Guitar Lessons with Paul Elwood: Overview
“Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music. This is a lovely tune and a great place to get started if you’re interested in finger-style guitar playing. We’ll start with a solid understanding of the guitar neck and and build on that until we’re playing the way we want to!
Lessons Overview
Although your lessons with me are always designed to match your specific goals, interests and ability, there are some basic ideas about making music on a guitar that will be helpful to understand no matter what kind of music you want to play! Below are some of the ideas that we will be looking at in early lessons. Let’s get started!
Naming the parts of the guitar is very important! I have a whiteboard video here you’ll enjoy watching that tells the names of the parts of your acoustic guitar. We’ll also look at some instructions on how to tune your guitar to “standard” tuning so that the notes you play sound correct.
How hard should you press on the strings? Here’s a PDF that can help you with that question.
Intervals for major scales follow the same pattern on the guitar neck. Once we understand that pattern we can play those scales anywhere! Why is that important? When we hear the intervals we can start to understand how the notes relate to one another- and that is quite helpful for building chords and arpeggios.
C major scale in the first position. A major scale as in the previous lesson, except we are going across the neck on adjacent strings instead of up the neck on one string. This is a really useful pattern to know!
We can play the octave in the previous lesson… and part of the octave below it as well as part of the octave above it! We’ll start on the Open E6 and work our way up to the G on the 3rd fret of the E1 string
Each note of the scale has its own numerical value. In the C scale for instance, C is 1, D is 2, E is 3 and so on. Knowing and understanding the notes in this way is useful for us to start thinking about notes as part of chords! Now we can think about notes in a few different ways- as a pattern our fingers move through on the neck, the tones the notes make, the intervals between them and the position of the notes on the neck.