Posts Tagged ‘Fret’

CA Guitars (Composite Acoustics) has produced the world’s best travel guitar – lightweight, durable, small, great sound. The Cargo seems to weigh nothing; indeed, when I first received it in its packaged box, I wondered whether CA Guitars had forgotten to include the guitar – the box felt empty it was so light. Also, the durability of carbon fiber guitars is just the thing needed for a travel instrument, and, the Cargo is small enough to fit into an overhead compartment on a plane.

OK, so you could take this with you on a backpacking trip and barely notice the extra baggage, but what about the sound? That’s the best part – the Cargo sounds great.

The first thing that I noticed was the amazing bass response. It’s hard to believe that a guitar that’s so small that I hold it the same way I hold a mandolin would produce such a deep, mellow and loud bass. The mid-tones come through just fine, and the high E string has a crystalline, bell-like quality to it. Features include an offset soundhole, ergonomic design, Gotoh 381 tuners, and a gig bag.

A couple of pointers – either cross your left leg over your right and cradle the guitar as you would a mandolin, or use a strap because the Cargo guitar’s body is simply too small to hold it the way you would a regular acoustic guitar. Also, the narrow fret spacing takes a little time to get used to, and you’ll like find yourself overshooting at first, but you’ll get used to it fairly quickly.

Musicians who play the guitar know that it has a musical notation of its own. Unlike the piano that has the regular musical notation such as staffs, notes, and note lines just to name a few. Guitar players tend to use a much more simple type of notation called a tab. When using the acoustic guitar tabs you do not have to deal with the pain of learning to read music. Tabs are used on a lot of stringed instruments.

Tablature is the musical notation for acoustic guitar tabs. The diagram of strings on an acoustic guitar is the tabs. The lines on the guitar represent the strings, with the sixth strings on the bottom and the first string on the top. The fret you must play is numbered, telling you which finger to play with. X is a muffled string and 0 (zero) is an open string.

Just so you will know what a fret is, it is located between the two metal bars on the fingerboard of the guitar. There are dots on the frets for you to use as a visual guide just so you know where you are supposed to be.

You pluck only the string that has the numbers, one after the other, which are all on one line. The numbers that comes one after the other tells you to play one note at a time.

On the other hand if you see that there is a number on each of the lines and they are stacked on top of each other, the tabs is telling you to play the note at the same time.

There are also such things as pull-offs, hammer-ons, bends and slides you will learn this when you begin to read acoustic guitar tabs. Pull-offs are noted by “p”. Hammer-ons are noted by “h”. Bends by “b” and slides by “/” (slash).

Once you get to the point where you are able to somewhat understand the tabs, try finding easy acoustic guitar tabs on the Internet and pick out a very basic song that you like and try to play it. Keep at it until you get the hang of it. Trying to read the tabs want be easy at first, so it going to take some getting use to, but once you get use to it you will see that you can quickly pick up on it now that you know how to read the tabs.

Make sure you listen to the song you are going to play, because even though you know the song, it will help you while you listen to the rhythm.

Learning to play by the acoustic guitar tabs is a lot of fun and rewarding. Before you know it, you will be playing for your friends and family, or you may just want to play it for your own listen pleasure.

All beginner guitarists who want to play rock songs are itching to get started playing chords right away. So let us get some insight into the process of learning beginner guitar chords for rock songs. Naturally you can apply the basic ideas you find in this article to any genre, but the techniques for playing chords are mostly for rock guitarists. The best way to introduce you to guitar chords is to list some easy rock songs and the chords that you need to learn in order to play them. As guitar chords and tabs are easy to find on the internet, I will leave it to you to do a search for the songs you decide to play.

Sunshine Of Your Love by Cream – A C G D F

Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones – A D E B

Pink Houses by John Cougar – G C F D

Wild Thing – A D E

La Bamba – C F G

As Tears Go By – G A C D

Okay, that should be enough to get any beginner guitar player started. If you do not like the idea of playing the songs that I have listed, then just do a web search for easy rock songs. The songs listed above have these chords in common: C D E F G A B. So you have the seven major chords as your basic chords for rock songs. All of these chords can be played at the first position but in the F chord you have no alternative to playing a bar chord. Or do you?

