a reference to tune the next string.

Play your recently-tuned E-string at the 5th fret, and then play the open A-string. These should sound the same. If they don’t, then tune the A-string accordingly.

Again, it helps to leave the string ringing while you tune it.

Follow the same procedure for the rest of the strings, except for the second string, where you use the 3rd string on the 4th fret as a reference.

Here’s a chart where you can see where to place your finger on each string when tuning:

That’s it! It can be frustrating at first, but stick with it. Even if your first tuning attempts aren’t entirely successful, you are still training and improving your hearing.

Now we’ll add three more notes to the ones we already learned: G, A and B. G and B are the open 3rd and 2nd strings respectively, and A is on the 3rd string, 2nd fret.

Here’s a simple melody using only these 3 notes. The last note is a whole note, which means it lasts 4 beats.

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And now let’s add the rest of the notes:

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Sweep and economy picking are usually treated as different techniques, but I prefer to group them together. I find sweeping is just an extension of basic economy-picking.

For the uninitiated, economy-picking simply means that you play any consecutive strings in the same direction.

For example, if you play a G on the 6th string followed by a B on the 5th string, you would play both with a sinlgle downstroke. As opposed to alternate picking, where you would play the first with a downstroke and the second with an upstroke:

The tricky part is to keep the rhythm steady while doing this. It’s very easy to make everything sound lopsided if you’re not careful.

The best thing to do, as usual, is to start out very slowly with a metronome and make sure that you’re hitting each note accurately. This is why I recommend to get really good at alternate-picking before moving on to this.

Here’s a simple exercise to get you started. Play this slowly and with a steady rhythm.

As promised in the last lesson of this series, here are some exercises using the root form.

Practice them slowly using alternate picking throughout.

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The first step to learn harmony on the guitar fretboard, is to learn the basic triad voicings. In this lesson, we’ll learn the root postion for the major, minor and diminished triads.

Starting on the C on the 6th string (8th fret), here are the voicings for C, Cm and Cdim:

Now let’s move up one string to play F. The shapes used are still the same.

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