Guitar - Create Your Sound Using the Right Guitar Pick

Guitar picks are tiny, silly seemingly, unimportant tools used to play guitar strings however you might be really surprised how a guitar pick can really boost your performance. It determines your playing style, your tone and speed. If you have a particular sound in mind the right pick is like the icing on the cake. It gives just that bit of extra you need to impress.

Picking Sound

Fender, Ibanez and Jim Dunlop have each there own variety of picks in many different types, sizes, colors, and are either made of nylon, celluloid, metal or PVC. They can be soft or as hard as steel and each produce a particular sound.

In the beginning a guitar pick feels very uncomfortable in your hand. You can't really find the right way to hold it. So therefor it's best to choose a pick that will definitely give a good sound. The very soft and thin white Nylon Dunlops add an annoying sound to the tone when using them on an acoustic guitar. Harder picks don't do that and give more volume in the first place than soft picks and that's a good thing.

Control the strings

A soft and a hard pick each give a different sound, have a different effect on the strings and play a part in creating  speed. I encourage everybody to start with the hardest pick you can handle. That way you will be able to use any pick softer than the one you've been using while the other way around is much harder. Switching from a soft to hard guitar pick might take some time before you can play comfortably.

If you play mainly chords and rhythm guitar you might want to use a soft pick as these help to produce a rich and fuller sound. Soft picks seem to blend all the notes within the chord that's being played and add more treble to the sound while a hard pick produces a somewhat darker sound.

Getting it Right

In rock music you will either play lead or rhythm or a combination of both. To play lead means that you're the one with the hot solo's. You want to use a hard pick with a sharp tip to improvise.

Most picks have a rounded tip and only a few have a sharp tip like the Dunlop Nylon Jazz picks and the Stubby's. These are both hard picks. The sharp tip helps to keep a clear tone when playing real fast. The problem with the Nylon Jazz picks is that the tip is as thick as the rest of th00000672e pick. Even though you want a full thick tone you still want it to sound dense and compressed . You can get that sound better using the stubby's as its tip is sharp and thin. The stubby's are not easy to work with in the beginning but once you get over that clumsiness you will have much more control over the tone and the sound you create. 

June Moris has been playing the guitar since she was thirteen and has been doing research on the use of effects ful time for six months. When you hear her live it's like there are two guitar players on stage. Some people mistake her guitar for synthesizers. June lives in NYC where she plays her music and teaches guitar. More articles like "how to hold the guitar pick", "The Action of the Guitar" and "Fine Tuning" can be found on her website http://www.music.junemoris.com/category/guitar/

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Guitar Training Software

Guitar training software is of perennial interest to guitar students of all levels. It seems as though the boredom of learning music notation and tabs plus the drudgery of long hours of guitar practice makes you wish that there were some short cuts. Or at least something that lightened the burden a little. Guitar training software can help you to learn various aspects of guitar playing but you still have to supply the time and effort.

The eMedia Guitar Method is touted as the world's best-selling CD-ROM for beginners. This software for guitar training offers more than one-hundred-and-sixty lessons showing you how to strum chords and play melodies, the basics of fingerpicking, power chords, riffs and lots more. You get split screen videos with close ups to allow you to tell what's going on with both hands when you are learning chords and picking.

The software's animated fretboard shows you the fingering for the seventy songs that are included, and you can get a view of the fretboard from different angles. You can decide whether to learn to play the guitar using tabs or sheet music notation, you can learn the songs and exercises at any tempo you want, and of course, you get a metronome and a tuner. If you find yourself stalling in your progress as a guitar player, this guitar training software will probably give you the boost you need.

Guitar 101: The Fender Method is a straightforward, user-friendly CD-ROM that will give you a solid grounding in electric guitar playing. You get thirty lessons with this software covering, theory, the basics of music, how the guitar works and separate lessons focusing on each hand. This guitar training software is aimed at the aspiring plectrum guitar player interested in playing pop and rock music. The software also has special lessons on tuning the guitar and playing against recorded rhythm tracks.

