How to Play Guitar - Lesson

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If you're looking for a single, important how to play guitar lesson, it's going to be reading tab.

Why? Because once you can read tab, it's easy to show you exactly what to play. That means an instructor or friend can show you NOTE BY NOTE exactly what to play. They can write it down and you can easily see what it is you need to do.

As long as you've heard the tune, you can recreate it by reading the tab to know where to place your fingers.

To start with, a simple how to play guitar lesson involves the tab diagram.

Imagine you have taken the guitar and laid it on your lap. I'm going to assume you're a right handed player, but the same thing holds true for lefties, you just have to lay it on your lap with the head to the right instead.

The fat string is the string closest to you. The thinnest string is the string farthest away.

As you look down at the fretboard, you'll see the nut on the left (right for lefties) and you'll see the six strings.

Guitar tab is laid out just like that. The bottom line is the bottom string (low string) as you look at it laying on your lap.

The top line is the top string (the thinnest one - high E).

You'll then see numbers on the lines. Those numbers tell you that you should press that fret, on that string.

Now I'll attempt a tab how to play guitar lesson with simple text symbols.

--------------------------------

--------------------------------

---------------------------------

-------------------2-4--5----

----------2-3--5-------------

--3--5-------------------------

That's a bit tough to do here because I can't use pictures, but I think you get the idea.

If you play that (and your guitar is in tune) you just played a Major G Scale, even though you might not have any idea what notes are in a Major G Scale.

So this how to play guitar lesson wasn't that tough was it?

Of course, there's a little more to it than that, there are other things we can denote with tab besides just the note to play, but I'll save that for another article.