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Easy Guitar Techniques for Beginners

Guitar techniques do not need to be difficult for beginners, in fact it is a great boost for your enthusiasm when you start to master one or two easy guitar techniques. As the left hand and the right hand both need attention when you are a guitar beginner, I thought we could examine some easy guitar chords and techniques a beginner can use to play and practice them, plus an easy technique to get the beginner guitar player's right hand moving. As you progress with your guitar playing you will often feel that you are working more on one hand than the other. Which hand you favor is different for different people. This is okay as long as you become aware of what you are doing and go back to engaging both hands.

When you are learning the various guitar techniques you will find that the fingers of each hand are given numbers. This system is used when describing finger picking techniques and left hand chord fingering. Your index finger is 1, your middle finger is 2 and the ring finger is 3. The pinky is number 4 and it is very important to work on using this finger for left hand guitar techniques. For the right hand, it is only used for Flamenco style strumming techniques. So when you see tabs for guitar chords with finger numbers on them it is very important to follow this numbering because the writer of the tab has included the numbers to make it easier for the beginner to finger the chords and change from one chord to another.

If you have not yet bought a guitar chord manual or downloaded some chord charts from the internet, now is a good time to do it. You will need to look up the chords D major A major and G7. These are easy guitar chords that beginners often start off with. For the D chord you will playing the first four strings on the guitar. The first string is the thinnest string which is designated with a lower case e, and the thickest string is known as the sixth string. This string also sounds the note E but on tab the note is written using a capital E. They are always referred to this way. So below is the tab for the D chord. The left hand fingering numbers are on the right hand ends of the tabs.

e---------2------------|2

B---------3------------|3

G---------2------------|1

D---------0------------|

A----------------------|

E----------------------|

This is the G7 chord:

e---------1------------|1

B---------0------------|

G---------0------------|

D---------0------------|

A---------2------------|2

E---------3------------|3

This is the A chord:

e---------0------------|

B---------2------------|4

G---------2------------|3

D---------2------------|2

A---------0------------|

E----------------------|

Now for the right hand technique. The simplest guitar technique for the right hand is strumming with a plectrum. You hold the plectrum between the thumb and first finger of the right hand  with the point facing towards you. Hold the plectrum lightly and gently use up and down strokes across the strings that are marked with fret numbers. Alternate your up and down strokes trying to keep the rhythm even. Once you have got the hang of it, try changing chords. Use the chord sequence D A G7 A. Do not stress over making the chord changes fast, take all the time you need.

Now that you have a couple of easy guitar techniques start using a metronome as you play. Again, do not get uptight about strumming and changing chords quickly. The idea of using the metronome is to get yourself used to keeping an even beat. As you are a beginner you could not be expected to keep time, strum with the right hand and change chords all at once. Give yourself a few weeks to get it all to flow together, and keep yourself from going stale by learning new strumming patterns and chords.

About the Author

Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.

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