Now, guitar training software for the bass guitar student. As a beginner bass guitarist you will find Bass Fretboard Addict a great help with learning the notes on the guitar fretboard. This program allows you to use fret numbers or music notes when you practice your bass guitar and the authentic bass sound helps your ear to become accustomed to the notes as they are played on the bass. You can also use games to help you learn the notes. If you want to be the kind of bass player with a well developed ear for music, this software is for you.

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all t00000F6Dhe resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

Electric Guitar Tricks

By Tom Grogan
You'll be surprised to discover that when learning to play guitar that there are some electric guitar tricks that can help you progress quickly. If you are looking for ways to decrease the learning curve and join the band as soon as possible you have come to the right place. Learning to play the guitar can be easy or it can be very frustrating. Our goal is to make learning fun and easy.

The first guitar trick is to make sure the guitar is set up properly. If the guitar is not set up correctly or has a high playing action it will take too much effort to fret the notes with the left hand. This will also cause the finger tips to get very sore and it will be unpleasant to practice for any length of time. The strings must be close enough to the fingerboard to be easy to fret (push down) without vibrating against the adjacent frets.

Next you will want to set aside a specific and regular amount of time for practice. Irregular and sporadic practice only prolongs your progress. Althrough there are things you can do to make learning quick and easy there is no substitute for regular practice. As you learn more techniques you may want to increase your practice time.

As you master the basic techniques of just playing the notes and chords there are some other electric guitar tricks you can use to refine your sound. One trick would be using the tremolo arm (wammy bar) correctly. The tremolo arm lowers the tension on the strings to lower the pitch and then returns the strings to their original pitch. When you have long sustained notes you can bend the note by pushing the string upward on the fingerboard. this will have the effect of raising the pitch just slightly and then returning to is original pitch.

Some of the more popular and easier electric guitar tricks involve using some of the many pedals to hook up between the guitar and amp. These could be reverb pedals, octave pedals, chorus pedals, or delay pedals. There are many types of distortion pedals to get sounds from classic rock to heavy metal and everything in between.

I'm sure you would like to begin to learn the electric guitar tricks used by your favorite guitarist playing some of your favorite tunes.

Jamorama is packed full of video lessons that will speed your learning and teach you how to play virtually any song by ear in the comfort of your own home.

You will be blown away by how much fun are are having learning the three basic parts of music while playing your favorite songs. Go to http://www.myguitarjam.info to begin your journey to fun and learning to play guitar with some free sample lessons.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_Grogan

How To Play Electric Guitar-5 Tips For Instant Success

There are a million different methods and styles of how to play electric guitar, and to teach them all in one article would be pretty pointless, so Im going to give you some tips that anyone who wants to know how to play electric guitar well should find useful.

How To Play Electric Guitar Tip 1:

Make sure the strings are fitted properly. Playing electric guitar often includes string bends, and if your strings arent fitted properly this can cause some real tuning problems. Hearing that PING sound as your guitar drops out of tune mid solo can be pretty embarrassing, so make sure your strings are perfect!

How To Play Electric Guitar Tip 2:

Get to know the guitar. Electric guitars have a huge range of different sounds and textures, all accessed by simply using the volume and tone controls on the guitar, as well as using different pickup selections. Any great guitarist with great tone understands this and will work their guitar to get the very best sounds.

How To Play Electric Guitar Tip 3:

Learn to mute the strings. When played at high volume the sheer power of the sound from the amplifier will make the strings on the guitar vibrate and ring out. This will ruin ANYTHING you are trying to play unless you can control it by muting the strings you dont want to sound. This is mainly done by laying the palm of your strumming hand across the strings at the bridge.

How To Play Electric Guitar Tip 4:

Learn some simple scales and licks. You can spice up anything by adding a few ad lib notes or licks, providing you have the scale knowledge to back it up. Some tasteful blues licks can really add depth to all kinds of songs, and will give your sound its own personality.

