The Guitar
When You think of playing the guitar you think of an instrument that looks hard and takes a long time to understand the basics.The reality is that playing the guitar is somewhat complicated and it does not take long to understand the basics of a guitar. To play the guitar you must first know what each part of the guitar does.
Tuning pegs
Tuning pegs are what tidy the strings to be tightened or loosened in order for you to play in the right pitch.There are 6 tuning pegs per guitar.(The amount of tuning pegs can vary on what type of guitar you have.Which needs to be turned in towards you to make the pitch higher or away from you making it lower in order to fix the sound of the guitar. After you tune the Guitar you can play the guitar.
How to play a guitar
- You first pick up the guitar with one hand, hold the guitar to chest level making sure that the opening of the guitar is showing and your body not covering it, then placing your left hand on the neck of the guitar and not pushing down on any notes to not interfere with the other notes.
- Pluck the string with one finger to make a note which are in a order of E.B.G,D,A,E
- After that pluck each string to see what they sound like and familiarize with the notes and how to play them. One tip that helped me was practicing with a few notes at a time and after that add another note to continue the learning.
- After you learn how to pluck the strings with ease you can add more notes A,B,C,D,E,F,G on different notes like you can play all these notes with only the first string in order to do that you will learn what are frets.
- Learn what note in each string/fret is in order to learn what note to play.
- There are in total around 9-24 frets(depending on what guitar you have) to learn each note in them.
- What you need to do is know how to place them in a sequence that can play all the notes in a music format to make music or songs that you are familiar with.
- You now can play the guitar at a novice level which would be enough to play some simple songs.
Conclusion
After hearing all of these steps this might sound like it will take a great length of time to learn to tell you the truth. It took me a while to understand the guitar and I’m still not perfect today.But you can take some time but with these steps you can learn in a shorter time in order to get good. If you just want to play and not want to learn advanced techniques you can learn in the future if you want to continue or stop at a good point to pass a class or elective.
Oscar Tamayo – Latin School of Chicago – DMSF Class of 2027