This is the F chord as a bar chord:

e–1—————————-

B–1—————————-

G–2—————————-

D–3—————————-

A–3—————————-

E–1—————————-

You can play the F chord without the bar this way:

e–X—————————-

B–1—————————-

G–2—————————-

D–3—————————-

A–3—————————-

E–X—————————-

Simply place your left hand fingers to make the bar chord, then lift the first finger and place it at the first fret on the second string. The first and sixth strings are not played. If you move this chord up to the third fret you will have a G chord and at the fifth fret, the A chord. Any barre chord can be fingered this way, and some guitarists use these “internal” chords all the time. You use four fingers to play four string chords.

Of course, most guitarists will tell you that you should learn to play the bar chord fingering, and I agree with them. It takes a few weeks to begin to play the bar chords effectively and a few months before you are playing them with no problems, but once that is done, you are set up for a lifetime of guitar playing. The four string chords are just a way of enabling you to play more songs without too much delay.

Another way of moving chords up and down the guitar neck is by the use of power chords. Power chord is the name rock guitarists have given to a two note chord containing the root note of the chord and the note a fifth above the root. Common practice has become to play the root note an octave above, for example to play a power chord instead of E major you would play the notes E and B.

e–0—————————-

B–0—————————-

G–x—————————-

D–2—————————-

A–2—————————-

E–0—————————-

In the above example if you play with a pick you just damp the G string with a left hand finger and strum all the strings. Or you might prefer the effect when you do not play the top E string so that the E B E B ring out on the lower strings.

Knowing how to read guitar notes is the basic need for anyone wanting to play songs on the guitar. It is very frustrating to be gazing at these dots on the page knowing that they are the key to making guitar music. If you have ever looked at the musical notes in a book you have possibly seen two sets of parallel lines with the notes on them. They are called leger lines. The top lines are the treble or high notes, the bottom lines are the home for the bass notes. In guitar music only the top set of lines is used.

If you want to learn how to read guitar notes the three things you will need are a few minutes every day, a diagram showing the notes on the guitar fretboard and a basic music theory primer. The fretboard diagram and the music theory book can be bought at a music store or online. The other alternative is to make use of the many free guitar lesson sites where you can download or bookmark your guitar note pages. The few minutes a day are often very hard to find but it just takes a little effort to step outside your daily routine and see where you can make time to learn the guitar notes.

The simplest way to start making sense of the guitar notes is to learn the names of the notes of the open guitar strings. If you hold the guitar in playing position, the string closest to the top side of the guitar – the thickest of the six strings – is the E. The next string, the fifth is the A string, the fourth is D, the third G, the second is B, and the thinnest string is E again, only one octave higher than the E on the sixth string.

If you look at your guitar fretboard diagram you will be able to see how the notes progress in steps. You will see that some notes have a whole fret between them. Your music theory book will tell you that these spaces hold notes called “sharps” and “flats”, collectively known as “accidentals”. The note at the first fret on the sixth string is F, the next note is not G as you might expect, but F sharp which is written as F#. The note can also be called G flat or Gb, because it is the note below G as well as being the note above F. You will see that there are no accidentals between the notes B and C or E and F.

So you can see the notes progressing in scales along each individual string and also between strings. For instance you can play the notes on the sixth string and instead of going from the G at the third fret to A on the fifth fret, you can go from the G at the third fret to the A played on the open fifth string. As you learn to play the guitar you will hear the difference in sound you can get from playing the same notes at different places on the guitar.

