Learning to Play Electric Guitar Fast

It can be difficult learning to play electric guitar, despite it being one of the most popular instruments today. Its sheer flexibility in terms of tone, volume, and sound quality has allowed it to dominate every popular music genre for the past 50 years.

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Learning anything can be difficult at the start, so before you consider learning to play electric guitar, there are some things you should consider:

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Your Fingers Will Hurt!

Beginner acoustic guitarists definitely have it easier than electric guitarists. Electric guitars use steel strings, which are thin and painful to play until the player forms calluses. You can buy strings which are thicker and won't hurt the fingers at much, but not only will that affect the sound of the guitar, but forming calluses will take longer. It's best to just stick at it and accept the fact your fingers will sting!

Get To Know Your Guitar

You'll probably be playing you're electric guitar for a while, so you might as well get to know it inside out. What materials are used? What sounds can you get out of it? Playing with the knobs and switches will give you an idea of how to mix everything to give certain sounds and effects. You can also buy effects boxes to further this, although it's something you should consider getting at a later date.

A Good Guitar Needs A Good Amp

It doesn't matter how good, or how expensive your electric guitar was, when you plug it into a low quality amplifier it'll sound awful. If you have already bought an electric guitar but don't have an amplifier yet, you should really consider getting a good quality one straight away. If however, you have bought an electric guitar and an amplifier, and the amplifier isn't that good, don't stress, you can always get one at a later date (and a backup amplifier is always good to have).

Learning to Play Electric Guitar Fast

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Electric Guitar Chords - Secrets to Playing Rhythm Guitar Revealed

Playing chords on your electric guitar is quite different from an acoustic, especially when using distortion. To get the best sound out of your distorted guitar it is best to substitute standard open electric guitar chords with bar chords, power chords and simple triads. The aim of this article is to discuss the different electric guitar chords that sound really cool with distortion.

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The first electric guitar chords you should use with distortion are bar chords. A bar chord gets it name due to the fact that the first finger will lay across the fret board covering all of the strings. To make a simple bar chord first look at how you would play an open E major chord. Now move that same fingering for an E major chord up the neck one fret and use your index finger to bar all the strings on the first fret. The advantage of using bar chords is that you can easily move this same pattern up and down the neck. Bar chords sound great on an electric guitar because you can easily keep any unwanted strings from ringing and causing feedback.

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Some more electric guitar chords you may find useful are power chords. Power chords are made up of just two notes. Usually the a root note and a fifth. If you are a fan of Metallica then you will love power chords. Almost all of their earlier songs are played using these electric guitar chords. An example of a power chord would be to play the 6th string 5th fret and the 5th string 7th fret together at the same time. These two notes make up an A5 power chord. This same pattern can be moved anywhere on the neck. Try it you'll see what I mean.

Lastly, you can play triads, or three note electric guitar chords. Triads can be made up of the root, third and fifth, however many guitar players like to omit the fifth and use the seventh chord tone because it generally gives a more unique sound. A good example of a band who utilizes a lot of triads in their electric guitar chords is Opeth.

All three of the electric guitar chords above sound great with heavy or light amounts of distortion. Bar chords help stifle unwanted feed back and noise while power chords and triads are simple chords shapes that have a clean crisp presence. The electric guitar can be a completely different monster than the acoustic so take advantage of the electric guitar chords mentioned above to make up your own brutal riffs.

Electric Guitar Chords - Secrets to Playing Rhythm Guitar Revealed

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Easy Electric Guitar Songs For Beginner Guitarists

Playing popular songs on your electric guitar is a great feeling, and very possible, even if you are a beginner guitarist. Your guitar skills are in direct relation to the amount of time you practice, and learning songs is a very effective and motivating way of getting better and advancing as a guitar player. Here are a couple of easy electric guitar songs for beginner to practice:

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Wipeout - The Surfaris

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A really fun and fast paced song from the '60s, this one is a must learn for all beginners. By practicing this song, you'll not only be making great music, but also improving your single string plucking technique, which is a vital element of playing the guitar. To make it really authentic, get together with a friend who plays the drums, or just download the songs drums backing track.

