If you have just picked up a guitar, or have had one for a while but have just not figured out how it works yet, you are in the right place. This series will take you through everything you need to know to get started playing the best instrument on the planet. It’s a new language and the guitar can be difficult to play at times but keep at it and work through the basic ideas in this series and you will have a good base of understanding to move on to making music.

The Parts of the Guitar

Let’s get this out of the way so we’re all taking about the same thing. The diagram below shows all the parts of the guitar as follows:

1. Neck – The long solid piece of wood below the strings
2. Fretboard – The thin piece of wood on top of the neck. This is where your left hand fingers make contact
3. Nut – The strings pass through this thin part before they run to the tuning pegs.
4. Frets – The metal object on the fretboard.
5. Tuning Pegs (Tuners) – These are used to turn the tuning pegs making each string sound higher or lower.
6. Bridge (not shown) – This is where the strings are held up near where your strumming hand is.
7. Sound Hole (note shown) – The big hole on an acoustic guitar.
8. Volume / Tone Controls (not shown) – The controls on an electric guitar.
9. Pickups – wire w
10. Pickup Selector (not shown)
11. Pick Guard (not shown)

***About diagrams: Usually guitar diagrams are show as the guitar is on your lap and you are looking down at it. The thickest string is on the bottom and the thinnest string is on the top of the diagram. If the diagram is showing the guitar standing on end it is as if your guitar is hanging on the wall and the leftmost string is the thickest (and lowest sounding) and the string on the far right is the thinnest (and highest sounding) string.

What you’ll need

Here’s a small but critical list of things you will need to learn guitar properly:

1. A guitar – You will need to practice everyday, so borrowing a guitar or having access to a guitar once a week will not give you enough time practicing to develop any kind ability on the guitar. If you don’t own a guitar there are stores that rent guitars for a small monthly charge.
2. A metronome – Playing in time can only be learned by practicing everything with a metronome. This is must. As an alternative there is an online metronomes available here.
3. A Tuner – Until your ear develops you will need to check your tuning with a tuner.
4. A binder – This will contain all you learn about guitar. Often it’s hard to practice all the things you will learn about. So have a binder and you can get to the material at the right time

Notes and the guitar.

The guitar is quite different than the piano when it comes to choosing which notes to play. On the piano as you go further to the left the notes sound lower and as you go further right the notes sound higher. The guitar is just a bit different. If you want to play higher on a guitar you can either head right or you can play down and if you want to play lower you head left or down. Don’t worry about that too much at this point, it will become clear as you work on knowing your notes. The important thing to know is there is more than one place to play many of the notes on the guitar but there is only 1 place to play each note on the piano.

Even if that makes no sense at all at this point, keep moving on it will eventually become clear. Where we start when learning notes on the guitar is with the open strings. An open string is when a string is played without touching the string with your left hand. It is just ringing between the nut and the bridge. As you can see from the diagram below the lowest string is an E. This string is the furtherest left in the diagram and closest to you as you hold guitar. So the strings as you are holding your guitar from closest to your eyes to furthest from your eyes are E – A – D – G – B – E. Notice that the 1st string and the 6th string are the same note name. A good way to remember this is to use an acronym. I like Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie. Feel free to come up with your own. This is the first thing you have to commit to memory and we will build on this understanding to learn the rest of the guitar.