Best Guitar Lessons for Beginners

Guitar is a fantastic instrument to learn contemporary music and let’s be honest one of the coolest instruments anybody can learn. At The Musicians Woodshed in Cedar Park, it is the most frequently requested instrument to learn. Our guitar teachers have decades of collective experience teaching guitar and here are some of the first lessons each instructor shows their new student:

LEARNING THE NAMES OF THE STRINGS

Now that we know where the six strings on a guitar are, it’s best to know which one is which to ensure you are playing the desired note. There are two key points to remember:

1. The lowest sounding string is on top of the guitar (the low E string) and the highest sounding string is on the bottom of the guitar (the high E string)
2. The names of the strings (from lowest to highest) E-A-D-G-B-E referring to the note the string makes without pressing down on the string (playing it “open”) Our favorite way to remember the strings during guitar lessons at the Cedar Park location is Eddy Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddy.

String names for a Guitar in Standard tuning.

READING CHORD CHARTS AND GUITAR TABS

There are several ways to learn guitar without reading a line of traditional sheet music. Did you know that music legends such as Prince, Paul McCartney and Elvis didn’t read sheet music? The two primary ways to read guitar music is through chord charts and guitar tablature.

CHORD CHARTS

From musicgrotto.com “A chord is three or more different notes played together. Two different notes played together are called an interval or a double-stop. Chords are the basic building blocks for guitar playing, and chord charts show us exactly how to play each chord. Each chart or diagram represents one chord, and chord progressions include multiple diagrams together. The chord chart is a diagram of the guitar neck and fretboard, which is the part you’ll use to hold down the notes in the chord. The vertical lines represent your guitar strings, and the horizontal lines represent the fret bars. Dots and numbers help fill out the picture by instructing correct finger placement.”