I'm surprised no one has yet published anything about how to play the
guitar on
E2. So here's my attempt at trying to convey small parts of the
knowledge I acquired about 5 years ago and have been constantly polishing ever since.
The first lesson I ever got was
how to play chords. Chords are good. Most songs can be brought down to a number of chords that you can play and sing (or in my case
hum) along to. One important thing you should remember before even starting that - your
teacher (if you have one) may tell you that you shouldn't use the pinky on your right hand for fingerpicking, and
never, ever use the left hand's thumb to barr strings. This was one of the things I was told when I was starting to learn to play, and I ever since I cannot stop regretting I listened to it.
I cannot over-stress this:
use every single finger you can to extract sounds from your instrument. Eventually you're going to get to a point where you're trying to play a song, and you feel you need more and more fingers to get
that particular chord shape or tune. Then, then you will realise that while the
rest of your fingers are well-trained, your pinky and thumb are just there doing nothing. So avoid that.
Back to
chords. First learn some open-position chords - for some easy ones I'd recommend
Am,
A,
Em,
E,
C and perhaps a
D,
Dm and
G. From what I remember, just knowing the first set of those chords will get you through
Radiohead's "Street Spirit" quite nicely.
Once you're comfortable forming chords with your left hand, try
power chords. They are basically 3-string chords that are easy to form and move around the neck. The generic shape of a power chord is as follows:
D --3--
A --3--
E --1--
That above was an
F5, and if you shift the shape down a string you will get an
A#5. If you move the original shape up to the 4th fret, you'll get a
G#5. Move
that down a string, and you'll get a
C#5. Now posessing that
knowledge, you can play along to
Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". God help me,
what have I unleashed ...
Once you are bored with
chords, try getting a simple melody going on one of the strings. The bass line to Nirvana's "
Lithium" or
Black Sabbath's "
Electric Funeral" are a good place to start practicing.
Get more song tabs from the net.
www.altavista.com is your friend in finding tabs - try a search string like
+"Song Name" +tab and you should come up with at least a few hits.
This post is getting a little to big and I'd like to ask whoever can contribute something to this node to
please do so. Thanks!