Acoustic Guitar Lessons

The free acoustic guitar lessons you find here will be a surperb resource for you to learn to play acoustic guitar from scratch, or to ‘bone-up’ on some things you should know, to become an even better guitarist.

There are a lot of subjects that will be covered in these lessons. The two major acoustic guitar picking styles that will covered are Flatpicking Guitar and Fingerstyle Guitar.

Flatpicking Acoustic Guitar Lessons:

Also known as Bluegrass Guitar, or plectrum guitar picking, this style will be covered in detail from the basics of how to hold the flatpick, how to position your right hand for most efficient picking, and how to gain playing speed. Also the left hand will be covered from how to hold the neck, position the fingers, and actually play the notes. These basic methods may seem unnecessary, but if you don’t start out right with the basics, you playing abilities will suffer a great deal. Playing technique is everything and strict discipline is required to become a really great guitar player.

Also we will cover how to read TAB or tablature in great detail. We will learn how to execute ornamental effects such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends and harmonics. Some of these get into the intermediate and advanced areas of the guitar, but it is important to master them.

Last and certainly not least we will examine some actual TAB in real detail to teach you the same techniques that such flatpick artist’s such as Tony Rice, Norman Blake and Doc Watson use. These are some real secrets that will make you leap from a mediocre player to a phenomenal player. Just focus on making some minor adjustments, and you have to pay attention to detail, and it will come to you.

Fingerstyle Acoustic Guitar Lessons:

This style has it’s roots based in ragtime and blues type guitar playing. More recently it has been popularized by such iconic artist’s as Chet Atkins, Jerry Reed, and Merle Travis. This tends to be a rather challenging method of playing the guitar, but it gives a tremendous amount of satisfaction to the performer and the listener alike.

I would recommend that you have a pretty good command of playing the guitar with the flatpick before you decide to take on fingerstyle guitar. This way we can get a lot of the preliminaries out of the way, such as the left hand position, reading TAB, learning ornamental techniques, and getting some reasonable speed going. Also you will become familiar with the fretboard, scales and positions.

You will started out very slowly with some simple exercises, and gradually get your feet wet in the process. There will be a real concentration on the left hand, the right hand fingering styles, picking styles, chord patterns and chord forms. Then we will take some actual songs and analyze them, pull them apart to examine how they are played and give detailed playing information which you can then go on to formulate your own style.

Also, we will be analyzing some actual breaks by some of the most famous artist’s, such as Chet, Merle, Jerry and more. After all, these people are regarded as some of the best, so let’s begin by copying from them. You can then make adjustments to these arrangements, and create your own unique style. After all, if you can ‘rip-off’ a great lick exactly how it was done by Jerry Reed, that is very impressive indeed. But, if you make it uniquely your own arrangement, based on his lick – that’s even better!