Sweet Home Alabama - Lynyrd Skynnyrd
 
A very popular song, covered by a barrage of artists ever since its 1974 debut. And the best part is that it's a pretty easy song to play on your electric guitar. By learning this song, you'll be practicing mainly lead guitar techniques, including:
hammer-on pull-off chords string bending
Holiday - Green Day
 
Green Day songs are great for beginners, since they are pretty simple. As many songs by the band, Holiday uses lots of power chords, and has several great riffs that sound really good under distortion. You'll be refining the following techniques by learning to play Holiday:

power chords single string plucking plectrum switch technique
 
Godfather Theme - Slash
 
The theme song to the Godfather (originally titled Speak Softly Love), as covered by Slash from the Guns N' Roses,is a great song if you want to practice your lead guitar skills even more. Slash uses a large variety of techniques that sound great on the electric guitar. To get an authentic sound, remember to add a bit of delay (echo) effect to your amplifier, as well as some distortion. By practicing this song, you'll be refining your lead guitar and solo techniques, namely:

hammer-on pull-off vibratos string bending slides
Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynnyrd
 
Free Bird is another easy electric guitar song. The great thing about it is that it not only uses lead guitar techniques, but chords, and arpeggios as well. As you know, an arpeggios is a broken chord, where you play the individual notes of the chord in a given pattern, instead of strumming all strings at once. Learning this song on your electric guitar will be loads of fun, and give you a chance to practice:

chords chord arpeggios single string plucking vibratos slides

Learning the electric guitar by learning popular songs is an effective way to advance your guitar skills. Why? Because practicing songs is fun and motivating, contrasting to learning by practicing individual guitar techniques in their purity. Through learning to play songs, you'll be practicing every guitar technique that got the pros famous, so what are you waiting for? Grab your guitar and find a song to practice.

GUITAR TIP: Leave your guitar out in the open on a stand, instead of storing it in a closet or under the bed. This will make you want to pick it up and practice more often.

Easy Electric Guitar Songs For Beginner Guitarists

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The Early Design of the Electric Guitar

Originally guitars were all acoustic, and the volume achievable by such guitars was quite enough for the environments in which they were played. However, as music developed and the locations in which it performed grew larger, and with the introduction of accompanying instruments, it became necessary to increase the volume and sound of the guitar. Especially with jazz gaining in popularity, the brass instruments would simply drown out the guitar, and so solutions had to be found.

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It was Les Paul, a major innovator in the world of guitars, experimented with attaching microphones to guitars, and this led to some of the earliest electric guitars, although these were generally simply hollow acoustic guitars with tungsten pickups. In 1931 these were being manufactured by the Electro String Instrument Corporation, and the design of an acoustic guitar with a hollow body and a tungsten pickup was devised by Harry Watson, and this model was called the Rickenbacker. This was officially the very first electric guitar, although still a very long way off the ones we see today. Although they were used, and popular, straight away, the first documented record of an early electric guitar being used in a public performance was in Kansas in 1932, when Gage Brewer helped to publicise this new type of guitar in a special Halloween performance.

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The first recording of an electric guitar is often attributed to Eddie Durham, but in fact this is incorrect, and fifteen days earlier George Barnes, a jazz guitarist, recorded Sweetheart Land and It's a Low-Down Dirty Shame in Chicago in 1938. It was Durham, however, who introduced the early electric guitar to Charlie Christian, who became one of the most significant influences for many decades on electric guitars in jazz music.

The electric guitar we know and recognise today usually has a solid body, although not always. The solid body electric guitar is made of wood - often a single piece where possible. The earliest solid body electric guitar was not made of wood however, and was in fact made of cast aluminium, with steel strings. This was officially named the Rickenbacker, but was more commonly referred to as the Frying Pan or Pancake Guitar for obvious reasons. The sound of this guitar was quite aggressive, with a very modern feel to its voice.

In the 1940s Les Paul was still developing ideas for the electric guitar, and in his own time he created the log guitar, which derived its name from the fact that it was constructed from a simple 4x4 wooden post, with a neck attached to one end. The pickups were home made, and there were two halves of the body attached purely for appearance sake. This guitar was patented, and was the first of its kind, although the Gibson Electric Guitar designed later by Les Paul shares no characteristics at all, and it seems to have been a one off.

The next major development in the world of the electric guitar was in the mid 1940s when Richard D Bourgerie, who was employed making electrical equipment during the second World War for the US military at the Howard Radio Company, created an electric guitar pickup and amplifier combination for George Barnes. Barnes in turn showed this new design to Les Paul who requested another be constructed for himself.

