Learn Electric Guitar

Sometimes people ask me what it takes to learn the guitar.  Usually this question comes about because they’re curious about what equipment they might need, although my experience teaching guitar has shown that what students have on the inside is far more important than what guitar they play.  The truth is that just about anybody [...]

Hey everyone, not long ago I contacted Dr. Matt Warnock about writing a guest post for us here at the Learn Electric Guitar blog.  Matt is a professional performer and guitar teacher, writing for Guitar International magazine and teaching at Western Illinois University.  I asked him if he could write something about improvising over a [...]

Josh, from the consistently awesome and extremely worthwhile Fretterverse blog has recently vented his frustration about what he terms the world’s must infuriating guitar product. The product he is referring to is the Power Chord Trainer.  This product is a small bit of plastic that fits between your fingers to train your fingers into the [...]

While it’s certainly possible to tune your guitar by ear, most guitarists will find having an electronic tuner to be convenient and helpful.  Compared to tuning by ear, using an electronic tuner is a much simpler process.  It won’t do anything to develop your ear, so you should still learn to tune without one, but [...]

Procrastination is the biggest enemy of many beginner guitarists.  Typically, after someone has bought their first electric guitar and had their first few lessons, they will lock themselves in their room for hours and practice until their fingertips are too sore to keep playing.  But after a couple of months, once the initial excitement has [...]

The 12 bar blues is one of the most popular types of chord progression in contemporary music.  As the name suggests, it features in blues guitar a great deal,  It is also used very commonly in jazz, rock, pop, country and even heavy metal.  A 12 bar blues can be played in any key, and [...]

Electronic tuners are cheap, accurate and readily available.  Even people with a very good ear will probably be able to tune faster with a tuner than by ear.  You can even get pedal tuners, that you can step on to tune quickly and silently, before stepping on them again and being ready to play straight [...]

A common question amongst new guitarists is whether it is better to learn electric guitar or learn acoustic guitar.  If you are thinking that you want to learn guitar, and are unsure what type of guitar you should learn on, then perhaps this post can help you make up your mind. To start with, let’s [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]