Learning where the guitar notes are on the fretboard will best be done while you are holding the guitar and playing the notes you can see on your fretboard chart. Learning which notes are which on the sheet music is a different kind of learning. If you find the notes of the guitar on the ledger lines, you will see that each note looks different according to its position on the fretboard. The way to begin to learn which note is which is by using the word F A C E to remember the notes in the spaces between the leger lines and the phrase Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit to remember the notes E G B D F which are drawn directly on the lines. If the prospect of learning the guitar notes in this way gives you a feeling of rising panic, remember to take it in only in small steps. It really is not rocket science. Once you have gotten over the feeling of unfamiliarity, the little dots on the page will begin to have meaning.

In Here Comes The Sun by the Beatles, we get to hear George Harrison at his best. This is a classic and one of the best acoustic guitar songs to be learned. If you can play an open D chord, then you should be able to play the biggest part of the song. You will need a capo and put it on the 7th fret.

As learning all songs, you should have a recording of Here Comes The Sun. This will help you out with all the phrasing and the arrangement of the song. It’s important that you don’t skip this part. Don’t cut corners with your acoustic guitar playing. Lots of people do skip this part, but don’t be one of them! Rise above friends. Ok moving on.

Put your capo on the 7th fret and play a D chord. Right away this should remind you of the tune. It’s such a beautiful chords played there. By the way, this is now an A chord because we are playing it way up here. But for ease and lack of confusion we are going to refer to it as D in this lesson.

Can you take your second finger off the first string and hear it open. You will need to be able to do this. This gives you a Dsus 2chord. (Asus2 for the picky people). Now can you put your pinky on the first string, same fret as your third finger? This gives you a Dsus4 chords. You will need to be able to do this one as well.

At first these chords may seem a bit difficult, especially the Dsus2. Keep on them. Make sure your third finger is up and over the first string. You can’t let it touch the first string at all or you won’t get any sound out if it. The main part of the song will call for you to be able to get the D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 all ringing out perfectly.

To finish up this part, practice playing individual strings and getting all the notes to ring. If you can do this, then you will be ready to move on to the song.

Many guitarists are self taught, with no idea how to read actual sheet music. Instead, guitar tablature (tabs) break songs down into which notes are played on which strings. This makes it possible for even players who cannot read traditional sheet music to enjoy playing guitar. This process allows guitarists, many who cannot read music, to share songs with one another and learn them quickly and easily. It’s relatively simple to learn how to read guitar tabs, and this article will teach you how.

Standard notation uses five horizontal lines to indicate what degree of pitch each note takes on. Each note has a shape that indicates how long to hold it. This system developed to suit the needs of vocal singers and some keyboard instruments. Tablature, however has been around as long as plucked stringed instruments. The English musicians in Elizabethan times used it to notate their lute songs. So for centuries, tablature has actually been the preferred method of notation for guitarists worldwide.

Unlike standard notation’s five lines, guitar tablature consists of six horizontal lines, each representing a string of the guitar. This makes learning how to read guitar tabs a primarily visual skill, and eliminates the need to read sheet music. The lowest line of tablature represents the low E, or fattest, string on the guitar. An easy way to think about it is that the lowest line is the lowest pitched string. Another way to imagine this configuration is as if you were looking down at your guitar from the playing position.

The next thing to consider is all of those numbers. Each number represents a fret on the guitar. It’s really very simple. A number 2 written on the lowest line means that you are to play the lowest string on the second fret, or F#. This is easy enough to comprehend, if not a little awkward to get used to.

Often with guitar music, you won’t be playing single note lines, but rather chords and double stops (two notes at once, harmonizing). Learning how to read guitar tabs for chords is slightly different. Chords are written just like they’re played- with the notes stacked on top of one another. Numbers written vertically across the six lines mean to play all of them together as one, usually in a strumming fashion.

Standard notation often falls short when writing for guitar. This is because the guitar has not historically been a major instrument in Western classical music. Major force in popular music, yes, but not as popular as the bowed strings or woodwinds for orchestras. Because of this, standard notation has evolved to suit the needs of the masses rather than specific instruments. Of course, there are symbols that are instrument specific, but since the guitar uses so many different techniques, standard notation often falls flat.

With a little practice, you’ll learn how to read guitar tabs in no time. Once you do, a whole new world of music will open up to you.