Today there seem to be as many different makes and models of electric guitar as there are players, and if you are entering the world of the electric guitar yourself for the first time, you may be slightly taken aback by the sheer range of options, features and designs available. Essentially, however, they all share more or less the same basic features, with a body that is either solid or hollow, usually six steel strings, and perhaps the biggest and most significant choice, the pickup. Depending upon the type of pickup, the guitar may well sound quite different, and this is perhaps the one place to look most carefully.

The Early Design of the Electric Guitar

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Electric Guitar Recording Techniques

A guitar is a type of musical instrument with ancient roots that is used in a wide variety of musical styles. It usually has six strings, but four, seven, eight, ten and twelve string guitars also exist. An electric guitar is the kind of guitar that uses pickups to convert the vibration of its steel cored string into electrical current, which is then amplified.

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There are various ways to record an electric guitar. The traditional method is to connect to a really good amplifier. The latest option is to plug the guitar directly into the computer and use a software plug-in to handle the amp and the speaker modeling.

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When recording an electric guitar, the amp is the important factor as far as the mic is concerned, and thus its position is important. The dynamic mic produces a solid sound with a smooth high end. However its position has just as much bearing on the tone as the mic itself.

One way to capture the sound of a large stack is to set up the stack in a large room, play it loud and put the microphone several feet away so that the combination of all the speakers can be recorded. Using this method, the mic captures the guitar sound as much as the audience would.

One of the microphones can be inverted though that does not produce the best result. Here using a capacitor microphone as the distant one often produces a sense of space, but the ultimate bottom line is that anything that sounds good goes with the guitar.

The biggest problem that many amateur guitarists face is poor tone. In order to solve this problem the recorder should check the amp and guitar combination on microphone level and then should decide where they would be placed. Tone should be adjusted but one thing should be kept in mind. The low end will increase if the microphone is placed close to the source. This is known as proximity effect.

The mic that is used for electric guitar recording is preferably a dynamic microphone because of its capability to endure high volumes. These are the technical things that one should keep in mind. But there are some simple points that will help while recording.

As a first and very basic rule, one should make sure that the guitar is in very good condition, that is, its strings are properly fitted. Tuning must be checked before every take as it is inclined to flow in warm studio.

Equipments containing transformers will tend to cause hum interference on electric guitar especially those of single coil pickups. Computer monitors in particular also cause serious interference problems with guitar pickups, so it is advisable to keep them as far away as possible.

While using different electric guitar types or sounds for recording, two or more overdrive guitar parts should be kept to keep the sounds separate in the mix. For example, using a single coil setting for one part and a humbucker for another.

Electric Guitar Recording Techniques

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Acoustic Electric Vs Semi-Acoustic Guitar

I've seen a lot of confusion about this subject and a lot of people misusing these two terms. So what exactly is a semi-acoustic guitar and what is an acoustic electric? It helps to understand what the difference between an acoustic and an electric guitar is. An acoustic is hollow. The hollow space is called the soundbox and it serves to amplify the vibration of the strings, producing that familiar sound popular in folk and country music. In an electric the signal is generated by the vibration of the strings over a magnetic pickup. The signal is then amplified by the electronic circuitry inside an amplifier.

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Semi-acoustic and acoustic electric guitars both fall somewhere in between acoustic and electric amplification.

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An acoustic electric is essentially an acoustic guitar with some additional electronics added in order to allow it to be plugged into an amplifier. It looks like, play and sounds for the most part just like a regular acoustic guitar. An acoustic electric guitar is a completely functional acoustic guitar that has been equipped with an electric pickup, a microphone or a transducer. In the case of an instrument with nylon strings it is necessary to use a microphone or transducer since a pickup cannot detect the vibration or non metallic materials. The signal is then fed into an amplifier which allows it to be amplified like an electric instrument.

A semi-acoustic guitar has a body more similar to an electric and is often referred to as a hollow body guitar. It is essentially an electric guitar with a body that is fully or partially hollow. Since the body is hollow it can be played unamplified, however a hollow body guitar cannot produce very much volume unplugged and as such is rarely used that way. The reason for the hollow body is that it gives the guitar a tone that cannot be achieved with a solid body electric guitar.

Deciding whether a guitar falls into the semi-acoustic category or the acoustic electric category is fairly easy in practice. If it looks like an acoustic but can be plugged in then it is an acoustic electric. If it looks like an electric guitar but the body is hollow then it's a semi-acoustic guitar.

Acoustic Electric Vs Semi-Acoustic Guitar

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