How to Tune a Guitar – Helpful Guide on Tuning Your Guitar

by Chris J Jones

When learning the guitar you can be so busy trying to learn chords and songs that you may not even know if your guitar is in or out of tune. Being able to tune a guitar is very important when you begin learning.

There is no point in learning your favorite song if your guitar is out of tune, is there? The first step to know about tuning your guitar is what sound you are looking for from each string. We need to know which note each string will be tuned to: Read more »

Single Coil or Humbucking Pickups – What is the Best for your Electric Guitar?

by Men Leblanc

In this article we will take a look at some of the differences between Humbucking pickups and Single Coil pickups, both technically and tonally. Many think, “Isn’t a Humbucker just two Single Coils side by side?” The answer is actually yes and no as they both provide quite distinct tonal and technical characteristics.

There have been lots of attempts to utilize both tones in one instrument or pickup, but the over all opinion is that a guitar is either use one or the other. Like they say, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Read more »

Use Vibrato to Make Your Classical Guitar Music Come Alive

Author: Emre Sabuncuoglu

Would you like to make your music vibrate with the pulse of life? In order to move the soul, music must reflect life itself, celebrating life’s joys and mourning life’s sorrows.

Vibrato, a method of slightly varying the pitch of your guitar, brings your music to life by employing specialized left-hand techniques to cause a string or strings to vibrate at a varied pitch. Read more »

Electric Guitar Technology 101

By: Kenny Auyoung

It is a curious paradox of the music industry: guitarists, particularly rock guitarists, are often thought of as trendsetters when it comes to fashion and culture; but when it comes to their instruments, they are notoriously conservative.

Innovations such as active electronics, guitar synthesizers and Steinberger’s intrepid steps into the field of headless instruments in the 80′s have failed to make much of a dent in the market. Gibson and Fender continue to dominate the electric guitar market much as they did in the 1950′s and 60′s.

Even with the entry of new competitors into the market over the years such as Ibanez, Paul Reed Smith and Charvel/Jackson, the electric guitar has remained essentially unchanged with one to three magnetic pickups and a mess of wires connecting them to the controls. But things may be about to change! Read more »

You Can Learn How To Play The Blues

by Ed Haas

The blues has influenced almost every genre of music. All the great guitar players of our time have been influenced to some degree by the blues. The music theory involved in playing the blues is rather simple, but the feeling that can be applied to playing the blues is what makes it so popular.

The 12 bar blues progression:

If you want to learn how to play blues, you need to know the 12 bar blues progression. Just as its’ name implies, it is made up of 12 bars (measures) of music. the 12 bars just keep repeating. The most common chord progression would be the I, IV, and V chords of the key that you want to play in. Read more »