How To Play Electric Guitar Tip 5:

Learn to bend strings and apply vibrato. To a guitar fan one of the best sounds in the world is the sound of someone bending up to a high note 0000112Aand then applying some good vibrato. Both techniques are fairly easy to get to grips with but tough to master, and will add even more personality to your sound. Using these techniques you can make the most mundane melodies sound interesting.

These guitar tips dont even scratch the tip of the iceberg of how to play electric guitar, but hopefully they have given you an idea of what kinds of directions you can go with the instrument. Happy playing!

Click HERE to learn the secrets of the professionals and become a great guitar player in record time-there's never been a better guide to how to play electric guitar!

Steve Laney is the webmaster at http://www.dailyguitarlessons.com

Learn To Play Guitar Sheet Music Part 1

Why is it so hard for many guitarists to read sheet music on the guitar?

Probably the answer is easy. They haven't done anything about it. An old used tyre can stand leaned against the wall of a car garage for thousands of years. Why? Nobody has thought about moving it. Could it be that easy also with playing guitar sheet music? I think so.
Sometimes we consider ourselves poor sight readers or not able to read guitar sheet music at all and we think this is part of our personality. Every person who wants to learn to read guitar sheet music notation properly has already taken the first step towards changing that condition, just like you have done by reading this article.

Climbing the "Reading Guitar Sheet Music" mountain starts with step one

Surprised? Well, I have been teaching guitar playing for many years and I have found that learning to play guitar is like many other activities. People, not you of course, often want to start from another position than from where they are.
I would like to suggest that we approach the sight reading assignment from two directions. First by learning to find our way around the guitar and learning the notes on the fingerboard.

Make a string safari on your guitar

With the conventional tuning on your guitar you will have the note E on the first open string. I guess you are aware of the fact that you can find the same note on the second string too. If you dont know on what fret you will find it you can listen your way through the frets on the second string until youll find the note that sounds the s00000885ame as the first string.
Now I will be frank and tell you that E on the second string is on the fifth fret. Maybe you have already found that out. E on the third string is on the ninth fret. Practice to play E on these different places and jump back and forth until you can find the frets without effort.

How to proceed learning the guitar fretboard

In a similar way you can invent small exercises on you guitar fretboard like playing all Es on all six strings until you can play them with ease or finding all Cs and play them consecutively like a picking exercise or as an exercise for your right hand fingers.

Knowing the notes on the guitar fingerboard will be a great help for you, not only when playing guitar sheet music but also when you are playing by ear or improvising a guitar solo.

Peter Edvinsson is a guitarist, pianist, composer and educator. He is also the proud owner of the website capotastomusic.com with free sheet music and resources for musicians and music students.

Visit his website and download easy free guitar sheet music and guitar tab sheet music! http://www.capotastomusic.com

Playing Guitar 1 - Choosing the Right Guitar

Choosing the right guitar for yourself is as important to playing as having the right shoe size - if it's not right for you, you won't want to keep playing. There are three main types of guitars, each with its own advantages and disadvantages: the steel-string acoustic guitar (dreadnought), the nylon-string acoustic guitar (classical) and the electric guitar.

The dreadnought is traditionally the first guitar that someone would get when they start learning how to play. The steel strings provide for a powerful, bright sound and the strings are spaced comfortably. The main advantage to the steel-string acoustic is that you and your friends will easily be able to hear what you play. You will also, over time, develop more precise technique and stronger hands. This also can lead to a disadvantage; the steel-string acoustic can be more difficult to play at first since the strings are under more tension. This can lead to many people not continuing to play long enough to develop any basic ability or even calluses.

Of the two acoustic guitars, I like the nylon-string the best. Personally, I think the tone is warmer. Also, the strings are under very little tension, making it easier to actually fret the instrument. The only drawback to the classical from a beginner's point of view is that the strings are spaced wider than the other two guitar types, and the action (the height of the strings above the fretboard) is also higher. This makes p000020B2laying with precision a little trickier.

