Let's start off with a run down of some of the essentials you will need to know to start playing country guitar at http://www.countryguitarlessons.org/playing-your-first-country-song.html.
Hand and Finger Strength
The first thing you want to practice as a beginner is finger strengthening. I learned early on that building up your muscles will be a major factor in determining how long you can play for. I do several exercises every single day to keep my hands and fingers strong and I definitely recommend beginner guitarists to do the same. Spend about 5 minutes pressing down each string on different frets up and down the guitar with each finger. This will help strengthen your hands and fingers.
Learning Country Chords
This is pretty essential – you will want to learn the basic chords. These are essential for guitar playing and can actually get you on your feet playing music for your friends in no time. The easiest country guitar chords that you are going to want to learn first are the D, G, C, A, and E chords.
Some guitar chords are harder than others so I recommend you start with the easiest ones first. You may find some chords easier than others so I would recommend that you try playing all of them and decide which ones are easy for you to learn. When I started, I first learned the E and D chords. I had most trouble with the C chord because of the stretch you have to do (and I have small hands).
Learning Rhythm
Learning to play rhythm is an essential skill you will need for play country guitar. It took me quite awhile to learn proper rhythm but eventually it just clicked. I don’t know how it will be for you. Some players are great with rhythm and pick it up very quick while others are terrible and take awhile to learn. If I can offer any advice, it’s to practice strumming both down and up when you play. The upstroke might feel awkward at first, but eventually you’ll get used to it.
One of the things that makes playing country guitar unique is tuning. Tuning your guitar is essential whatever style you are playing, but there are a few different ways to tune your guitar to play popular country songs. Here is a short review of a few different tunings at http://www.learncountryguitartoday.com/2011/04/popular-country-guitar-tunings/.Learning Scales
These are a little more advanced, but if you are serious about being a great guitar player, you are going to want to start practicing scales. Scales will teach you how and why certain notes are played in certain areas and the patterns that are present on the guitar. It’s these patterns that guitar players build leads out of. So, if you plan on playing lead guitar, you will want to learn scales. I recommend waiting until you’ve mastered a few chords and have your rhythm down before moving on to them.
Standard Tuning
The first country guitar tuning is our old reliable standard tuning. Most country- pop and country-rock tunes are written using this standard tuning. There’s no real explanation needed here since it’s the same tuning you would’ve learned when first starting out.
Drop D Tuning
Drop D, also sometimes called Open D tuning, is a nice easy to play tuning. To get your guitar to an Open D or Drop D tuning you must:
You can see from this example that getting your guitar into Drop D tuning requires you to drop several strings a whole tone.
- Tune your low E string down to a D
- Tune your B string down to an A
- Tune your high E string down to a D
To play in Drop D tuning requires a bit of re-learning some chord shapes but once you have them it’s not difficult. The great part is that you can barre across any where and make a great sounding chord, something you cannot do with standard tuning.
Now that you have different tuning options, it is essential to learn correct strumming technique. Here is a solid review of the importance of strumming on your guitar at http://www.countryguitarlessons.org/learn-country-guitar-fast-with-guitar-tricks.html .Open E Tuning
This is the final popular country guitar tuning. Similar to Drop D, Open E requires the adjustment of several strings. This time your E strings are going to stay the same. Here is what you do have to change to get your guitar from standard tuning to open E.
So go grab your guitar and try one of these two open tunings (E or D). You’ll probably fall in love with the sound right off the bat. Keep your electric tuner handy just in case you’re having a tough time. Also some software and electric tuners have an option for other tunings beside standard. Check and see if your tuner supports this as it makes it easier then retuning by ear.
- Tune up your A string to a B
- Tune up your D string to an E
- Tune your G string up to a G sharp (only a half step you can compare this to the 4th fret of your E string)
As a country guitar player for quite some time now, I still can’t quite understand why most beginners pass up on essential skills such as guitar strumming.
Now there are several different types of strumming patterns out there. You’ve got chicken picking, bluegrass style, finger picking, simple rhythm strumming and more.
What it all comes down to is the simple fact that learning to strum basic rhythm patterns are essential if you plan on being a decent guitar player sometime down the road.
Those that avoid learning rhythm and strumming are doomed to all-time failure.
Learning rhythm and strumming as a beginner should be one of the first lessons you focus on for awhile.
Put down all those chords and song tabs that you’ve been reading and downloading off the internet. They will do you no good if you don’t have a basic understanding of strumming under your belt.
Basic Guitar Strumming Is Essential
Now you may know how I love teaching the fundamentals. I’m not like most guitar instructors out there. I’m a big believer in the 80/20 rule in that if you spend 80% of your time learning how and why things work the way they do, you’ll only have to work hard 20% of the time.
Most people have this backwards. They spend 80% of their time working hard trying to master something and 20% of the time learning how something works and why it’s important.
Learning how to strum the guitar is an essential skill you’ll need to learn if you plan on being a guitar player. You need to be spending 80% of your time doing these boring strumming patterns and finger warm-ups.
Why?
Because when you spend the time developing and learning the fundamentals, everything else becomes easy.
So what are some basic strumming patterns you can try?
Well the first step is being able to hear and listen to the beats of a song.
Once you’ve learned the tempo to a song, you can start strumming to the beat of that song. Most songs have 4 beats per measure so you need to practice listening to the song for those 4 beats in each measure.
You probably already know the beats to the measure. Our brains are pretty good at figuring it out and it’s why music has been so powerful (especially the drum) for thousands of years.
When you’re listening to your favorite tunes and you start nodding your head to the beat of the song, you’re moving to the tempo of the song.
Try to translate that to the guitar. Strum downwards the same time you nod your head to the beat and you’ll soon be playing to the rhythm.
Strumming is one of those skills where once you figure it out it becomes simple. Light bulb moment.Lastly, you'll find that many of your favorite country songs found online can be downloaded and read as guitar tablature. "Tab" is a form of writing for musicians and is specifically used for guitarists. Here is a guide to reading tab at http://www.countryguitarlessons.org/how-to-read-guitar-tablature.html.
Guitar Tablature, also known as Tab in the guitar world, is how musicians and guitar players alike write out their music to songs, leads, exercises and more. Unlike traditional music notation, guitar tab is different because it doesn’t use much of any symbols.
This allows anyone without any musical background the ability to read and write guitar tab without knowing music theory and symbols. It’s easy to learn and is universally recognized around the globe as the standard for reading guitar music.
You have two E strings, a D, G, B, and A. Tab is directly related to these strings so it’s important that you have memorized what each string is. Spend time learning each string because it’s important.
Let’s begin by taking a look at this image below. You’ll notice that it has the number 1-6 instead of the actual note of the string. This is how tabs are read. They don’t use the string names. But it’s still very important to memorize each string for other guitar playing purposes (like down tuning, scales, chords, etc.).
Now this can be quite confusing at first. But if you look carefully, you’ll notice that the fattest string (E) is number 6. The lightest and most high pitch string is the high E also referred to as 1 in tablature. Remember this also as it’s important.
When you take that image of the fret board with the frets and the string numbers to the written form, you’ll get the image below which is a standard tab diagram:
Remember that I told you how it’s important to remember the letters as well? That’s because some tab is written using the letters instead of the numbers like in this example tab I found:
The same rules apply for the strings as with the other tab example. The E on the bottom after the A represents the fat string on your guitar. So by looking at this picture, you would start off playing this tab on the 4th or G string of your guitar. Now let’s talk about what those numbers mean going across.
As you may have guessed, there are 6 lines and each line represents a guitar string. The top being the thinnest or high E and the bottom being the thickest or low E.
On the fret board, you’ll notice the metal pieces sticking up at various locations. These are here for a reason and separated at just the right distance to form the correct notes.
Each section of these frets as they’re called represents the horizontal numbers you saw above on the tab for ‘Silent Night’.
So to play that piece of tab in the example, your first note is shown at 0, also known as open. This means you hold nothing down when you pluck the string.
Then you press down that same string on the second fret and pluck again. Then it’s open again and you pluck it and so on and so forth. The number that you see on the horizontal lines or “strings” is where you hold down that specific string on the fretboard on your guitar.
Pat yourself on the back. You have just learned how to read guitar tab. When you see something like the following example, you’ll now have a general idea of how to play it:
This is the most famous song of Christmas, Jingle Bells. To play this song according to this tab, you start off holding down the 5th or A string on the 5th fret and continue from there.
This Jingle Bells tab is actually a perfect example that you should use to practice. Start off slow and go through the entire string. You’ll occasionally get confused as to which fingers to use and for that I have this answer:
Use whichever finger is most comfortable for you to play that note.
This should be a good amount information to start playing some of your favorite country songs on guitar.But do NOT neglect the pinky. Yes it might be annoying to use at first. But when you get used to using it, you’ll be thanking yourself later. It’s a great finger to use and absolutely necessary for playing anything intermediate or advanced.
Have fun and stay tuned.
Mike
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