Important Guitar Tips For Beginners - How To Do It Right From The Get-Go

By Remy Moz Remy Moz
Level: Platinum

Remy Moz is the Editor-in-Chief of ReviewMOZ.org. At ReviewMOZ.org readers can "Learn, Compare and Save" by reading professionally written product reviews, comparisons, and customer feedback ...

Learning the guitar seemed easy enough to me then because almost everyone I knew at that time seemed to know a few chords and so I thought, "How hard could it be, right?" Boy, was I ever wrong. If you aren't determined enough, you could just easily ditch the whole thing. But if someone told you what you should expect, wouldn't you be more prepared and more ready to see yourself through all the challenges? Learn and Master Guitar by Steve Krenz does just that and so does this article.

The first challenge you'll ever run into when learning the guitar is dealing with the pain of training your fingers to be nimble and strong enough to hold the chords. Learning how to position your fingers might look easy but it can be a pain. However, you can make the pain all worth it if you know the right technique from the get-go and if you learn a few exercises to warm-up and strengthen your fingers. Buy Learn and Master Guitar if you want to go and learn techniques from the pros as early as now. The more you've trained yourself to do it right the first few tries, the easier it will be for you as you progress.

So how do you position your hands? First, you need to focus on training your left hand before you move on to the next. Learning one at a time should make it easier. Your left hand should be positioned in a way that no sound will be muffled when you pluck or strum with your right and in order to do that you need to start with the proper positioning of your thumb.

The thumb is often ignored by most first-timers because when you're on your first learning session, you really just want to be able to play the song you've chosen, paying little mind about technique. I understand. I've been there. And like I said, you do not want to build a habit that'll impede your playing later on and that will be hard to break. In any case, your thumb should be planted firmly against the back of the neck of the guitar and should be at least halfway down, with the left thumb pad the only part touching the guitar. Don't bend your thumb or curl it. You also want to make sure you keep your wrist bent in and never out or backwards. For diagrams on this and for other proper hand and finger positioning, go to Learn and Master Guitar Reviews. You may also compare this program with other learn guitar programs by checking out general review sites like ReviewMOZ.org.

Before you purchase any online product, go to ReviewMOZ.org and take a look at the Product Reviews, comparisons and user ratings of a wide variety of consumer products and services. Check out Learn & Master Guitar and Learn & Master Blues Guitar by Steve Krenz, Jamorama Guitar, Guitar Maintenance by Greg Voros, Guitar Super Stars and other music learning courseware at ReviewMOZ.org.

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Article Submitted On: April 07, 2011

How To Play Piano - Learn to Play Music With Lessons For Beginners - 2

I guess every body at some time in their life thinks about how cool it would be to play the piano. Well it is cool and you can, this article is the second of seven, they will help and give you to a firm grounding to go on and teach yourself how to play. If you remember your school days when you had music or piano lessons the one thing you probably recall, my guess is that FACE represents the names of the notes in the spaces of a line of music; and Every Good Boy Deserves Favour represents the notes on the five lines of the piece of music. This is so, if you read from the bottom upwards.

But it does not stop there; the notes carry on down to the bass lines, which also have five lines and four spaces. The bass line and the treble lines are separated by one imaginary line. There used to be a line many eons ago but nowadays it is omitted, but the note that this missing line represented still exists it is C, usually called middle C; therefore the notes either side of this imaginary line also still exist and they are B, and D,

This leaves us with the bass lines G, B, D, F, A, and our bass leger line spaces A, C, E, G, Now these sets of notes also have a memory aid, probably not known as well as the others, they are for the spaces of the bass "All Cows Eat Grass" for A, C, E, G, and for the lines of the bass, "Grizzly Bears Don't Fear Anything" first letters of which represent G, B, D, F, A, Like the treble lines these are read from the bottom upwards.

You can now see that if you start at the bottom of the base lines from G, alphabetically obviously G, to G, to G, and onwards you can read right to the top of the treble lines to F, Naturally as you will have seen with more complicated music scores you can go higher and lower with the use of leger lines, these are a little line added to the note, through it, above or below it.

With that I should tell you in case you are a complete beginner that the left hand will play Bass and the right hand will play treble, which should be obvious as soon as you sit down at the piano, this is also why it is important to have a reference point " middle C," Left of middle C, left hand, Right of middle C, right hand although there will be times when you cross over. This note is usually slightly left of centre of your keyboard.

To play the piano with both hands is quite an achievement for the beginner but not that difficult, play and practice slowly, although I say practice slowly you try to keep your rhythm and beat, for instance if you are playing a song and you know the words, if you sing them slowly and deliberately, you can play along and still keep your rhythm, it also helps if you tap your right foot to help with your timing.

I would like to mention here again for the beginners sake, when you take piano lessons you will need to know what numbers are used for your fingers, simple enough, start with the thumb as One the index finger as two the middle finger as three, the ring finger as four and the little finger is five, that is the same for both hands. Ok, techno wise you should be in good order to start your lessons.

