News, Tips, tricks and other things

I remember a music teacher telling me, "Don't forget to breathe". I thought that was him being funny, but it turns out there are many benefits to focused breathing. Before you play your instrument, try this simple breathing exercise. It's known as Box Breathing . Some of the benefits of box breathing are: calm any performance anxiety helps you to focus reduces tension in your body If you can, try to breathe through your nose. You can set your metronome to 60bpm and count 4 b

Last time, we looked at the Natural Notes on the A string. Now, let's see if you can find those notes on the other strings on your guitar. 1. Remember that notes are ALWAYS alphabetical - A B C D E F G . 2. Once you get to G, the sequence starts again from A. 3. The notes are all 2 frets apart, EXCEPT for B & C, and E & F. They are best bros/two peas in a pod/beans & toast. 4. Have you ever wondered why fret 12 has two dots? It's to make it stand out from the other frets! W

Do you know the names of the notes on your guitar? Some guitarists do, but lots don't. You might find that you just use fret and string numbers to find your way around - and that's okay - but if you learn the notes on the fretboard, you'll be able to communicate better with other musicians, find chords and scales faster, and feel less ‘lost’ on the neck. There are 12 notes to learn, but let's keep things simple and learn the 7 natural notes - A B C D E F & G. This week, tak

One of the first things you need to know when you learn to play the guitar is the names of the open strings. These are the note names you'll tune the guitar to each time you play it, and you'll be doing it a lot because, as we say here, "tune before you play".

New to music theory? Watch this 16-minute video from Guy Michelmore . He covers some basic elements of music theory that might just help...

In the final part of our Cracking The F Chord series, we look at adding the first finger barre and recapping all the previous steps. There are some practice tips near the end too.

In this video, we bring you Part 2 of the 'Cracking The F Chord' series. In this lesson, you'll learn to add a partial barre to the...

In this video, Tom shows you some exercises you can practice at home to help you to learn to play an F barre chord . For beginners, it...

When you first start to learn to play the guitar, you'll find that your fingers don't want to play ball. It takes time to develop the...

Here's an exciting indie-rock piece that is fun to play from the Grade 3 Rockschool guitar syllabus. It's called Maiden Voyage and is...

3 easy guitar chords for young beginners using only 3 strings