Teach Yourself Guitar Basics
“So you have in your hands this piece of crafted wood with six strings and wonder how to get started making those beautiful sounds you've heard? Get this book.”
—Pete Seeger
From the publishers of Acoustic Guitar
Learn how to choose, buy, and care for a guitar.
Six lessons, with audio, on how to play your first chords and songs.
Plus 35 questions and answers originally published in the Beginning Guitarist’s Handbook.
Praise for the Handbook:
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book that addressed so many useful subjects for beginners.”
—Stan Werbin, Elderly Instruments
Available from the publisher as a book with CD or as a pdf/audio download.
Amazon (book/CD only)
From the introduction
If you’re just getting started on guitar, I’d wager that two things are true: You want to play—now. And you’ve got a ton of questions about how and what and where and why. This book was written to help you on both fronts.
In the opening section you’ll find a six-pack of lessons to get you up and playing today—from your first chords and strums through the basics of power chords, fingerpicking, and music theory, and even your first solo. You’ll find all the examples on the accompanying CD, so you can hear the sounds and grooves you’re aiming for and loop them until they fall easily under your fingers. One of the beauties of the guitar is that so much of rock, country, blues, folk, and more uses these simple ingredients and nothing more—so you can make real music with only what you’ll learn in these starter lessons.
The balance of Teach Yourself Guitar Basics is devoted to advice about instruments and gear—a source of tremendous confusion for seasoned players as well as newcomers—and the learning process. From my own experience as a player, to years of dialogue with guitarists worldwide as the editor of Acoustic Guitar magazine and moderator of its online forum for beginners, I heard beginners ask the same types of questions again and again. The 50 most common and perplexing ones are collected and answered here, and all those mystifying bits of guitarese you’ll hear are defined along the way (look in the Index of Guitar Lingo to find where a particular word or phrase is fully explained and illustrated). Whether you are at home trying to figure out what to practice or how to change strings, or in a music store shopping for a guitar or a capo, you’ll find reliable and understandable advice in these pages.
Throughout the book you will hear pearls of wisdom from a wide range of teachers and instrument experts. I can’t tell you how many times I have thought, “I wish I had known that when I was learning to play!” during the course of putting together this book. I hope Teach Yourself Guitar Basics clears up nagging questions, steers you away from some dead ends, and most of all, inspires you to fill your home with your own music—there’s nothing better.
Happy playing,
Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers