Choosing a guitar

Choosing a guitar is a very personal thing and therefore only a small amount of advise can be offered by a third party, however some of the main things to consider when choosing a guitar are.

1. The type of music you want to play
2. The type of guitars you like the look of
3. How much money you want to spend

When you have decided on the style and price of guitar you want to buy, the most important question before buying a guitar is 'do you like the way the guitar feels', and this can only be answered by trying a few guitars.

Left handed guitarists
Lefties have the added consideration, 'do you want to play left handedly'. This might sound like a strange question, but a surprising number of left landed guitarists play right handedly without a problem, and many prefer playing right handedly.

Reading chord and scale maps

The first thing you must learn to do is read chords, scales and notes so that you can practice the lessons.

Chords and scales
Chords are initially written in chord charts. These are simple pictures of the guitar neck with dots which represent the tips of fingers pressing on the string. You should try to place the fingers on the guitar as shown in the chord map and then strum the strings.

Scales are initially shown in the same way, however with scales you should play the notes one at a time. By downloading the free month one multimedia course from the download page (here) you can here a scale being played which will make this clearer to understand.

Learn to read tab in a minute

Like most modern guitar courses the GCH Guitar Academy guitar course uses tablature or tab as the primary way of writing guitar music down.

Tab or tablature is now one of the most recognized methods of writing guitar music and there are many, many books available of guitar music in tab form. You local music or guitar shop will probably have a selection of music books in tablature.

There are also many Web sites with free tab which is provided by the site users. This can be good and/or bad. Most of the tab provided on the internet is free, however much of it is inaccurate, also there are questions of legality as many bands are trying to stop this trend as it is directly effecting the music industry financially.

The first four weeks of lessons

Month e-books (PC/Mac)
download site 1 - download site 2

Month one multimedia course

PC - download site 1 - download site 2

Mac - download site 1 - download site 2

The Left handed versions can be downloaded here

To download
Click the right hand mouse button and select 'save target as'. then you can save the download to your computer.

Download the first four weeks of guitar lessons.
There are e two ways of doing this.

Download Just the e-book
An e-book is an Adobe PDF file which can be opened on your computer using the free application 'Adobe Acrobat reader'. When you have acrobat reader on your computer you can open the PDF e-books and either view them on your computer or print them out so you can read them more easily whilst holding your guitar.

Download the multimedia month one
The multimedia course is a computer application with sound and video. The obvious advantage is that you can hear how the guitar should sound when you play any of the chords or exercises. However if you have a basic guitar knowledge this may not be necessary. The multimedia course also contains the e-books so you can view or print them out as you like.

Chord theory one - the triad