Last but not least is my personal favorite for beginners - the electric guitar. While it is heavier than the others (due to having a solid wood body), it is also the easiest to play. This makes it great for beginners since they will play long enough to develop calluses and get over the first hurdles and experience some success. The acoustic guitars over the long run will give you better technique, but the electric will actually have you PLAYING!!

Of course, the final decision comes down to want you want to do with the guitar. I always ask my students (and potential students), "What kind of music do you like? Which musicians do you want to sound like?" and "What guitars do they play?"

If you like old Bob Dylan, a steel-string acoustic will be great, but a hot-rodded super-Strat will make you frustrated. If Eddie Van Halen is your thing, get the hot-rodded super-Strat - anything else will leave you wanting more. Having the same instrument (or at least the same type) as your favorite player will go a long way to keeping you motivated and inspired to keep playing. These heroes and heroines of the guitar become like mentors to us leading the way. Good luck to you and your future guitar adventures!

Bill Franco is a performing & recording guitarist in St. Louis, Missouri and is also available for guitar lessons. Visit his websites at: http://www.billfranco.com/ and http://www.myspace.com/billfrancomusic

Playing Blues Guitar on an Epiphone Les Paul

By Mike OHara
If you are a blues electric guitarist, or even if you are just learning to play the blues on an electric guitar, you will want to make sure that you have a guitar that suits the style.

Step forward, the Epiphone Les Paul Standard. This guitar is a blues guitarist's dream.

OK, so it's not a $2,500 Gibson, but it's not far off. And at only a fraction of the price it offers great playability, superb tone, and it looks just fantastic!

One of the things that you always want to make sure of when playing electric blues guitar is that you can produce a good amount of sustain. Typically, guitars at the cheaper end of the scale do not sustain anywhere near as well as their more expensive counterparts. But hit a note on this baby, add a bit of string vibrato and it will go on and on and on, making you feel like Carlos Santana!

This is down in large part to the solid mahogany body, the maple top and the quality of the pickups, which are nearly as good as those on the Gibson equivalent.

Make no mistake, the Epiphone Les Paul is a quality guitar, well built and made to last.

It is interesting that some well-known and respected guitarists play and endorse Epiphones, even though they could have their pick of other makes (guitarists like Noel Gallagher, Ace Frehley and Nancy Wilson to name just a few).

When I get rich, I'll buy a Gibson. In the meantime, an Epiphone Les Paul Standard will do just fine, thank you!

Mike OHara is a guitarist and guitar teacher who plays a variety of styles on a variety of guitars. He is a particular fan of the Epiphone Les Paul Standard, a guitar he often uses when giving a Blues Guitar Lesson.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_OHara

The Power Of Consistent Guitar Practice.

Most of us have heard of the power of being consistent in our guitar
practice. You know what I mean. Practicing something EVERY day until
mastered. But do you do this? I know that in the past, I definitely
didn't...

When I first started playing I was a maniac! I had no real structure to
my practice. I just put in the hours and hoped that I got better. And I
did! But there was a problem. I practiced something different almost
every day. My practice "schedule" changed from o...

Keywords:
guitar practice,alternate picking,legato

Article Body:
Most of us have heard of the power of being consistent in our guitar
practice. You know what I mean. Practicing something EVERY day until
mastered. But do you do this? I know that in the past, I definitely
didn't...

When I first started playing I was a maniac! I had no real structure to
my practice. I just put in the hours and hoped that I got better. And I
did! But there was a problem. I practiced something different almost
every day. My practice "schedule" changed from one day to the next. This
created two major negative side effects...

