Learn Guitar Academy

Stop press:

Guitar Chord Calculator - free for the first 100 respondents. Get yours before they are all gone!

Welcome to Learn Guitar Academy .com

The guitar is a great musical instrument. One you can have a true physical artistic “connection” with, and an instrument that can develop and express your emotions as you grow. Yet i can also be a simple instrument to start. And most of all, guitar playing should be FUN!

Acoustic Classical or Folk, or Electric or semi acoustic guitar?

Luckily, which ever you choose, your guitar playing can translate across each of them. You’re quite likely to end up with more than one, if not all of them
If you want to play classical or folk music, the choice should be pretty obvious.

But for pop, and even rock and dance, unplugged acoustic can sit side by side electric in the textural front.

Acoustic guitars do have wider necks and so are easier to learn fingering to start with. Acoustics also have that pick and play anywhere feel. So starting on acoustic is pretty normal.

But electric guitar, with its thinner neck and wide range of tones, lends itself far more towards lead and music production.

Because you get such a difference in feel between acoustic and electric, I think you will probably end up with both, because they are each best at certain times.

I’m going to go out on a limb by saying that I think starting to learn on electric (unless you are only interested in lead and electronic sounds) is probably harder than starting with acoustic. It’ s a bit like learning to drive on an automatic. It takes longer to get used to gears for the first time.

Acoustic guitar has a wider neck and the frets are slightly more far apart. And learning to play guitar can be alto about “stretch” and “reach”. So learning chord shapes on acoustic, will probably seem easier wen you finally go to electric. Easier than if you had done it the other way round.

It’s a personal thing, and there is no hard and fast rule. Play what you feel most comfortable with. I think you;ll end yup with both, and in that case, starting with acoustic is the way I would go. It is the way I went in fact

Songs for Guitar and Guitar TABlature:

Guitar TAB (or TABlature to give it, its’ full name) has been a great revolution for guitar players. While music notation (score) is still the best way to go long term (as it lets other non guitar musicians see what you are playing, as well as include a lot more clues as to how you intended the piece to be interpreted), music TAB is super easy and quick to understand.

TAB is vaguely “pictorial”. Its’ layout looks much like a guitar fretboard, in that it shows each of the six strings and the notation (nomenclature) it uses is the number of the fret to play.

The big difference between an actual guitar (or a guitar chord diagram) is that left to right shows “time” (the order the notes are played in) and not the frets.

It may or may not help you to think of TAB as being like roughly a guitar neck, but that is the beauty of it. It is very easy to translate the visualisation of TAB to the frets on a guitar.

More on this shortly.

Musical Notation:

More on this shortly.

How to learn to play guitar:

There are many element sin guitar playing. Chords, scales, picking techniques, strumming techniques, left hand playing techniques (hammer on, pull-off, vibrato) and right hand techniques (chicken, mute, rub, ebow) as well as other stuff like; slide guitar and then all of the tonal textures that can come from electronics. We tend to think of electric guitar form electronics, but reverb and phrase sampling are 2 common effects for acoustic guitar.

More on this shortly.

What about da’ bass:

And let’s not forget the bass guitar. What “band” would be complete without the bass guitar? Electric bass, or acoustic bass.

More on this shortly.

What next in the guitar panacea?

Lots more to come in the following months.

So we’d really welcome you joining our blog, so you can comment, share, ask questions an see bonus content that is only for the eyes of (free) members. Please join us for FREE to get access to the bonus content.

We will also be introducing a paid membership, but will be able to get an awful lot for free at Learn Guitar Academy.

Have FUN Playing Your Guitar.

Peter