Learn How to Play Guitar Through Youtube

There's been much time and money spent on learning to play the guitar. It's not as easy as it sounds "playing guitar", there are a bunch of other factors to it than just learning the strings. You have to find the right teacher, make sure that teacher is not abusing on price and learning time, time spent practicing, a guitar with the right scale and ease of playability. One teacher I had, not such a good experience. He basically lectured me for 15 minutes and the other 15 is his eating $%#& time. The only reason why I lasted 2 months was because he was actually a great teacher but it's just the little things that did not make it worth my time and money.

Being self taught at home was the best decision I've ever made in my guitar career. You see, in our day and age we have a little commodity called the Internet and it's meant to be used to the maximum. Information is ran through the Internet by the billions. The best part about it is, we can select an article to learn from which suits our educational needs the best.  Youtube has been a place where millions want to be recognized and I believe that guitarists are at the top of that list. You can choose from hundreds of amateur instructors on youtube, rating the better ones to help another aspiring musician as yourself take advantage of these free high quality lessons.

I've listed some locations from youtube where you can learn from scratch "how to play the guitar". We start off with some chord learning, then to the strumming, some fingerpicking, and then we learn some songs to expand our playing techniques. I place the steps from easiest to hardest, I do not recommend skipping the steps if you've never picked up the guitar before. If you know a thing-or-two about playing than you should try to learn the songs as a challenge. The songs are also numerated from easy to hard. You should have plenty to go with here, so, save my blog page to be coming back and keep trying the steps over and over. Each step should take you at least a week to practice, but, the more you practice a step, the less time you'll have to spend learning a song.

The way you hold your guitar from the beginning is mandatory to master before you start to play:

How to hold my guitar

Let's make sure your guitar is well tuned before you begin playing:

Standard Guitar Tuner

Lesson 1:  Let's start off by learning some chords

1.  Individual Chords
2. United Chords
3. Some more chords
4. Blues Chords

Doing step 1 on your own and without any lectures on strumming or fingerpicking is vital. Once you learn the right way, you learn from your errors and learn a better way to play. Learn as many chords as possible so you will go through less trouble in the future when you want to learn a new song. Make transitions with strumming at first, before you learn to fingerpick and burn in those finger blisters. For some newbies, your fingertips will hurt in the beginning and will peel a couple of times before settling in. Try to practice these notes and chords as much as possible before moving to step 2.

Lesson 2:  Strumming and Fingerpicking

These steps can be done with both pick and fingers.

1.  Strumming with pick
2. Strumming with chuck

1. Basic fingerpicking
2. Fingerpicking
3. Inside out fingerpicking
4. Folk style fingerpicking
5. Jazz Blues progression fingerpicking

There are many other strumming fingerpicking styles you can learn on youtube. It's easy to find them once you look through these videos. Using the chords you just learned in step one with these strumming and fingerpicking styles can improve your skills dramatically.

These techniques can be used on electric guitars as well. Some of these songs will sound better on electric but many will sound better on acoustic. Try a little of everything, learning different kinds of songs will expand your ability on the guitar.

1. Bob Marley- No woman no cry
2. Jack Johnson- Good People
3. Incubus- Drive
4. Playing the Blues
5. Some more Blues
6. Pink Floyd- Wish you were here
7. Led Zeplin- Stairway to Heaven
8. Metallica- Nothing else matters
9. Kansas- Dust in the Wind
10. Red Hot Chilli Peppers- Snow

These are just a small portion of the thousands of videos they have on Youtube for you to learn. As you can tell, I prefer to learn rock songs more than anything else. Just place "How to" then your song of interest on the youtube search bar. If this is not your style of learning than an online teacher or a real teacher may be more suitable for you. The advantage of an online teacher is that you can save the video sessions to return to practice at your leisure and they're not that expensive. Hope this got you started well on the guitar.

To be or Not to be a Solid Wood Guitar

Much speculation has risen when deciding on going laminate or solid wood for a guitar (due to the price of course). Everyone will tell you that you must go solid to reach the full potential of an acoustic guitar. All about tone and power and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those as well, telling you that a solid wood guitar will always be superior to any other. I'm a guitar Lover, something about them that I always stop and check one out if one happens to cross my path. Inspecting and playing for the right to judge it's construction, playability, and sound.

My first guitar was a foreign piece from Nicaragua, for me, it was the nicest sounding guitar I've ever played (and first one at that). Guitar Center was the go-to-place for me after my first, thinking in my mind, "yeah, i'm part of the guitar click now". Comparing her to many other beauties in the store and receiving feedback from the store clerks was fun for me. Until, they hit me with the "this guitar is made out of plywood". I had to sit down and take a breath as this came as a shock to me. Couldn't believe my ears, but true, my first guitar was a cheap plywood piece. After that, it worked as a placebo effect, other guitars starting sounding better than mines (in the same day) after the news.

My interest in wooden guitars grew when I made a trip to a Luthier shop in Nicaragua. Watching the Craftmans make these impeccable looking things from basically a chisel, a drill, and a table saw. Nothing to do with what I've seen about Gibson guitars on Discovery channel. When I mean Handmade, it cant get any more crafty than this unless you scrape the wood with your fingernails. I had to make a video on how they make these guitars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwYptY2azcI
I've had these people make dozens of guitars for me to sell online and around my area. For the price and the quality of wood, you couldn't beat 'em. Some eBay customers had bad intentions though and would take advantage of my return policy. For me to find out that these people were luthiers and only purchased them to see their competition. It did discourage me a bit since the limited guitars I had were being returned with damages from these A%$*#&@$.

Anyways, back to the subject at hand. With all of these Solid made instruments in my possession I never dared touch a plywood back and sides guitar. When I started to take the prices of solid wood guitars against nonsolids under consideration, that's when I started noticing that some nonsolids are actually not that bad at all. You will have many people say that the top of the guitar is what really matters, even my luthier friends will say that. But, for us few perfectionists that have that keen hearing ability, you will notice a difference in the type of back and sides you use. Even though with that being said, plywood is not all that bad if you have a solid top on the guitar.

I played a $1200 Taylor the other day and it didn't sound that bad (these are the cheaper ones). It had a low-mid grade top (one I can get on ebay for probably $6) and a laminated rosewood back and sides. The construction was impeccable, should be a huge factor in whay it sounded so nice. A while back, I remember playing a $150 Valencia guitar with a solid cedar top. The thing was not bad at all, even for a mediocre player as myself. With some better strings the guitar would've been ready for action. Not that I'm going to switch or anything from a solid wood guitar to a laminated one but you can find some real nice and cheap laminates out there.

Now, in my opinion, I love to see the wood age and I love to smell the wood of the guitar as well. When I receive the Mahogany and Spanish Cedar guitars, you'll see my nose stuck in that soundhole. With time you will have a nicer sounding guitar on a solid body unlike the laminate. If you are looking though for something to just have fun with, I wouldn't worry too much about it being solid wood or not. If you want to compare prices, I've played $400 laminated guitars that sound better than a $4000 solid body guitar. It depends on the builder as well, I'm not going to call anyone out.