Learn Electric Guitar

Learn to play the electric guitar

Archive for May, 2010

Getting The Right Guitar Neck Wood

Its not easy getting a guitar to sound just right but a good start is to make the right choice of wood for the neck. There are many different woods that can be used and all of them are different as it relates to the sound and tone which is projected. This is mainly the [...]

Gibson’s Top 50 Guitarists of all time – 40 to 31

This is continuing on from the last post on Gibson’s Top 50 Guitarists of all time – 50 to 41 40. Steve Jones (Sex Pistols) Though not the first punk rockers (that honour belongs to The Dictators or the New York Dolls, depending on who you ask), the Sex Pistols are probably the most iconic [...]

Playing your first chords

When you first pick up the electric guitar and are unsure exactly what to do with it, one of the first things you will generally learn are some simple chords. So, just what is a chord, anyway? Technically, a chord is a set of harmonically related notes, played simultaneously.  To be less academic about it, [...]

Gibson’s Top 50 guitarists of all time – 50 to 41

The Gibson guitar company is compiling a list of the top 50 guitarists of all time.  They’ve got their list from some fairly inscrutable process involving votes from their website’s readers, and from their own team of judges.  They are releasing their results ten at a time, so here are guitarists #50 to #41- I’ve [...]

Understanding guitar pickups

What is a guitar pickup? A pickup is one of those little rectangular things on the body of an electric guitar, directly under the strings.  It will either be covered in a metal case, or in a plastic bobbin with some metal pole pieces or a bar magnet exposed. What does it do? A pickup [...]

Understanding neck joints on an electric guitar

What is a neck joint? The neck joint is the point on a guitar where the neck meets the body.  The neck and the body on a solidbody electric guitar can be joined in a number of different ways, each making for different tonal and playing characteristics. Set Neck The first solidbody electric guitars featured [...]

Rest In Peace Ronnie James Dio

This post is a bit unusual, and slightly off-topic for the site.  I normally try to post only about learning electric guitar, rather than just general music news.  But, because Ronnie James Dio has been such a hero of mine, I’ve decided to make an exception here.  Even though he is known as a singer, [...]

So why learn to play guitar?

For many of us, our decision to learn guitar is not something we ever thought about too hard.  It was almost as though it was made for us.. we just knew that it was something we had to do.  For other people though, it’s something they will need to find some logical reasons to do [...]

Buying a gift for a guitarist

Birthdays, anniversaries, christmas time – these are all times when you might need or want to buy a gift for someone.  What better thing to get a guitarist than a guitar related gift?  It’s a good idea, but there’s just so much out there you could choose from.  Here are some ideas to get you [...]

Tuning a Guitar – What should you tune to?

An electric guitar really does sound a lot better when it’s in tune.  Even the nicest, priciest, most gorgeous fourteen thousand dollar special edition Les Paul will sound terrible if the tuning is out.  If you’re not sure exactly what you should tune to, here’s a guide. What tunings are out there? Standard tuning on [...]