Guitar Guide for Beginners

Whether you want to shred like Jimi Hendrix or strum like Joan Baez, the path of a thousand guitar licks begins with a single step. Learning how to play guitar is a fun and immersive hobby, and it takes very little to pick up a guitar and start figuring it out. As with any pursuit, the key is to keep practicing and find a good guitar teacher — in the age of the Internet, you can learn some tabs and chords online, but having a live teacher to provide guidance and feedback makes a lot of difference. As long as you have the ambition to stick with it, you’ll find yourself slowly getting better and better at handling your guitar. It’s just like learning a new language, except you’re speaking in terms of chord progressions! In order to get the most out of your guitar experience, it helps to know the basics. Let’s take a look at the makeup of a guitar model, how it’s played, and some bits of terminology to get you comfortable with the lingo.

How It’s Made

The guitar is a fantastic example of mechanical engineering applied to a musical instrument. It consists primarily of a neck (long “stem” of the guitar) and a body (the main part of the guitar), which is hooked up to a number of metal strings and coils that work in tandem to produce sounds.

Two Basic Guitar Types

When you start playing guitar, you’ll likely have one of two models in your hand: acoustic (round, hollow, and made out of wood) or electric (flatter, slightly heavier, and made out of hard plastic, with two outward horn shapes on either side of the upper body). You may hear recommendations to start on an acoustic guitar, but if you want to pursue playing electric guitar, it’s good to start plugged in!

Tuning Keys

Understanding how guitars produce sound starts with the length of the strings. You’ll notice the spot at the very end of the guitar’s neck where all the tuning keys and strings are gathered; this is the headstock, and it’s kind of like the brain of the guitar. In order to tune a guitar, you turn the knobs (which are called tuner keys). As you turn a tuner key, you wind more of the string around it, tightening the whole string, which raises the pitch that string produces. When you turn the tuner key in the opposite direction, you unwind some of its string, loosening the string as a whole, and therefore dropping its pitch. By turning these tuner keys, you can effectively get a whole range of notes out of five simple strings.

Frets

Speaking of the strings, as you look at the neck, you’ll also notice the raised lines that run horizontally across the neck here and there (underneath the strings). Those are the frets. When your finger presses down on a string in the space between two frets – called the fretboards – it effectively shortens the length of the string, which creates a higher pitch when the string is plucked. Instead of turning the tuning key every time you want a string to change sounds (which would take forever), you can simply hold your finger on the appropriate fretboard to change the note of that string for a moment. This is how guitarists play smooth melodies and tunes; by knowing which strings to hold down, in which places on the neck. The string’s pitch will change by one semitone for each fret as you move towards the bridge (the bridge is the silver strip of metal that holds the strings towards the bottom of the guitar). The strings run left to right as (Lower) E, A, D, G, B, and E.

Body

When it comes to the body of the guitar, you’re going to see a pickguard on both acoustic and electric models – a strip of plastic located near the hole in the guitar’s body, which is meant to protect the body against your guitar pick’s strums. If you’re playing an electric guitar, you’ll also find a number of mechanics in the body, including the pickups (which convert the string’s vibrations into an electric signal), the pickups selector switch (which allows you to shift between the common 2-3 pickups), and the volume and tone controls for when the guitar is plugged into an amp.

How It’s Played

When you hold your guitar, your non-dominant hand will be the one moving up and down the guitar neck; while your dominant hand will be doing the strumming (or picking) of the strings across the body. With your non-dominant hand (holding the guitar neck), you’ll use all of your fingers, minus the thumb (unless you’re using it to mute the lower E string). Position your hand curved slightly around the guitar neck, as if you’ve just opened a fist. In order to play, your fingertips will be pressing down on one or more strings over the fretboards, while your other (dominant) hand strums. Your dominant hand will lay relaxed across the front of the guitar’s body. You’ll use this hand to strum a group of strings (often holding a small plastic tab called a pick), or pluck one or more individual strings. For many beginners, it helps to start with a basic exercise, like plucking one string at a time while changing frets with your fingers; switching from open, to the first fret, to the second fret, and so on. (Note: “open” refers to playing a string without pressing on any of the frets.) This should help you get used to the feel of sliding your hand up and down the neck of the guitar. A couple more tips: Keep your fingernails trimmed short – all the better for pressing down on the strings unhindered – and prepare to have tender fingertips for a little while, until your fingers build up calluses. rnIt’s okay to start off playing guitar seated, but don’t be shy about standing up to get a better feel for how you hold the guitar when it’s hanging.

Know the Lingo

Here are a few more guitar-centric terms you should know as you learn how to play: Humbucker: A type of pickup in electric guitars, made out of two wound coils, which allows for warmer tones than a single-coil pickup.rnWhammy bar: A small bar that you may find sticking out from the bridge on an electric guitar; by pushing down on this bar after striking a chord, you can give the chord a wobbly “echo” effect. Kill switch: A switch that immediately cuts the power to all the electric guitar’s pickups. Capo: An adjustable plastic clip that clamps onto the fretboard to allow the guitar player access to a different key. Where you place the capo on the frets determines what key you’re in! Finger vibrato: A technique when you press a string down against the fretboard, strike the chord, then bend the string back and forth to create a warbling, bending sound. Hammer-on and pull-off: These are two opposite techniques. The hammer-on involves dropping a finger onto the fretboard to create the note. The pull-off is performed by pulling the string away from the fretboard for extra vibration.

Start at the Beginning

You won’t be Jimmy Page the minute you pick up a guitar, but if you familiarize yourself with the makeup of the instrument and the techniques, you’ll soon realize that practice really does make perfect. Once you learn how to speak the language of the guitar, you just might find that it’s the ideal instrument for your quick and spunky fingers. What was the most important piece of advice you received when you first started playing guitar? Tell us in the comments.