Rock Out on Your Guitar

Here's a quick beginners guide to playing the guitar. If you want to increase your proficiency, you'll probably need lessons. But with these simple steps you can at least begin to rock out on your own.

Steps

  1. Choose the Right Guitar. Acoustic or electric is fine, though most people find electric to be much more fun.
  2. Learn some basic chords like A, E, D, C, G, and F. There are millions of songs that use only 3 of those chords. There are also barre chords and power chords that you might want to learn.
  3. Do fingering exercises without your guitar. Even just fingering a scale can help strengthen them.
  4. Get an adjustable metronome that counts the beats so that you can keep your timing right.
  5. Learn tablature(tabs). Learning and using tabs is a way that most beginning guitarists and bassists use to read their music. Check the "External Links" section below for good tab-finding sites. Optionally, if you want to develop a musician's ear, you can transcribe the songs you want to learn, just by trying to play what you hear on your guitar. It will be very slow to begin with, but practice makes perfect.
  6. Learn a song that you know and play along with it on a CD or MP3, if you have that song. That should help you get to know the song pretty well.
  7. Forming a Band Get with people of the same ability level and rock!

While Playing

  1. Jump when a chorus starts. This is also acceptable when the music suddenly gets louder.
  2. Shake your head back and forth. Up and down really fast so your hair is flying everywhere.
  3. Jump all around the stage in circles.
  4. When you finish playing a chord, hold your arm up while holding the guitar pick until you play the next chord.
  5. Give the audience a 'rock on' or 'peace' sign with your hand. This is most effective after a song has ended.
  6. After last song is done, throw your pick out to the audience. (This may not be allowed in some places, but if it is, go for it.)
  7. Hold your guitar up by its neck while playing the last few chords of a song.
  8. Smile! it will show you're having fun
  9. If you can sing, do secondary vocals and share the mic with the singer.



Tips

  • Try different gauges of picks. Some are thinner and are more bendable than others.
  • Never give up.
  • Take your time and don't give up, no matter how irritated you get.
  • Clip your nails on fret hand. If you don't, it will be much harder to press down the strings, and affect your tone.
  • Buy a guitar basics book. It will show you how to hold a guitar and your pick.
  • Watch some of your favorite music videos to pick up some tricks you can use in concerts (if you ever get that far). For example, check out The Who, and Pete Townsend's windmills. Angus Young of AC/DC is good when it come to rocking out on guitar. Find videos of him too.
  • Watch Wayne's World. He truly is a rocker who probably used something like wikiHow to learn to rock!

Warnings

  • Try not to step on your cable (the cord that connects the guitar to the amp). If you do too many times it'll be too messed up to use. Or you can get a heavy duty cord but the risk of messing it up is still there.
  • Don't get a higher gauge in strings without expecting to set up your guitar again. If the strings are too thick you will need to adjust your guitar's truss rod which affects the neck... and if you tighten the rod too much, it can break. So don't change gauges unless you know what you are doing. If in doubt of the gauge your guitar is strung with, get a .009 to .042 set; they usually will not damage any guitar's neck because they are fairly thin strings. Then decide from there.
  • Make sure you clean your guitar consistently. If you have a tremolo (whammy bar), don't press it too hard. Tune your guitar every time you play.
  • Be careful not to crank your amp volume up too loud, you can easily damage your hearing. Or you can be like Spinal Tap, and put it to 11, annoy the neighbors, (you can wear earplugs.)

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Sources and Citations

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