Guitar Therapy

As we have seen in our previous session, which focused on the introduction of tablature, the diagrams differ from those of chord diagram illustrations. The numbers on the horizontal lines indicate the fret number rather than the finger number. You can see this when you keep going above the 5th or 6th fret on the guitar diagrams. To learn something, I believe the best teacher is a practical application itself. Therefore I have devised a fretting exercise, an improvisation from a Steve Vai exercise I came across a long time ago. It is advisable to use a metronome or if you can, maintain a count yourself while doing the exercise. First, we do it in a simple chromatic run starting from 1st fret on the 6th string. Examine the diagram below. It’s a simple chromatic exercise you start with lowest string and chromatically decend. Once you do then you ascend in the oppsite starting with your pink from the highest string. It’s important to have a metronome on or try and count yourself as you do

Although we call it guitar tabs nowadays, tablature has been around since the a5th century. It was used to write for lutes, vihuela, ukelele. It was used in Renaissance and Baroque eras; there were many types of tablature for even for organs. Today it is commonly used for guitar and stringed instruments and the like. For us, we will solely focus on guitar tablature. Unlike music notation, tablature indicates the note to be played in numbers rather than musical pitches or notes on music sheets. Guitar tablature allows you to read and write the technical aspect of playing the guitar. Techniques such as hammer-on, vibrato, pull-offs, etc. are all easily demonstratable. Here's an example Add caption Guitar tablature is easily adapted into bass player's tablature as well. The diagram of a tablature as shown above is the view of the guitar if you kept it on your lap frets upward. The top most line is high 6th string and the bottom the lowest E. The numbers are the note you need to fr

According to the Wikipedia definition it states; "In music, a  barre chord   is a type of  chord  on a  guitar  or other stringed instrument, that the musician plays by using one or more fingers to press down multiple strings across a single fret of the fingerboard (like a  bar  pressing down the strings). In guitar chord diagrams we seen how they are demonstrated in our previous sessions. A bar chord is demonstrated in similarly diagram as shown above. The diagram is interpreted in the guitar tablature manner, where the chord diagram is flipped 90 degrees. If you keep your guitar flat on your lap, that's the view of the diagram in tablature. [A topic which will be covered more extensively in GT sessions later]. The most important factor is knowing what the root note of that barre chords is. Root notes, octaves and more of these will also be covered at GT when I go in-depth with music scales and its applications. The root note on first diagram is 'F'  and the second di

To play music, you need to know its meter, the beat you use when dancing, clapping, or tapping your foot along with a song. When reading music, the meter is presented similar to a fraction, with a top number and a bottom number, we call this the song’s time signature. The top number tells you how many beats to a measure, the space of staff in between each vertical line (called a bar). The bottom number tells you the note value for a single beat, the pulse your foot taps along with while listening. In the example above, the time signature is 4/4, meaning there are 4 beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Click here to listen to sheet music written in 4/4 time, and try counting along 1,2,3,4 – 1,2,3,4 with the beat numbers above. In the example below, the time signature is 3/4, meaning there are 3 beats per bar and that every quarter note gets one beat. Let’s look again at the above examples, notice that even though the 4/4 time signature in “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Sta