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 [...]

I have been playing guitar for a while now – my entire adult life actually.  I think I first started hacking away at it in 1994.  But, as the truism goes, “you never stop learning”.  And there are a few things about playing the electric guitar that the past year has really underlined for me, and I think they’re [...]

Keith Richards, often known as “Keef”, is the guitarist and backup singer from the Rolling Stones.  He first sung lead vocals on the album Let it Bleed in 1969. Keith wears a silver skull ring, a gift to him from a friend in 1979, and a bracelet that resembles a pair of handcuffs.  The ring [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This is continuing on from the last posts on Gibson’s Top 50 Guitarists of all time – 40 to 31, and Gibson’s Top 50 Guitarists of all time – 50 to 41 30. Roy Buchanan Leroy Buchanan was a Telecaster player, a sideman and solo artist, and a master of the blues guitar.  He was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]