1. Sore hands. For example, I would often go so berserk on alternate
picking exercises that my picking wrist would get incredibly sore. It
would be so sore that I couldn't practice alternate picking the next
day. So what did I do? I then went crazy with legato exercises. So much
so that I wouldn't be able to practice legato the next day. So I went
back to my trusty alternate picking. Mmmm...there's a pattern emerging
here. :-)

2. Slower Progress. Now, don't get me wrong. I progressed faster than
any of my friends. But I definitely don't think I progressed at my
fastest possible rate. If I had practiced less on an exercise, but did
it EVERY day I think my progress would have been much faster.

I guess the moral of the story is to temper your enthusiasm with
intelligence. Let's look at how to start to be more consistent with your
practice...

***Step One***

Decide on something that you would like to master. Make it something
short like a lick, scale or perhaps a few bars of a song.

***Step Two***

Decide on a speed goal for the thing that you have chosen. This will be
your target tempo. Make it challenging. Something that will make you a
significantly better player once you have achieved it. Of course, you
need to keep in mind your current playing level. If you are a beginner
and you set a speed goal of sixteenth notes at 240bpm, you are
definitely setting yourself up for a failure!

***Step Three***

Decide on how much time you'll invest practicing the thing that you have
chosen. I would recommend setting a goal of 10-15 minutes a day. A small
amount done daily will give you better results than hours done irregularly.

***Step Four***

Make a commitment to practice what you have chosen on a daily basis. The
key is to practice it every single day until your speed goal has been
reached. No excuses,no crying, no moaning, no exceptions.

***Step Five***

Get to work! This is the step that requires discipline. It could take
weeks or months to achieve your speed goal! Just keep in mind that
anyone can write down a goal, but unfortunately VERY few people will
follow it though to completion. That's probably why there are so many
more guitar OWNERS than guitar PLAYERS ;-)

I invite you to try this approach to guitar practice. I've found that it
really helps me, and I'm sure you'll benefit from it as well!

The Secrets of Correctly Stringing Your Guitar

Why do you care about stringing your guitar you may ask. Well the reason is simple. It will make you sound better because if your guitar is properly strung, you will get longer natural sustain.

This is something that no fx pedal can reproduce, clean natural sustain. Of course after you have this sustain you can play with it all you want with your fx pedals.

Many guitarist make the same mistake when stringing a guitar, they don't wind enough of the string onto the tuning peg or they wind too much.

Why is this seemingly simple thing so important? Because the greater the angle between the nut (the top part of the guitar) and the tuning peg, the better the sustaining qualities of the string. Simply put, it makes you sound better. And your strings will not go out of tune as fast. Of course you can always wind too much as well, and then the strings will tend to slip out of tune easier. You want to have just the right amount.

Here is how to string your guitar.

Step 1 - Take all the strings out of the package and lay them out from the thickest to the thinnest. When you go to buy strings, always try and get the same gauge, as changing the gauge could mean problems with intonation, and may require truss rod adjustments.

Step 2 - Turn the tuning peg until the hole is in line with the neck.

Step 3 - Starting with the thickest string - The low "e", thread the string through the bridge (bottom part of the guitar). Each guitar has different ways to do this, but it is usually very easy to see where the strings go.

Step 4 - Next thread the string through the hole in the tuning peg until it is tight. Now back the string up about 3 inches so that it loosens.

Step 5 - Grab the loose part of the string with one hand and with the other start turning the tuning peg. As you turn the peg, hold the string tightly away from the guitar to insure that it wraps tightly, with no slack. This will stop the string from going out of tune as you're playing. When the string is getting tight against the fretboard, You can let go and continue to slowly turn the peg a little bit more and then top.

Step 6 - Make sure as you turn the peg that the string is winding downward, and don't let it flip over itself. Your goal is tog et about 2 1/2 to 3 full winds on each string.

Step 7 - Repeat 0000105Athe process with all other strings, but decrease the amount of slack a little bit each time.

All the best,

Tom Freeland
PlayGuitar.com

This is just one of the hundreds of guitar tips that you will get for free simply by becoming a member of PlayGuitar.com's Guitar Tips. Go to http://www.playguitar.com/guitartips/ and fill out your info. You will be on your way to becoming a better player.