Next question, should you go online or offline for your lessons, what do you go for? My own view is, that it would be great to have a local tutor that you could call on day or night whenever you had a problem or a thought that you needed to get clear in your head. But being practical that's not going to happen, unless you live with your tutor. Which usually leaves you pondering until your next booked lesson? Whereas with online lessons you will have a well programmed course, videos, e books and help anytime from wherever you are at home or on holiday, anywhere where there is a computer. So in my opinion, I recommend buying a course of lessons online, another point is that you also learn at your own pace, no pressure, no set time limit, you choose your own pace. Make it fun.

My name is Ken Aindow I am, like you, a budding keyboard player, and singer LoL. If you would like to see more and progress in a similar style, read my other articles to and learn how to Teach Yourself Piano, you will find an amazingly easy, quick and extremely enjoyable method. In fact it's notably called, The Ingenious New Way to Learn Piano and Keyboard. I have it and I recommend it highly. See you in my next article.

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Learning Guitar Chords for Beginners

A very important skill you must develop when learning guitar is mastering all your chords. There are hundreds of different chords and it can be overwhelming for beginners. My suggestion is to learn one or maybe two chords at a time in the beginning. For example you could start with a common chord like C major or G major then add a new chord each week. Do this routine until you have all the major, minor, and 7th chords. This will take most people some time to get down.

Take some time to learn about keys which are very important to know about also. A key is three chords played together that have good harmony. Take the key of G for instance, it includes the G major chord (AKA the root chord), then the fourth chord from G which is C major and finally the fifth chord from G which is the D major chord. The way to figure out what chords go in the key is to count from that root chord to the fourth and fifth chord. For our example of G major you start with G is 1st, A is 2nd, B is 3rd, C is 4th, D is 5th, E is 6th, and F is 7th. So as you can see the root G, the fourth is C and the fifth is D. To give you some comparisons look at the key of D. The D is the root chord and if you count to four you'll end on G. If you count from D to the fifth chord it will be A. So the key of D is D major, G major and the A major.

When learning chords on the guitar you should get familiar with the terms for strumming and rhythm patterns such as up stroke, down stroke, finger picking, etc. The person who plays the chords in a band is called the rhythm player, however when there is no lead parts both the rhythm and the lead players play rhythm. Then when a lead part comes up in a song the rhythm player keeps playing the chord progression while the lead guitar player plays the solo.

Another important skill to learn is how to count beats and keep time. This is a critical part of learning to play rhythm. If you can not count beats and keep time you will never be a good guitar player. Don't be discouraged because it took me a while to get my rhythm but I never gave up, and now I am pretty good at it. Most of the time the quarter notes are on the down strokes and the eighth notes are on the up stroke. To get familiar with counting beats study some music theory and it will all become clearer to you. You will learn a whole lot more than counting from learning music theory.

When I browse the internet I look for all type of information on guitars and playing guitars because it is a passion of mine. I run into a ton of information for beginners but there is one resource that I think is the best by far. The best part is you can learn how to play guitar at home without taking lessons at the music store. Just go on over to http://www.learn-guitar-at-home.com/ and give it a try. You'll get six lessons free just to try it.

You can learn guitar with out ever leaving your house and now learning guitar online has never been easier!! Let's get you started right away! Get 6 Guitar Lessons Free when you try it. the site is called http://www.learn-guitar-at-home.com/. Start your guitar journey today!

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Piano Beginners - Learn The Basic Chords On The Piano to American Pie by Don Mclean

A great song for beginners to learn on the Piano is American Pie, by Singer and Songwriter Don Mclean. It was released from the American Pie album in 1971, and became a number one hit in the US for four consecutive weeks in 1972. American Pie is renowned as Don McLean's signature song.

The song was inspired by the death of Buddy Holly, who sadly died in a plane crash in 1959, and the song was written about the memories of the event.

This song shot him to fame, but Don Mclean found this very difficult suddenly being in the public eye and rarely having any privacy, it sadly made him depressed at times, and all linked back to losing his father at the young age of 15, and having a failed message, which is represented in the American Pie Album. A lot of his emotions at the time are linked to songs on the album.

The song is an incredible 8 minutes and 33 seconds long, but cleverly manages to keep you captivated throughout the whole length of time with its catchy melody and gripping lyrics. When Don Mclean talks about the song to people he would describe it as starting off with his memories of the death of Buddy Holly, and then moves on to describe America as how he was seeing it and how he fantasized about how it might become.

He explained that it is perfectly okay for him to talk about being in the gym and seeing this girl dancing with someone else and suddenly have this become this other thing that this verse becomes and moving on just like that. That is his reasons why he never analyzed the lyrics to the song.

The Song is still played regularly on the radio today, even though it was originally released over 20 years ago, Madonna famously covered this song for the Soundtrack of the Austin Powers film the Next Best thing, which once again proved a popular hit with the public, reaching number one in many countries across the world.

The song is in an easy key signature to play which makes it ideal for a beginner learning piano. It is in the key of G Major, and is quite a repetitive song. The main chords in the Song are G Major, E Minor, A Major, C Major, D Major and A Minor. It has a clever arrangement by which the intro is featured later on in the song as part of the end section, so it links in very nicely, and a great song to have in your repertoire as a budding pianist.