Guitar Songs and Styles For Dummies, Enhanced Edition

By Mark Phillips and Jon Chappell

Immerse yourself in sounds, techniques, and a whole lot of fun with this enhanced ebook. Part instruction, part video and audio play-a-long, Guitar Songs & Styles For Dummies is the perfect mix of instruction - whether you are a beginner or experienced guitar player. Watch correct hand position, posture, and playing techniques with detailed videos. Get the instruction you need to rock every type of Rock, including Classic Rock 'n' Roll, Modern Rock, and Country-Rock. Discover the Blues when you explore rhythm and lead techniques, signature riffs, and progressions. Then play along with popular Blues songs,including Chicago Shuffle and Mississippi Mud. Get familiar with Folk style, by learning fingerstyle techniques, playing Arpeggio style, trying thumb-brush and carter style, and taking on Travis picking. Have some fun with Folk when you play along with House of the Rising Sun, Gospel Ship, and Freight Train tunes. Go classical with instruction on proper seating and hand positions,ways to combine arpeggios and melody, and details to play free and rest strokes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Aug 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118133248

Mark Phillips

Mark Phillips is the author of My Father's Cabin, and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Saturday Review, and Country Life. He has also worked as a beekeeper and occasional maple syrup producer in upstate New York.

Book preview

Introduction

You and your guitar can combine to play a multitude of styles, and whether you want your guitar to rock ’n’ roll, wail some blues, pick some folk, or go classical, this book can help you achieve your dream.

Playing rock or blues on an electric guitar can put you out in front of a band, where you’re free to roam, sing, and stir the passions of your adoring fans. Playing classical or folk on an acoustic guitar can make you a star in a more intimate setting or a guitar hero at a campfire singalong. The bottom line is: Playing any kind of guitar can bring out the music in your soul — whether you play for an audience or just for yourself.

About This Book

Guitar Songs & Styles For Dummies showcases the skills and techniques you need to focus your guitar playing on four of the most popular styles in music: rock, blues, folk, and classical.

Playing the guitar

Although this book includes plenty of sheet music you can use to play pieces of music, you don’t have to be able to read music to play guitar. In fact, many great guitarists don’t read music, and many who can learned to do so after they learned to play the guitar. Repeat after us: You don’t need to read music to play the guitar.

So, no music-reading required, but it helps to understand guitar tablature, which is a guitar-specific shorthand for reading music that actually shows you what strings to strike and what frets to hold down on the guitar for creating the sound that’s called for. Tab (as it’s known to its friends and admirers) goes a long way toward enabling you to play music without reading music.

As you look at the music, you may notice little letters above some notes. Classical guitar notation indicates the right-hand fingers with the first letters of the Spanish names for the fingers: The thumb is p (pulgar), the index is i (indice), the middle is m (media), and the ring is a (anular). You may also see these notations used in fingerstyle guitar.

Looking and listening to the e-book

This book is enhanced with media clips that help you see what to play, hear how to play it, and combine both senses in video clips. So, along with the numerous two-dimensional illustrations and bars of written music that can help you understand how to play guitar, you can expand your experience into auditory and visual dimensions with a simple click or two:

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Video intro (0:20)

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Audio intro (0:30)

Foolish Assumptions

We make just a few assumptions about you:

check.png You own, or have access to, a six-string guitar.

check.png You know the basics of how to play.

check.png You want to branch out and increase your stylistic range.

So long as that range includes rock, blues, folk, or classical, you’ve come to the right place.

Conventions We Use in This Book

We use a number of conventions to make things consistent and easy to understand:

check.png Right hand and left hand: Instead of saying strumming hand and fretting hand (which sounds really forced to us), we say right hand for the hand that picks or strums the strings and left hand for the hand that frets the strings. We apologize to those left-handed guitar players who are using this book, and we ask that you folks read right hand to mean left hand and vice versa.

check.png Dual music notation: The songs and exercises in this book are arranged with the standard music staff on top and the tablature staff below.You can use either of these methods, but you don’t need to look at the two staves at the same time, as you would while, say, playing the piano.

check.png Up and down, higher and lower (and so on): If we tell you to move a note or chord up the guitar neck or to play it higher on the neck, we mean higher in pitch, or toward the body of the guitar. If we say to go down or lower on the neck, we mean toward the headstock, or lower in pitch. If we ever mean anything else by these terms, we tell you. (Those of you who hold your guitar with the headstock tilted upward may need to do a bit of mental adjustment whenever you see these terms. Just remember that we’re talking pitch, not position, and you should do just fine.)

Count-offs

Many of the music examples are preceded by a count-off, which is a metronome clicking in rhythm before the music begins. This tells you what the tempo is, or the speed at which the music is played. It’s like having your own conductor going, A-one, and a-two . . . so that you can hit the downbeat (first note of music) in time with the music. Examples in 4/4 time have four beats in front (musician lingo for a four-beat count-off before the music begins), examples in 3/4 have three beats in front.

Stereo separation

We recorded some of the examples in what’s known as a stereo split. In certain pieces, the backing, or accompanying, music appears on the left channel of your device, while the featured guitar appears on the right. If you leave your device’s balance control in its normal position (straight up, or 12 o’clock), you’ll hear both the rhythm tracks and the featured guitar equally — one from each speaker. By selectively adjusting the balance control (moving the indicator to the left or right) you can slightly or drastically reduce the volume of one or the other.

Why would you want to do this? If you’ve practiced the lead part to a certain example and feel you’ve got it down good enough to where you want to try it along with the band, take the balance control and turn it all the way to the left. Now only the sound from the left speaker comes out, which is the backing tracks. The count-off clicks are in both channels, so you’ll always receive your cue to play in time with the music. You can reverse the process and listen to just the lead part, too, which means you play the chords against the recorded lead part. Good, well-rounded guitarists work on both their rhythm and their lead playing.

How This Book Is Organized

This book contains seven chapters, each with a specific purpose:

check.png Chapter 1, Getting Beyond the Basics, clues you into a couple basic guitar facts, but moves beyond those basics to introduce the specialized knowledge you need to master the guitar styles in Chapters 3 through 6.

check.png Chapter 2, Special Articulation Techniques, contains information on the basic and not-so-basic skills you need to play the various styles with greater expression.

check.png Chapter 3, Rock, covers the methods you use in playing lead and rhythm guitar for classic and modern rock, and offers advice on how to play lead for country and southern-style rock.

check.png Chapter 4, Blues, offers up tips and techniques for playing both electric and acoustic blues.

check.png Chapter 5, Folk, includes explanations of several playing styles, some of them named after people. From fingerstyle to thumb-brush style to Carter-style and Travis picking, this chapter explores the roots and branches of this downhome guitar style.

check.png Chapter 6, Classical, starts by giving you the proper posture and hand positions you need to play classical style, but lets you know that it’s absolutely okay to play it any way you feel it. The techniques most used in classical are included, of course.

check.png Chapter 7, Ten Great Guitarists, lists ten of the all-time great guitar players as determined by your humble authors. And, don’t worry, the