Guitar Therapy

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 diagra...

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...

Now that you know the parts to each note, we’ll take a closer look at those filled and open note heads discussed prior. Whether a note head is filled or open shows us the note’s value, or how long that note should be held. Start with a closed note head with a stem. That’s our quarter note, and it gets one beat. An open note head with a stem is a half note, and it gets two beats. An open note that looks like an “o” without a stem is a whole note, and it gets held for four beats. There are other ways to extend the length of a note. A dot after the note head, for example, adds another half of that note’s duration to it. So, a half note with a dot would equal a half note and a quarter note; a quarter note with a dot equals a quarter plus an eighth note. A tie may also be used to extend a note. Two notes tied together should be held as long as the value of both of those notes together, and ties are commonly used to signify held notes that cross measures or bars. The opposite may also happen...

The Musical Note Notes  on the staff tell us which note  to play on our instrument and how long to play it. There are three parts of each note; is the note Head, the Stem, and the Flag. Every note has a note head, either filled (black) or open (white). Where the note head sits on the staff (either on a line or space) determines which note you will play. Sometimes, note heads will sit above or below the five lines and four spaces of a staff. In that case, a line (known as a ledger line) is drawn through the note, above the note or below the note head, to indicate the note letter to play, as in the B and C notes above. The note stem is a thin line that extends either up or down from the note head. The line extends from the right if pointing upward or from the left if pointing downward. The direction of the line doesn’t affect how you play the note but serves as a way to make the notes easier to read while allowing them to fit neatly on the staff. As a rule, any notes at or above...

What is an open chord? The wiki definition is as follows:  "In music for stringed instruments, especially guitar, an open chord [open-position chord] is a chord that includes one or more strings that are not fingered." Let us deviate for a bit here. The definition is technically correct, and I've had the same problem while developing material for Guitar Therapy Maldives [GTM], using the word "fingering". Now, this has to change, in my opinion, to something more apt, so at GTM, you will use "fretting" instead of "fingering." I've had problem adjusting as well, as we use to call any left-hand exercise fingering exercises, but never realizing it might have a vulgar tinge to it. As I will be teaching a lot of juniors, I feel calling it "fretting" exercises is way better than "fingering." Anyways let's get back to business! I hope the above explanation of a chord diagram makes sense to you and you can decipher them now,...

Intro Your first impression on this topic might deceive you, but not if you knew how I simplify it to just two types of guitar players. To me, there are either [1] Melodic guitarists, or [2] Harmonic guitarists. You can categorize a guitarist into two parts, unlike the countless sub-genres we have in music is because it's the two different styles, you can actually play the instrument. That's it. I hope I've not lost you there. Please bear with me and read on; it will be apparent very soon. Step one is understanding the difference between melodic and harmonic guitar parts. Melodic Guitarists My definition of a melodic guitar player would be someone who plays the guitar to produce a melodic music piece. A melodic music piece is just a melody, a single line of music. For example, a violin is a melodic instrument because you cannot play other strings in unison [or in harmonic - we will get to it in the next point], you have to play a melodic piece but using one s...

I started playing guitar at the age of 11. I'm mostly self-taught as I grew in my teen years not until I was 14 did I see a computer connect to the world wide web for the forts time ever. Unlike now we never had any sources of knowledge, then it was only what you can find in books; sometime in the early 90s' I bought a VHS tape of Marty Friedman about exotic scales, that taught me so much that I use what he taught on that tape even today. When you are obsessed with anything, you will eventually become good at it. Luckily for me, it all very easy. I absorbed everything I found on books, taught myself to read guitar tablature and started becoming good that I started leaving the friends I began to play behind, and join other older guys much who were much better. But it was a dull time to be teenagers as there almost no platform for local musicians to showcase their talents. There would be infrequent shows here and there, and unfortunately, if you were a local band covering Hindi...

The first step for any guitar student is to learn the way the guitar is tuned. Majority of guitar players have their instruments to tuned to the standard tuning. The standard tuning is, starting from the top string, E, A, D, G, B, E. To remember this we use the time tested mythological phrase - "Every Able Dog Gets Beef Everyday".

By the end of this post, you will be able to know the parts of the guitar. You will also understand the value behind knowing the mechanics and the parts of your guitar as the first step to building a solid foundation & learning your new instrument. Those of you who love racing would have seen the recent movie that came late 2019,  Ford v Ferrari . Not a bad film. More importantly, it shows the genius of British race car driver and mechanic, Ken Miles portrayed by Christian Bale in the movie. The pivotal reason for Ken Miles being such a legendary driver was also because of his mechanical background. See he helped develop the racing car Ford came up to battle Ferrari for the  Le Mans , his understanding of the mechanics of the car allowed him to be a super ace driver. Just like Ken Miles, if you know how the guitar and the mechanics and physics of the instrument, it would be a solid foundation for you to become an ace guitar player. Just as good as ken Miles was a dri...

As a new aspiring guitarist, one of the first questions you will ask yourself is, "So, where do I start?" In this era of information, you will find loads of data on the web; on Youtube and online content, it easy to get lost in it. Why do we even need a coach when you can study online? Of course, you can, and if you have the talent for music, you will eventually learn as I did. When I grew up and was a teenager of 11 years when I started playing guitar, we never had the content freely available nowadays, all on your fingertips. There was a time my new guitar friends and I will visit an older peer who plays guitar well; we will do him favors or give him cigarettes so that he will teach us the new cool scale or the new Steve Vai fretting exercises that will 'super-speed up' your fingers etc. We would absorb any teeny tiny bit of information on guitar we could find, or anyone would teach us, and play it to shreds. Hell, I remember the first time I bought a full cou...

Join   Guitar Therapy   today!!  - One to One classes I'm graduate from the International College of Music [ICOM] in Malaysia [the year 2006] and been in the Audio production field for 14 years. My primary instrument is the guitar and has experience of 29 years of playing and also teaching friends. I also have formal training in the pre-foundation of music theory, composition, and music production. My commercial works include audio post-production for TV ads, recording & mixing for local artists, and I also played guitar for band Kushehnooney's album 'Lah', which can be heard on Baiskoafu. I run my 0own audio production label called SellingKarma Productions [S.K Producitions]. I have had the privilege to work alongside with musical talents such as Meyna Hassan, Flu-Nashid, Affan, Dimba Ishantey, Kushehnooney, Appi, Kayano, and many more on various occasions. My biggest career milestone stone being working for a live gig as crew for James Brown concert,...

Greetings all string-pulling, jumping, slamming, ass-kicking, ax-wielding musicians. This is for all of you guitar freaks out there! Don't be fooled so easily though, my private coaching sessions do not only cover guitar, but also music theory, learning pathways to advancing your music skills, composition, and basics of arrangements as well. So whether you want to shred out, or learn to write your own songs on your guitar, you are at the right place. It's in a long time we are making, and I think it's finally time to give it away for the new generation. First, before I go any further, I want to say that I'm not a guitar guru, nor a music maestro, I consider myself always as a student of music. Yes, my primary instrument is music, and I also play piano, drums a little bit, and the bass as every guitarist would or should. I've been playing for 29 years and have enough experience teaching not only guitar but music production as well. I have formal education in mus...